Crowded trains: more complex than you imagine

These last nine days my husband has again been in hospital. He had surgery last Wednesday for a skin graft over the area that they excised due to suspect skin cancer in September. His hospital is in Shinjuku, one of Tokyo's main city centres.

I've visited on five occasions so far, the final time will be tomorrow when he's (hopefully) discharged. The journey is an hour via two to four trains—often standing—and involves numerous flights of stairs and walking about 1.5 km. I love going to see him, but the journey really takes it out of me. 

Most of the trains I've been on have been okay, but on Monday I stayed for dinner and came home around 7.30pm. The first train I hopped on was not a fun experience. 

My first clue it was going to be difficult was when the train arrived and no one got off. It already looked full. But people in the line in front of me literally pushed their way in and I had little choice but to push in too (the next train was unlikely to be less crowded). The lady in this photo could have been me. I had to check to make sure neither of the bags I was carrying were protruding into the space where the door was going to shut.

But that was only the start of the "fun". Standing jammed in like that is technically fine as long as either:

1. the people getting out at the next stop are next to the doors, or 

2. everyone is getting out at the same stop.

But that is rarely the case in an inner-city line where there are lots of intersecting train lines (it was a different experience I described here when I headed into the city from the suburbs and almost everyone was headed for the end of the line in the city). So at the next stop I got "spewed" out onto the platform while the train disgorged itself of people who were buried deep inside and needed to exit. 

Then we repeated the previous action of pushing our way back on, except that this time I got to be buried deeper inside. Which is not necessarily better. 

Thankfully, though I am only 157cm high, Japanese people aren't as tall as Australians on average, and I usually get some air, but still, being jammed such as your body is touching four or five other people is not fun. You can end up in very awkward situations. I've had my hands jammed to my sides, so I couldn't reach my face, been stuck behind a lady whose long hair swept over my face and tickled my nose, and most commonly, had someone's elbow or shoulder or hip pocking into me. I am thankful that I've never experienced wandering hands, but in a situation like this, it does not surprise me that women are harassed.

Here is a photo I took the other day at a quiet moment on my way into the hospital mid-afternoon. This is the standard layout of seats on a Tokyo commuter train. In a crowded train there is usually three lines of people standing down the middle between the people sitting down and then a tonne squeezed into that small area near the door. That's where I got stuck on Monday.

The aforementioned cycle of "shoving into the train—travelling one station—people disgorging—people pushing back on the train" happened eight times in my journey of 16 minutes. I only got pushed out onto the platform once, but it was a great relief to get off the train finally and change lines to a train where I wasn't squished up against strangers nor having strangers pushed past me or pushing me so they could get onto the train. For a nation that can be characterised by generally "no touching" and "not being a bother to others", this pushing-shoving experience is quite strange.

It is all quite quiet too. Quiet enough for me to hear someone exclaim, "There's a foreigner here" when I first got on.

The other strange thing about it is how orderly this is (there are even arrows in the stations to help modulate the flow of foot traffic). Lining up, pushing on, jiggling around so we all fit, pushing off again. There's generally a quiet sense of order and no rudeness (though I have experienced rudeness beyond the general shoving required). Certainly being aware of people around you and doing your best not to take up more space than you have to is part of it. It is routine for people to wear backpacks on their fronts to take up less room.

What's interesting to note is that the culture of orderliness and taking care of others as best they can in such crowded situations on trains has spilled over into the use of elevators. My husband is in a 19-floor hospital and the elevators are very busy. They aren't as crowded as trains, but we've seen the same practice of people close to the door hopping off the elevator if someone behind them needs to exit.

Needless to say, I am glad that I don't have to commute every day in conditions like these. I will also be very happy to have my husband home again and not have to visit him in hospital again soon!

Borderlands: on the edge

Here's an excellent 15-minute video by a TCK that was originally a TED talk. It fits so well with my blog's theme of "on the edge of ordinary" that I just had to share it with you. Joshua Tan calls this edge "the borderlands" and explores the theme biographically, looking back over his 20-something years as a missionary kid and then as a young adult seeking to find his way.

He's studying a post-grad degree in Art Therapy. From about 13:00 (my paraphrase, not quite an accurate transcription): 

"I like this concept of the mental health continuum....we're not just well or unwell. We're constantly moving throughout the day, sometimes we feel a bit more well, sometimes we feel less well. 

I think this is similar to belonging, to moving through the borderland. We're constantly moving up and down through the course of the day. In each new group, we're going to be at different stages. Maybe we see a friendly smile in a strange place and we move up the scale, or a colleague makes a remark that makes us feel a little bit uncomfortable and we feel as though we don't belong as much in that workplace."

