Why did the chicken cross the road? and other linguistic challenges

Why did the chicken cross the road is a classic joke, but we recently found out that it's very much an English-speaking-culture joke. We had dinner last week with two colleagues, one Australian and one German. After dinner we served our Australian guest tea in a mug that had a version of the chicken-road joke. It was a "Far Side" comic. She loved it, but confusion took over as we tried to explain to our German guest the meaning of the joke. She's fluent in English, but didn't understand why that version (or the original) made us smile. (The joke turns out to have quite a history, check it out here.) Humour is so much more about culture than it is about language.

We continued talking about humour and I brought up the example of Mr Bean. I'd thought he was pretty clever with his non-verbal humour that seems to be appreciated across cultures, but our friend tells us that in Germany, Mr Bean is seen as "British humour"!

Most of our colleagues and friends are not Australia, many are not native English speakers either. Sometimes people in Australia notice that our English isn't quite as Australian as it used to be and it's because we've spent nearly 24 years living and working outside of Australia in multicultural environments. It means some of our word choices are different, for example, I tend to say "bathroom" more often than "toilet" these days, simply because it's less likely to cause confusion or offence. I used "rush hour" just this morning and found out that "peak hour" is more often used in Australia. Probably "gas station" comes out more often than "petrol station". I tend not to use colloquial words like "arvo" or "footy" and geographically-tied words like "ute" (pickup truck) and "regional" (yes, this word is used differently in Australia to other parts of the world). Our accent has become more "international" and we probably don't lengthen our vowels as much as many Aussies do.

My work as an editor and writer means that words are on my mind a lot. Almost all I write is for an international audience. Both my jobs are with international teams who speak different kinds of English, or have English as their second, or third language. Linguistic challenges are often on the table for discussion, hence my apparently well-known "Wednesday Words" Facebook statuses. The other day I tried to set up an online meeting with a British colleague and American colleague. Communication went a little bit awry with what I suspect was a hastily written email by our British colleague that confused my American colleague. Each of us had a slightly different understanding of what had been written. No big deal, as far as I know. But it could easily have been.

Working in an environment like this can make you think more carefully about the words you use and how you say them. A good communicator thinks more about their audience than they might have in their own country. For example, if I'm talking to an American, I would tend to say "ketchup" not "tomato sauce" or "candy" not "lolly". If I'm talking to a friend who speaks English as their third language I might choose simpler words and sentences than I would when speaking to my Australian or British colleagues, not because my friend is unintelligent, but as a way of respecting them by speaking in a way they understand.

It might be a surprise to you, but the differences between our English go way beyond spelling, word usage is a big difference, and not simple biscuit vs cookie vs scone. Will I stand at the back of the room, or in back? Is it good or bad news if I hear "you lucked out"? Is the chicken walking in the road or on the road? But I think it's time I hopped on my bike and rode on the road to the grocery store.

The struggle to feel useful

Recently I spent time editing three short articles by colleagues from my organisation. They all were about staying healthy on the mission field (our social media theme for November). They all talked about various personal struggles to stay healthy in Japan. Not just physically healthy, but mentally and spiritually healthy too. I identified strongly with many of the things they wrote about, but one common thing struck me: the desire to feel useful. 

And a fire photo from last week's camping,
because I needed an excuse to share one
more camping photo! :D

One of the articles was by a couple who’ve been in Japan less than two years. Their struggles to take care of themselves as well as their young daughter on top of learning Japanese and living in a place where they felt like toddlers themselves was all too familiar to me, even though it’s been 20 years since we were in a similar position. Another article was by someone who’s been here a while longer, but her struggles were not so dissimilar. 

They all are in Japan because they (and many around them) discerned that God called them to serve him here, but the struggle to feel useful is common to them all. I think it’s an innate human trait, and certain none of us came to Japan with the intent on being useless, though we feel that way more often than we’ve ever felt like that as adults in our home country.

I've seen this "need to feel useful" struggle in others too when I've worked with people who have been here for a short time. There's often a great deal of gratitude when they're given a task that they can actually do, a feeling of usefulness that helps them through the other parts of their lives. 

