Extended Family

It’s usually the case that when you get married, your family grows. You become related “in law” to your husband or wife's parents and siblings and your family is suddenly twice the size with mothers-in-law and brothers-in-law and everyone else.

But, in the case of my family it was after I got divorced that it got bigger.

Even after separating from my husband, I still keep in touch with the family I had when I was married. (Before his parents died I went to England on my own to see them and some years ago I went to visit his sister in London). But on top of that I’ve connected with my ex-husband’s new partner’s family as well.

For Christmas this year, we ended up having it at my daughter’s house because that’s where my grandson is. We were all there but so were her father (my ex-husband) and his partner and one of her daughters as well. Some years ago it even went as far as her ex-husband and his new partner being there too.

In this country, it’s not uncommon for couples who’ve split up to maintain a good relationship with each other and thanks to that the children get saved a lot of grief. But you don’t know whether such people will actually all get together as one family at Christmas. In fact, you get kids who have to run straight to lunch with their dad right after breakfast at their mum’s house.

My ex-husband’s partner is American and they’ve been together now for well over 15 years. My two daughters call her two daughters ‘sisters’ (and vice versa) and on Facebook they list their father’s partner as their “mother”. She and I are Facebook friends, just as she’s my sister in Tokyo’s feesubukku no tomodachi.

On Christmas, her and I nattered away for hours together about clothes (her dress was 'a chameleon dress’ designed in New Zealand. Not only is it reversible, you can wear it any number of ways depending how you tie it and fold it, etc.), our family, our health, our gardens… there’s no limit to the things we can talk about.

The best thing is that we can really have a good chuckle together.
My ex-husband was taking photos of the two of us laughing our heads off together - that's something that leaves me particularly tickled.

Whenever I get asked “Don’t you feel jealous or hold a grudge against her?” my answer is always “Not at all”.

Just as I’ve never once regretted getting divorced (not even for a moment, to use an English superlative) I have never for a moment felt jealously towards her.

Of course, I’m still a person with feelings just like anyone else and I’ve been envious of the two of them being so close and travelling around the world together. But what I’m envious of isn't her being with him, but the kind of lifestyle the two of them have.

Far from being jealous, I am just so thankful to her, from the bottom of my heart, for everything she has done to support the father of my children. Now that my children have grown up, they’ll say things like “It’s so great having her there” and her presence has been felt so deeply within my family.

She loves South America, and when I told her about the Sloth Club, she said “I love sloths!” I then straightaway sent her the English version of the Sloth Club website.
 
*Namakemono Club, a part of the Japanese “slow living” movement

For my grandson, she’s his grandmother too. When I see him smiling so happily being cuddled by her, I think to myself that’s what love is.

Merry Christmas!

[You can find the original post in Japanese 「拡大家族」 here.]

Girl on Girl, Man to Man

Below is a photo I saw on Facebook leading up to Valentine's day.
The last item, homo choko (homo chocolates), is probably meant to be a play on the item above it, tomo choko (friend chocolates). But in what way are they using the word “homo”? If a gay person were to see this sort of thing, I wonder how they'd feel about it.


Statistics suggest that 1 in every 10-15 people is either gay or bisexual. That would mean that in a class of 40 students, 3 or 4 of them would be gay.

Despite this, being gay still continues to be treated as being “other” and there are many societies where gays are targets of discrimination. How hard it must be to have to continue to hide who you are, even from your friends and your family.

I heard that there are lots of cases of depression within the gay community. But I guess it's no wonder that that's the case when you have to hide away and deny your sexual orientation, something which is at the very core of who you are. Now, it's still baby steps as people get to understand more about homosexuality but we're definitely getting there.

Last week, a bill was passed in the French National Assembly allowing same sex marriage. It's  such a fantastic achievement for France, particularly in light of the number of Catholics there. But here in a country as free as ours, New Zealand, gays still aren't allowed to get married.

I really can't believe that there are people still here in the 21st Century who are still harping on about how “Marriage is between a man and a woman”. People should be able to love freely and without restriction, regardless of their partner' gender.

In the old days, the kind of shallow thinking that disallowed marriage between people who were different and prohibited marriage on the basis of race and nationality and the colour of someone's skin went unchallenged, but don't you think it's an embarrassment for us now to be falling back in time by who knows how many decades and prohibiting gay marriage?

Here in this country, there are of course still people who don't want people to know that they're gay. But it's pretty common now to see photos of a gay couple's house in glossy interior design mags and lesbian kissing scenes in TV and movies don't cause quite the scandal they used to. We're starting to get to a point where being gay isn't really anything special.

Recently in Japan, courageous people have been coming forward, out and proud, declaring that they're gay and writing about their experiences. But, as I'm sure you can guess, Japan's also full of people for whom being able to “come out” is still a long way off.

  You’re single, but you can't go out with the person you like
  Even if you are with someone, no-one is happy for you
  And as icing on the cake, you get forced into a sham marriage...

And so we have people who feel like this and flee these sorts of countries, moving to some place that's more free and never looking back.