I'm seeing my own TCKs find their way through these borderlands, but at the same time have my own borderlands to negotiate. Living a cross-cultural life has a lot less security, in terms of belonging, than we otherwise would have experienced in our home country. I have to say that I probably "belong" most right where I am at present, being the longest I've stayed in any one place since I left home at 17. We certainly don't belong as much in Australia anymore, though that would grow if we stayed there for a length of time.

I do like the way he ends:

It's important to know that you are not alone...The borderlands aren't a bleak wasteland...they are rich with potential, filled with the colourful vibes of so many other people. You will find your own place in your own time.

This is true for adult TCKs, it's also true for us. The borderlands are a constantly changing landscape, but with keen eyes it is possible to see and appreciate all the beauty of the diversity and change there.

Ups and downs of parenting teens

This is a flash back post. I wrote it two years ago but never published it, probably because it was a little too revealing about my guys at the time. With that much distance, though, I think it's okay (and I've edited it to make it even more anonymous, noting that at the time I had three boys under 19 in my house). 

_________________
[Written in 2017]
I've been known to grumble about my teenagers. I was known to grumble about my kids when they were younger too. But in August one of my boys had an exceptional day, and I wrote about it at the time. And yes, it was a pretty rare event. Actually on Sunday I was "writing" a blog post in my head about the horrible times I'd had recently, but when I sat down to write it I found it really hard going. Mostly because this is a public forum and, though I'm having a hard time of being his mum at times, I'm not about to take revenge on my boys by spewing their shortcomings out here.

Parenting teenagers can be super hard. I know that that is probably general knowledge, but the reality of it is harder emotionally than I ever imagined.  I hate conflict, and having one or more people in your home who are liable to blow up at you at any moment for something you may or may not have done, is horrible. It makes being at home with them sometimes very difficult to bear. They don't often drive me to tears, but they sometimes make a coffee shop seem even more attractive than usual.

In writing this post I do want to encourage you. Parents tend not to write about the challenges of parenting teens as much as they write about the challenges of younger children, and that can mean that parents who are having a tough time of it feel isolated. So when I tell you about the amazing day one of my teens had, it's not to make you feel horrible because your teenage son has never had a day like that. Read between the lines! I write about it, because it was such unusually congenial behaviour.

I saw the shock on a friend's face when she witnessed one of my sons in our home show his annoyance through his actions (and actually it was a very slight amount of annoyance that he displayed, nothing like we get when he has no witnesses). So I know that though it's known that teenagers can be horrible, most of their horribleness is saved for their parents (at least in this house) and is therefore unseen by most people.

Thinking back over the last couple of weeks, I can tell you that I've experienced things like,  "What, are you deaf!?!" shouted at me, when I asked the "wrong" question.

I wrote this last year:

I can't tell you the details of the bad or even much of the good because I respect the privacy of my boys. It is harder as they get older. Yesterday morning when I was feeling particularly exhausted by parenting, this article called "Help for parents who want to give up" that popped up in my newsfeed on Facebook, especially this:

There’s support groups for moms of preschoolers, but where’s triage for the moms of teenagers? The older our kids become, the greater our isolation can become, because while mothers can instagram and commiserate together over the Terrible Twos — but mothers struggling through a stretch of terrible teens can suffer alone.

Yesterday we saw good come out of the bad with one son whose earlier bad choices led to him making some better decisions that are hopefully a sign of better things to come. 

Parenting is such a long-term event. So much persistence, patience, and resilience is required. Oftentimes I feel like we take two steps forward and three backward. But periodically we are rewarded with gold. I got some rare compliments on my parenting yesterday from one of my boys. GOLD!

I wrote this in August of the year before (2015):

In recent months our family has seen more emotional ups and downs in a day (or hour), than we've ever had before. Some of it is the transition, but not all. There are hormones at work. It's hard! And that's saying it nicely. . . . 

Back to teens. I've seen other difficult teens grow up and become well balanced adults (just not experienced it as a parent). So I'm clinging to the hope that this present pain is but a passing stage.

Trying not to embarrass him, but I want to mention some unusual things that one of my boys has done today.

He looked bored this morning (happens when you are woken early and don't have plans for the day), but he didn't default to electronics. I suggested a bike ride . . . he went for a bike ride.

Then he defaulted to playing Minecraft for a couple of hours. After lunch he took the initiative to go out and buy school supplies, all on his own and without any prompting. He didn't default to watching videos online, as he so often has in the past.

I've had conversations with him!