Feeling useless is tied to the struggle to learn Japanese and that is innately tied to learning the culture (you can’t really do the latter really well without the former). In my early years here I was told that I needed to get better Japanese otherwise I would hold my husband back. That cutting statement only added to my feelings of uselessness and, sadly, the statement still hurts (my tears are flowing as I write). I doubt the person who wrote it knew how deeply that cut. I felt it was saying my poor ability to learn Japanese affected my ability to be the wife God expected me to be to my husband, while trying to live and work in the land God had called us to.

Over the years in Japan I’ve felt more useful in certain ways, but still feel very limited here. One of the areas I’ve felt most useful outside of my editing work, is maintaining a home for my husband and kids—doing my best to make sure they had good food and a clean, comfortable place to live. I think part of the big adjustment I’ve had this time is that I no longer have that way to be useful in Japan (to my kids). And so it’s felt more difficult in Japan to deal with that loss than it was in Australia where I am overall more capable.

However, I’m re-reading a book that always gives me a good readjustment to my thinking—Awe by Paul David Tripp. He defines awe as the desire of every human being to be amazed, blown away, moved, and satisfied, and clarifies that it actually is a universal craving to see God face-to-face. You've got to read this book!

In a recent portion I read, he wrote about how we humans try to place our identity in the wrong places. We try to be useful, we tie our identity to our relationships (kids, partner, friend, daughter/son), we identify ourselves by our jobs, by how much we earn or own, by our citizenship, by what we’re good at, what we’ve achieved, what our kids or parents have achieved. 

The grace that has connected me to [God] has also freed me from looking for identity anywhere else. I am what I am because of who he is for me by grace. In his awesome glory, I really do find everything I need. . . . I do not have to hunt elsewhere for meaning and purpose for my life. I do not have to look elsewhere to define who I am. I do not have to look elsewhere to measure my potential. I do not have to look elsewhere to find that inner sense of peace and well-being. Why? Because I have found all those things in him. Awe of him liberates me from a life-distorting bondage to awe of anything else. Remember, you and I tend to be in awe of what we are convinced will give us life (identity, meaning, purpose, pleasure, etc.). (All quotes from Chapter 13 of Awe, Paul David Tripp). 

This is in a chapter about work. He goes on to say:

Because work is such a huge and significant dimension of our lives, it becomes very tempting for us to look for our identity there. And when you look to work for your identity, you will find it very hard to resists challenges, demands, and promises of reward.

So we have this label "missionaries" or "cross-cultural workers" and we feel like that's our identity and that we have to "succeed" or at the very least "be useful" at that to have any worth. That's obviously a big mistake, especially in a place where it is rare for English-speakers born elsewhere to become native-level fluent in the language and culture.

But Tripp points out that it's a mistake for any human:

When I don't let awe of God give my heart rest and define me as his child, I will seek identity in things like success and achievement, power and control, and possessions and affluence, and I will work like crazy to get them, leaving a trail of relational and spiritual destruction behind me.

One of the articles I edited this week talked about a new missionary's temptation to overcommit to things that they felt they might be useful at, but also to overextend themselves in language study in an effort to get to the level where they can be useful.

Only when your heart is satisfied in [God] can you be freed from looking for spiritual satisfaction in the fleeting pleasures of the physical world. When you're satisfied in him, you will be liberated form working constantly in order to possess more of what you hope will give you identity. 

So the bottom line: my identity is not tied to my kids, my job title, my usefulness or output, or how busy my schedule is. This isn't really news to me, and yet why do I have so much trouble remembering it. So much trouble lining up my emotions to fit it?

Sole camping trip for 2024

I've been away from my desk for much of the last 2 ½ weeks and have been playing catch-up this week, but I am determined to do a little bit of my own writing today. Last week we went camping for three nights in Fukushima Prefecture, about 250 km north of Tokyo. It was our first time to spend any time at all in this prefecture, aside from driving through on the expressway. 

It's the first time we've been camping in 19 months...we were looking forward to this trip so much! It's been really hard to accept the reality this week that our trip is over. It was a much needed break. We've been going pretty constantly since we got back to Brisbane in early May from our long motorhome sojourn.

We had a spectacular time. The first time to go camping with none of the participants under 20 (in fact all four of us are a long way past 20)! It was very quiet. We were literally the only people there in this large campground. After 4pm there wasn't even a caretaker around.