I happen to know a Japanese woman who is living together with a Kiwi woman and they appear for all intents and purposes to be free and happy. Working with a gay male friend of theirs, the two of them ended up being blessed with two children. Their children have two mothers, but they call one Mummy and the other one Mama and there doesn't seem to be any confusion for them.

A student of mine from two years ago contacted me once completely out of the blue. I hadn't seen him for a long time and he looked so different – he was so alive and it seemed like a world of weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He told me “That year, I was really struggling with the fact that I was gay. But I've finally managed to accept that for myself and recently, I've even found myself a boyfriend and...”

Whenever I'm taking a class, I make sure not to forget that there's likely to be some gay students there. If the topic of boys and girls dating comes up, I make sure that I emphasise that a guy's partner might be his boyfriend. Some students will giggle, but to them I say “What's so funny? Gay people exist too, don't they?”

If you're gay, you've got at least one person right here who is genuinely happy for you and who accepts you as you are – that's the one message I hope really gets out to you.

[You can find the original post in Japanese｢男と男、女と女」 here.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Organic Green Roots

http://organicgreenroots.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/4-heart-flr.jpg

Men Who Bake Cakes

We were having a party for my eldest daughter’s birthday and I had decided to make two cakes – an orange rum cake and a rich chocolate cake.

I heard that she had a large group of friends coming and I was wondering if two cakes would be enough when all of a sudden I saw one more chocolate cake already sitting in the kitchen. A friend of mine and I put some finishing touches on it along with my two cakes, dusting them with icing sugar and decorating them with flowers. We then laid the three cakes out on the table on the veranda and put in the candles – Happy Birthday!

It turned out that the person who’d made the other chocolate cake (with nuts in it) was my daughter’s husband’s close friend. He’d just had a baby three weeks before and is a brand new father.
I asked him “Did you separate the eggs?”
I giggled a little to myself at the fact that such questions are usually kept just between us girls. But he didn’t seem to react at all and replied, straight-faced, “No, for this one you don’t separate the eggs, you just throw them in.”

A male friend of his overhead this and jumped in with “Really? You don’t separate them? In my recipe you separate them”.
“How do you get it to rise without beating in the egg whites?”
“You cream the butter and sugar together in a mixer. That’s how you get air into it right?”
“Really? In my one you heat the butter and the chocolate together in a water bath.”
“Mine too. How many grams of flour do you put in yours?”

We went on chatting like this for a while enjoying our symposium on the finer points of cake preparation with no hint that any of this was at all out of the ordinary.
“You two boys really know what you’re talking about huh” I said.
“Now if only I had someone else who could hand-peel my hazelnuts for me” he laughed.

The two of them are both in their mid-thirties and the guy who'd joined our conversation already has three children. They're totally the kind of dads who are always in the kitchen making tasty treats for their kids.

In this country, it's not rare for men to cook and barbecuing is most definitely a man's job. Still, it's not often that you find men that bake cakes. Consequently, if a man says “Should we make a lemon cake together tomorrow?” his stock quickly goes up two or threefold. A man who can really cook - that’s the dream!

In the English movie Bridget Jones’ Diary, there’s a scene where she’s trying to cook. She’s screwing it up entirely and this guy she has over comes into the kitchen, takes off his suit jacket, rolls up the sleeves of his white button down shirt and whips up some omelettes – that is just so hot.

On the topic of England, I have to talk about Jamie Oliver. People say he’s the chef that’s been changing people’s ideas about “horrible English food”. Now, if you watch him cook, you somehow just want to cook more than anything else in the whole world. He doesn’t use measuring cups or spoons – he uses a splash of this, a pinch of that, a dash of this and a handful of that. The way he mixes and squeezes things with his bare hands and runs them all through and all over his food is intensely sensual and his effortless way of cooking always looks simple, liberating and fun.

Mixing things together, kneading, making things into balls... Cooking is just like playing in the mud when you’re a kid. That would mean everyone would have loved helping out in the kitchen as a kid, right? But, we get robbed of our precious creativity amid being hurried about and being put down:  “You're crap at cooking!”  “This tastes pretty bad…”  “You can't do it that way!” or even something as harsh as “What's a boy doing in the kitchen?”

Then on TV you see these top chefs yelling their heads off at novices and you have these people competing under tremendous pressure. But no matter how high quality the food made by these aggro chefs is supposed to be, I don’t want even one bite – the most delicious food is, of course, slow food made with pleasure.

Just like how mass produced, processed food can never match up to something that’s been made entirely from scratch, there’s nothing that tastes anywhere near as beautiful as something someone else has made for you and really put their heart into, no matter how simple it might be.

Even when I try going to fancy restaurants because people have told me “The food there is divine!” I usually end up thinking it’s nowhere near as good as the stuff made by my family or my close friends. It’s probably because I know they enjoy cooking food, they make it with love and they put their heart and soul into it.

At my daughter’s party, our homemade cakes flew off the table leaving just empty plates and crumbs. The guy’s chocolate cake had sunk a little in the middle and mine was similarly amateurish – it had zigzag bumps all around it from the baking sheet I’d used. Nevertheless, the proof is in the pudding!

A cake which someone’s put their heart and soul into – what greater gift can there be than that?