Tonight he's cooked dinner for us (it's in the oven as I type, but I'm sure it's going to be superb), as we'd planned that he would. His attitude was positive, even when things looked a bit grim.

I wish every day were like this, but I know that realistically they won't be, at least not yet. Days like this give me hope, however. Hope that the boy I'm raising will one day be a useful member of society and will be able to interact with people and look after himself.

________

I can say in hindsight now that things have improved. Our eldest son has moved out and is, indeed, living a fairly independent life as a respectable university student (doing his last university exam for this academic year tonight). His brothers are still teens and we still have bad days, but I'm not sure that they are as frequent as they used to be. The truth is, teenagers do get through this stage. It is a stage, just like the "terrible twos" and "horrible threes" were. It takes a lot of patience and perseverance, just like the rest of the parenting years do. There is very little instant gratification in this job. But delayed gratification is much more satisfying. The joy I get in seeing these boys maturing is something that can easily bring tears to my eyes.

My advice to mums at this stage is to find someone safe who you can talk to about your parenting struggles. I sat with someone at CAJ's bazaar a few weeks ago and we shared our pain from recent years. We were safe people for one another at that moment and it was a very special connection. 
It's important to have people with whom you can say, "My teen said this to me the other day and it cut deep." 
And have them say back, "That happened to me the other week too, I really hate it when they treat me like that."

I also want to note that mental health is something we've struggled with on top of teenage behaviour and it can be difficult to discern whether some behaviour is just "horrible teen" behaviour, or whether it is something more. If you have concerns, I recommend that you talk to a professional about them.

Friendship goal—12 months later

One of the things OMF missionaries in Australia are required to do on home assignment is debrief with a psychologist (possibly other places too, I can't generalise, though, because I don't know). We did that as a family last July, but OMF encouraged us to go back again if there were things we'd like to go deeper on. I sat on that encouragement for a couple of months and then decided to give it a go.

You see, I'd been finding myself hit harder and harder with the losses of life. The missionary life has more losses than most people encounter (see this post I wrote about the colander of expat life), and I was finding that even small losses were hitting hard. If you've been reading here a while you'll have probably noticed that I've talked about that over the years. Anyway, we've also seen people knocked off the mission field by burnout and knew that if I could avoid that I wanted to try.

So I went to a psychologist and talked to her. This is what I wrote not long after that:

She asked a lot of questions about my friendships and realised that though we have worked in the same organisation for 18 years and in the same location for the last 12, my friendships have had a lot of change over the years, even people who seemed that they would be there for the long-haul have had to leave for various reasons.

Even the other day I realised that many of the people I interact with now don't know the people I was interacting with, even two years ago! Between being in cross-cultural ministry and involved at an international school, we've got a lot of people continually moving in and out of our lives.

The psychologist made several suggestions, but the one that stuck out for me was to gather four friends around me who were less likely to move out of my life and make them the base of a pyramid. I realised that I'd been avoiding investing deeply in relationships in Australia because of the distance, however the truth is that my friends in Australia are generally more stable than the ones I'd been making in Japan. The friends I have in Australia are long-term ones that I keep seeing when I go back there.

Finding friends at a different level
So I set myself the difficult task of deciding which of my friends I'd ask for this deeper commitment of and then steeling myself to ask them. It was not easy. I felt like I was back in Primary School vulnerably asking someone to be my best friend! But I'm here to tell you, one year later, that it is making a difference.

Two of the ladies I asked happened to be good friends with each other and I texted them, almost impulsively, one afternoon in October last year. Asking if we might not join forces and become a support group for each other. That was the start of something I could never have imagined. They both messaged me back within a couple of hours, almost jumping out of the phone screen with enthusiasm. I was blown away—it truly was God's timing. We continue to remark on that very thing and give praise to God.

But that was just the start. I had imagined period Skype calls, but it's turned into almost daily contact between at least two of the three of us. Twice in the last week I've been at a coffee shop messaging with one or both of them (unplanned in both cases). It's almost like they're here with me! I've never experienced anything like it, outside of the friendship that goes with marriage, but even different to that, because they're women and they understand a woman's heart in a different way to a husband.

I also couldn't have imagined the sorts of things that the three of us were to go through in the months following that initial text. It's truly been an incredible, sometimes heartwrenching journey, and being able to do it together has enriched and strengthened each of us.

I have two other good friends who are committed to staying in touch, though we don't chat as often. But I know that I can go to either of them with honesty and bare my heart, or ask them to pray about something very private. And I'm pretty sure they know the same about me.