But back to the start of the trip: getting there involved over four hours of driving, first on Tokyo's congested ordinary roads, then an expressway, and finally over an hour through the Japanese countryside—over mountains and valleys and through tunnels. It was our first time to drive at 120 km/hr in Japan. I took a photo of this dual-speed sign to give us time to read it...and yes, we were allowed to drive this fast in our little car.

We stopped for lunch at a roadside "service area", one of the joys of travelling long distance in a car in Japan. There is usually many food options, as well as lots of clean toilets. We were already enjoying being away and hanging out that we took quite a long break at this point! Eventually someone pointed out that we still had more driving and a campsite to set up, so we got going again.

The countryside we drove through was, as usual, gorgeous, especially to eyes that have been in Tokyo for months. The layers upon layers of mountains still amaze us Aussies from a wide-flat land!

When we considered what car we would buy, a key requirement was the capacity to carry all our camping gear. This little car did a magnificent job. And we discovered that with no extra passengers it was really easy to pack the back of this, which is basically a box when you lower the back seats. Of course we had less gear, but still, we could see out the back of the car when fully packed and that has not always been a given!

It was wonderful having three nights away: it meant two full days without travelling. We had a very relaxed time. We played games, read, napped, strolled, and the one who brought his bike went for several long rides. Our friends introduced us to a beanbag game called Cornholes (US game) and we introduced them to a card game called Take7.

And of course fire featured a lot. This campsite sported a big flat place where people had previously had fires, so, with no rule saying we couldn't, we gathered up wood lying around and had two big fires on the last two nights. Not just entertainment, but we cooked our evening meals there too. Cooking for four wasn't hard, but the biggest difference was how little washing up there was for just the four of us: we were almost finished before we started. A big difference to when we've camped with 10 or more people.

This simple meal was so delicious.
Thin-sliced pork and baked veggies
in foil.

There was plenty of nature to enjoy. I didn't take photos of the bees, mozzies, or bees, or the vast numbers of "stink" bugs but I did capture the more photogenic dragonflies who loved to land on our ropes and car antenna. 

It was a pretty cheap place to stay. Just $AU42 for three nights for each couple. For that we had water, as much space as we wanted, flushable toilets, and a place where we could wash dishes. Ironically the toilet seats were heated. The toilet pedestals were pretty much the cleanest thing in the whole place—the hut they were in was full of bugs and spiderwebs, though nothing too big (I've seen much worse in this land). The showers were also very clean and open 24 hrs a day. They cost $AU1 for five minutes, which is plenty of time. Alas there were no hooks or benches in the showers, but thankfully there was an actual door between the shower room and changing area, so our stuff didn't get wet.

You might wonder how we find these places. It's a pretty simple Google Maps search. We only stay at places that have sufficient information online for us to judge if we're happy about trying them (usually a simple webpage). The translations on Google reviews on these campsites are sometimes illuminating and often entertaining. This one had a lot of chatter about "Kevins" and I briefly wondered...until David clarified that "cabin" in Japanese is sometimes spelled ケビン or literally "kebin"! There were indeed a lot of unoccupied "Kevins", that looked great on the outside, but I don't think there was kitchens or showers in the Kevins. We knew that we were getting a better deal in our tents. Yes: much cheaper, potentially cleaner (according to the reviews), and more fun. I mean you don't get to play with fire in a Kevin! 

Gotta love a good fern!

Beautiful squishy moss.

One area we drove through was obvious a dairy farming area, which is quite unusual in Japan. They had a farm that was set up for tourists and we stopped there for a yummy lunch and ice cream on the way home.

Yep, a dairy farming themed area!
This is a post box at the local convenience store

Ice cream with our long-time camping friends.

The farm shop...speaks for itself.

And a random bus! We could see the road that
went past the campsite and these between-village
buses went by a few times each day.
And it's a sign that you're relaxing
when you have time to notice the 
occasional bus driving past (it wasn't 
a busy road).

One more dragonfly because they are so beautiful!

This was the view up a nearby hill. It's a valley
that contains both a village and yellow rice fields.

We think this pond is where most of the mozzies were
coming from. Because it's well into autumn I definitely
underestimated the mosquitoes.

Comfort gained from gathering with others

Earlier this week over 2 ½ days I talked to dozens of people, almost all were missionaries. 