 [You can find the original post in Japanese ｢ケーキを焼く男たち」 here.]

Power of Will

My grandson's five months old. He can now lie on his front and prop himself up on his arms. He can keep his head up for a long time, gazing curiously at the world about him. He kicks his legs out with a lot of force, but ends up kicking the air since his feet are pointing up. But he sometimes manages to put huge amounts of power into his knees and move forward a tiny bit. In order to do this, he has to keep his body level so he ends up putting his face straight down into his playmat. For a second he sees nothing and there's a risk that he won't be able to breathe, but nevertheless he does it over and over again just to move that little bit forward.

He's quite a zen baby. He sleeps peacefully and hardly ever makes a fuss, but, according to his mother he is a strong-willed baby. Even though he was only born a matter of months ago, he is full of energy, always wanting to do things: he'll turn himself to face things he wants to look at, he’ll reach out his hands towards everything he wants to taste, and he makes funny little voices and sounds to communicate with us.

Babies are born with a tremendously strong will and a natural curiosity. Along with their physical abilities, they come into this world fully blessed with everything that is necessary for their development. So, saying things like “giving them drive” and “making them have a sense of curiosity” is kind of strange. It's as if will and curiosity are things you have to find somewhere and bestow upon them.

Not long after moving to this country, my family was invited to dinner at the home of a Steiner school friend. She was right in the middle of preparing dinner when we arrived on her doorstep. Her two year old son, who had up till then been playing by himself on the floor, said “Mama” and lifted up his arms. His mother then popped him up onto the kitchen bench, said to him “Put some flour on this meat here”, and then proceeded to fry some meat in a pot filled with boiling hot oil. Her son had a field day helping flour the meat, all the while getting his hands and face covered in white. Right within reach there was a huge kitchen knife...

Witnessing such a sight – one I wouldn't have seen in a million years in my family – I was struck anew with a feeling of “I've certainly come to one hell of a country”. If you were raised by such courageous and accommodating parents, I bet you could get to do all sorts of fun things.

I do admit this is an extreme example and I’m not saying that everyone has to be like my brave friend. But adults do stop children from doing the things they want to do for any number of reasons: it's dangerous, it'll be a pain to clean up afterwards, we don't have the time...Some people sincerely believe that children are wilful or that it's the parents’ responsibility to decide what children should do. These parents desperately keep their children's will in check. Either way, children who are not allowed to do the things they want to do begin losing their inherent will.

For most kids, the time comes for you to sit your high school exams and your parents all of a sudden come at you asking “why are you so unmotivated?!” what are you supposed to do? You have absolutely no idea why you can't just summon motivation of your own accord. The reason why you only shrug whenever you get badgered with the question “Isn't there anything you want to do in life?” is probably because your potential was quashed so long ago.

According to Rudolph Steiner, because a person's will develops in their first seven years, you shouldn't make them do mental activities during that time. To really cultivate the will that they're inherently born with, the best thing is for them to come into contact with beautiful things in a safe, relaxed environment and to sing, dance, draw pictures, listen to stories, play with flowers and animals, whatever. It's about becoming one with nature, moving around and simply playing. If, during this period, you don't let children do what they want and instead get them to do things like Gifted Education, they'll end up as a teenager who knows a lot of facts but is weak-willed and doesn't know what they themselves want to do.

Now, you might come back at me with “No way! Thanks to Gifted Education my kid's on their way to Tokyo University and has tonnes of motivation”, but God only knows whether getting into Tokyo University is something that high school kid actually wants for themself.

People think adults know and understand far more than their children, but I don’t really think that is the case. Their bodies may be small and they may be low on facts but kids know a great deal. Young children may not be able to explain things in words, but they have incredible intuition and know themselves best of all.

So, to cultivate those precious things our children are born with, they do need our support. Let's not crush the things they're born with. Let’s stop beating them down. Let's not let them lose what they already have.

We should stop stuffing them full of external knowledge and information. If we try cramming all of that stuff in, we're not nurturing their precious innate will and curiosity. When they need knowledge and information, they’ll be able to get it in no time.

Rather than going to work on our children, we should be working on ourselves, cultivating the courage to let go, increasing our power to trust that things will turn out alright and making sure that we have plenty of time and room in our lives for our children.

 

Today, my grandson continues to inch forward with all his might.

[You can find the original post in Japanese 「意志の力」here.]

Welcome to Karoyakani!

Karoyakani is part of the title of my Japanese language blog. It means ‘lightly’ or ‘airily’; an image of a carefree young girl effortlessly leaping up in the air…
 

I’m originally from Tokyo but it’s been over 20 years now since I moved to New Zealand. Since I was little, I was excited by anything Western and I would secretly wish that I could live abroad someday. I can now see why I was so drawn to that idea. It seems I had to leave my own culture behind in order to redefine who I really was.

I work in the education sector and have been trying to adopt approaches more in line with Holistic Education, with three key elements being balance, inclusion and connection.

In September 2011, I set up a Japanese blog and started sharing my thoughts. And, to my delight, I can now offer English translations of some of those posts. This is all thanks to my former student and fellow tutor, Alec.

Please feel free to post questions or comments. We’d love to hear your thoughts!