Having these four friends helped me through the vulnerable time in June at the end of the school year, when so many goodbyes are "I don't know if I'll ever see you again" goodbyes. They've also given me the courage to not hold back from making friends here. It's a temptation you need to fight after a few years of saying goodbye to friends you've invested your heart in.

What might I have done differently?
I'm not a fan of those "write to your 16 y.o. self" letters. However, pondering this journey I've been on now for 19 years makes me wonder what advice I'd give myself on friendship when I left Australia to become a long-term missionary in November 2000? (And no, I wasn't 16 at the time!)

I don't think I'd advise "daily friends" in Australia. I think it is important for new missionaries to leave their home country and friends and do their best to cleave to their new country and the people they find there. But in 2000, we didn't have the advantage of free messaging or Skype calls. However, maybe I'd advise writing/emailing more regularly to a couple of good friends?

I might advise me as a new missionary to be aware of grief and what it looks like, and not to downplay small griefs. You don't need to lose a parent or a spouse to experience grief. To be aware of how many goodbyes I'd already made and how to process that a little better. To have more realistic expectations about the relationships I'd make in Japan with expats. To make sure I had a few more things in place to help me be more resilient?

Thankful
Our home assignment last year was really hard in so many ways, yet there were things that were good about it, and this is one of them. I'm so thankful for the psychologist who advised me and for these four women who have taken the risk of being friends with someone who isn't even in the country most of the time!

Much to be thankful for

Sometimes on a Monday it sometimes seems easier to write here than it is to do other things. . . I've got much to be thankful for today. David's been away at a conference in Malaysia since Wednesday and I've coped fine. That may seem a strange thing to say, but it's not always been true when he's been away from us. He's back with us today, but still recovering from the overnight flight and the usual over-full head that a conference will induce!

Field of cosmos.

In the meantime I've had a rather lighter schedule than usual. There has been a welcome lull in the magazine production process, so I've been able to spend more time away from my computer than is usually possible (or advisable). 

On Thursday I took most of the day off and rode to a favourite coffee shop via my favourite park. It had been a long time since I'd taken a long ride, and it was most refreshing. I didn't even take work to do at the cafe.

Not many flowers in the park at this time of year. I can't remember
what this is, but it was one of the last standing.

Lunch enjoyed in cozy spot in the "loft" of this coffee shop.
It's not that long ago that lasagne wasn't on many menus
in Japan, let alone a non-Italian coffee shop's. I had
to learn how to make it myself so that I could enjoy
it periodically.

A rare public telephone in a rare telephone box,
donated by Rotary. This I found on the edge of
a small, but leafy park that I'd never seen before.

On Friday my day was filled with a school prayer meeting, going to the gym, grocery shopping, and a much needed time of language exchange (two of the three of us have been so busy we haven't gotten together for two months), followed by an enjoyable evening watching rugby union.

This is a strange historical building, also found at this small newly-discovered park.
 My Japanese is not good enough to read the sign, but I'll put it
below for anyone who could enlighten us. Google Translate tells
 me it was built in 1781 and was a storage warehouse for ? firewood.
It is quite small, so I can't imagine that it stored much at all.

We are between sports seasons so the weekend was blessedly quiet. On Saturday afternoon the two boys and I went and got our flu injections. A point of praise that I managed to both schedule and complete this with almost no assistance from my husband and his superior language ability—"almost" being the important word because he did help with filling out the forms via a video call.

On Sunday I woke up with a Wry Neck (aka stiff neck) that turned ugly after church—I was gasping with pain at small adjustments in my posture for several hours. Thankfully I managed to see a physical therapist before they shut for 1½ days (today's a public holiday). Thankful too that I had few responsibilities for the rest of the day and the boys helped me out a little. My third point of thanks is for the prayer of friends and family. It's so helpful at times when you feel desperate and alone to have people you know you can call on to pray or help. There were other local friends I could have called on for both, but it didn't get that bad.

The other huge point of thanks really is a whole blog post or article all on its own. Twelve months ago I wrote this post about a friendship goal that a psychologist had given me. I will write a separate post about how this has been, suffice to say that yesterday I had a timely (pre-organised) video conversation with two of the friends who were part of that goal last year that not only fed my soul, but helped me through a rough afternoon of pain. 

I've woken up this morning after a good sleep and with just a stiff neck, not debilitating pain, so I am thankful for a timely answer to prayer.

So you see how much I have to be thankful for! It's been a quiet few days and I'm feeling a bit more rested than I usually am after David's been away. Indeed recently I've found myself flagging before 9pm at night, which is a bit unusual, but a good thing to take notice of.