On Sunday afternoon we caught a train to a fairly new church plant. After the service we talked to several missionaries about the church.

It helped that on Tuesday we met in a beautiful
location (Okutama, western Tokyo), though it
rained all day, so we didn't get to go walking.

On Monday morning I travelled in a car with five other OMF missionaries across the city to meet with maybe around 50 other people, most of whom are also involved in cross-cultural work. This was our monthly regional meeting for worship and fellowship, but this time we also had a working bee to help with some deeper cleaning of our Japan headquarters and guest home. I travelled home with three people, arriving home around 5 pm.

On Tuesday morning I took our car on its first trip filled with cross-cultural workers. Our four-seater car was filled with ladies attending a Women in Ministry worship and fellowship time out in the far west of Tokyo, where we met with around 35 other women from variety of organisations and backgrounds. This was a total of three hours of driving and talking in the car, plus six hours at the meeting.

Monday's meeting (lunch)

Adding it all up, I spent over eight hours in cars with eight different people (nearly half of that I was driving) and about 100 people over the three days.

I've been very tired in the wake of all that, and have struggled these last couple of days to push through a headache (again).

So, was it worth it? Yes! I desperately needed the encouragement and re-focus that these meetings provided. Here are just a few tidbits from conversations and the speakers:

• Encouragement from two couples who have moved back to their passport countries after serving here until their mid 60s. It was great to hear them encourage us to keep our eyes on Jesus; that the task was too big for any of us, but not for God; and that God uses each of us differently.
• Time and encouragement to focus on praising God. Something that was surprisingly hard to do with my tired, squirrelly brain.
• Praising God for being an author (Acts 3:15 ESV), was particularly meaningful.
• A conversation with another mum, just a few years behind us, who has a neurodivergent daughter. She needed some hope about the future.
• I chatted with a single lady who is doing things that she couldn't have imagined, even 12 months ago.
• I spent time getting to know one of my newer teammates and her husband. So encouraging to see how they've grown while we've been away and they encouraged me too.
• A colleague and friend who brought up a sensitive topic, made me cry, but then encouraged me hugely in a short conversation!
• I gave a short back rub to a friend who was celebrating her birthday.
• I was encouraged to hear the wife of a former leader talk about them choosing a church to attend once they were no longer church-based in their ministry.
• Two of the ladies who rode in my car yesterday are new to our area and have never been to one of these Women in Ministry events. One of them couldn't stop saying thank you for bringing her.
• Lots of hugs with women who I've grown to know and love over the years. I only see them two or three times a year at these events, but they're precious to me. "My people" from a vast array of backgrounds.

There's much more than I can write here, or even remember, but I'm grateful for it all. 

Today I read an article about Australian farmers finding community at their local cattle sales and how important that time of gathering is. It's easy for people on the land to become isolated and lonely. That is also true when you are living overseas. And even more so as Christian workers: our enemy doesn't like what we do and he targets our weak spots, especially when we live too much inside our own heads. It's important for us to gather with "our people" for encouragement and connection. I'm so grateful for these times, they help me to remember who is really in charge, as well as opportunities to pour into other people's lives from the comfort that God's given me over the years.

Expectations

Expectations play a big part in how we experience life.

One example is weather. We had a dinner party on Saturday night with three American friends. They all come from a cold part of the US. One of them experienced his first Tokyo winter earlier this year and he didn't feel it was cold enough! In contrast I had an online meeting last week with a young Filipino lady who visited Japan for a month early this year. I asked her how the cold weather was for her! She didn't come with any winter clothes (she didn't own any)! Thankfully she was able to get some here. She also saw snow for the first time and was amazed. Tokyo's winter was well and truly cold enough for her!

The contrasts in the above two stories aren't with who these people are, but the differences were their expectations which were shaped by life experiences.

Likewise, our 19 years of experience with Tokyo summers have led us to expect that the weather will cool down in early September—but this year it didn't, not until the 22nd! My expectations, sadly, made me unsettled and unhappy as I waited for the weather to change.

So why have expectations come to mind to write about today? Because as we've come into this new chapter of our lives I realise that I've held various expectations, and worse, imagined that other people had expectations of us. I don't think I've been living up to my expectations and certainly feel as though I fall short of what I imagine others expect of me.

Interestingly, as I've thought about this today I've had two sides to the "coin" brought to my attention:

Side 1: You're robbing God

Over lunch I listened to the sermon that was presented at our home church in Australia. It was on Malachi 3:3-12, entitled "Robbing God". It looked at how the Israelites were not giving God what was owed to him (the tithes and offerings he had told them to bring). In short, the application to us today was–are we robbing God by not generously giving. This isn't just in money, but in time and capacity. How can I serve God? Is my life a testimony to his goodness? 

Romans 12:1 "Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God – this is your true and proper worship."

Many sermons and books and other things we say to one another are along this line: you're not good enough, you're not trying hard enough, you're not committed enough. My tendency towards rule keeping and wanting not to disappoint others (first born child?!) means I often end up beating myself up on this front.

Side 2: God's grace

This morning I read an article by a missionary in Japan. She wrote: "I regularly wrestle with wondering if God is disappointed in me." So do I! The article she wrote is here and is about the time when in a small Bible study with a couple of Japanese believers, she saw a different side of the Parable of the Workers that Jesus told (in Matthew 20:1-16). It's a story that showcases God's generosity, but also challenges our right to question God's choices. She was impressed that God's grace is not connected with our capacity to serve him, that God loves us and accepts us anyway.

My thoughts go to other places in the Bible that say similar things like:

Isaiah 40 where we're told God knows how frail we are and that our faithfulness doesn't endure (vs 6-8), and yet he holds us close like a shepherd holds a lamb to his chest (vs 11).

Mauve dancing ladies ginger, 
spotted in Geelong Botanical
Gardens in May. Isaiah 40
compares us to flowers that fall.
It's good to remember!

Psalm 103:13-14 Which talks about how God has compassion on us because he remembers we are "made of dust".

Psalm 139 which tells us that God knows even our secret thoughts and he knew us before we were born, he created us just as he wanted us to be, yet he also never leaves us, he always guides us and "holds us fast".

1 Corinthians 1:26-29 where it talks about how God chose (to be his disciples) the foolish, weak, low, and despised.

What are God's expectations of us? And, which of these two sides should we choose? Well, I say we need to choose both. Because, like many things, they are both true. It's not a black and white situation, though my small mind wants to make it so.

I both need to strive to obey God and do my best to offer my best to him, but I also need to rest in his grace, to know that he accepts me even when I don't meet my own (or my perception of others') expectations. My own bent is to be very hard on myself, so I probably need to lean towards the second side of the coin to counterbalance the "being good to earn God's approval" mentality that I so easily slip into.

How about you? Which of these is easier for you? How do you keep a balanced attitude to your expectations of yourself?

It's messier than I like to admit

I kinda regret that I had to talk about our ministries to people in Australia. How many of you have to stand up in front of friends and strangers and talk about your job and why you do your job? It's one of the weird things that missionaries often have to do, and not one of my favourite things.

Why do I regret it? Because I said things about the past that sounded like I'd resolved them, that I was past all that. It's tricky to get up in front of an audience and tell a story about your life. You have to have a point and a conclusion. Sometimes to make that point or come to that conclusion you have to make it sound more complete than the story actually is.

So here's what I regret: I told a very brief version about how I came to be doing this pretty specialist job as a missionary (editing and publishing). The story I told was only about 400 words long and took 2 to 3 minutes to say. That's a radical summary and it's not that simple. And nor is it complete. Part of the reason I ended up doing this was because I struggled with learning Japanese and was asking God why he brought me to Japan. Saying it like that makes it seem like that was all in the past. The truth is that I still struggle (so much!) with Japanese and that I still wonder sometimes why God brought me to Japan.

One significant part of my job these last 23 years has been raising children, and obviously that is over in a day-to-day sense, which means I'm less busy (even cooking dinner and doing grocery shopping takes less time). 

I'm also sitting with transition within the two main jobs that I've done these last seven years: magazine editing and social media for mobilisation. With both these jobs, at present, I don't have as much day-to-day stuff to do as I've had in the past. 

I wish I wasn't feeling so unsettled, but the old thoughts about why I'm in Japan keep coming back. That's despite spending a whole year telling people we met in Australia why we were going back to Japan and fighting so hard to make that possible! The fickleness of the human heart astounds me sometimes. The other annoying thing is there's so much evidence that I should be here, that God's put us here again. Despite understanding that transition takes time, I don't really understand why I still feel so unsteady, and so grumpy at times.

Cosmos were almost the only blooming plants
in the whole park (aside from weeds). I took a
moment to enjoy them.

Then yesterday I took some time to ride to my favourite park—something I've been looking forward to for months. I'd been waiting for the weather to cool off a bit, which it did on the weekend, and then, on a meeting-free day, I hopped on my new bike and went on an adventure.

It wasn't the nicest of days. It was grey and gusty, with a threat of rain, and despite the much more pleasant temperatures it was a little unsettling out there. I headed to a small shelter in the park and ate lunch and later headed a bit further south to a favourite cafe of mine that I've visited in the past.

My intention during this time out of the office was not just to get some exercise and go to favourite places, but also to ponder what was going on in my heart. A retreat, of sorts. I've been thinking about the question of what God's got for me in this new season in Japan, but the much bigger question of what my purpose is as a human. The Westminster Catechism (shorter) summarises that as "to glorify God and to enjoy him forever." The New City Catechism says "God created us . . . to know him, love him, live with him, and glorify him".

What does that mean? I found an article from The Gospel Coalition called Enjoying God. It was a little heavy for my poor little brain, reading it on my tiny phone screen while I ate lunch, but still good. One Bible reference it pointed to was Psalm 145, which I encountered again at my next stop.

Then I rode to the cafe and, after a spot of birthday-present shopping nearby for my husband, I ordered a coffee and retreated upstairs (yep, it's a two-story cafe) and pulled out an old favourite that I've started re-reading: Awe, by David Paul Tripp. To my astonishment, the chapter I was up to was called "Ministry" and spoke right to me (and quoted Ps. 145 in its entirety). 

This blog post is getting a little long now, so I'll commit to writing a followup on it because it's easy to sit here at my computer and simplify the journeys that God takes me on, putting it all down in black and white as if I've got it all figured out. Doing that denies the reality that it's messy! I'm hoping to sit down again tomorrow with my Bible and a couple of books to listen further to what God is saying. 

Suffice to say, that I need to take a bigger picture approach to my life and ministry. My last 25 years have been full of the minutiae of raising children, the last 14 years have been full of deadlines pertaining to the magazine, and the last 7 years have been full of social media deadlines. My life has been very busy, and I've loved it. But change is inevitable and indeed necessary. I need to refocus my eyes on Jesus and remember that he didn't make me just to be a mum to my kids or just to have a schedule full of deadlines.

I'll be back...

Something to ponder: "So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal" (2 Corinthians 4:18 NIV).

What's it like, being in Japan without your kids?

Missionaries with younger kids are asking me: How does being here without kids feel?

A few different ways to describe it and I'm grappling for the best way. The most dramatic is to compare it to the grief of losing someone you love. You know they are in heaven and without pain. You’re happy for them, but still sad. You wouldn’t wish them back for anything. Like any metaphor this breaks down pretty quickly, but it does convey that there’s an emptiness in our lives, and it’s a matter of sitting with that and finding a way forward. They will always be part of our story, just not an everyday part. It's weird that we're meeting people now who have never known our sons, and often I feel compelled to bring them somehow into the conversation: they are part of who we are, they bring context to our lives.

Today I'm a little sad because its one of our son's birthdays. It's the first year that I won't celebrate with him in person. He's not a big one for parties, but we'd always have a cake and presents for a small family celebration. I'm not making a cake or wrapping presents today.

But if you think about it just a short while you realise that it is also sad if they don’t move on! It's a natural and expected change and when that doesn't happen it's a cause of grief too. A Japanese colleague pointed out to me that having them remain tiny and dependent is not what we want.

Parenting is all about sadness and happiness. Both emotions regularly occur at the same time from very early on: when a child begins eating food instead of drinking mum's milk, when they start school, have their first sleepover away from home, get their licence, finish school. All these evoke both sad and happy emotions for the parent. And often other emotions too like fear and pride.

And then there is expectations that we place on ourselves and our kids and that society places on us. When those expectations aren't met we run into emotional challenges too.

People working cross-culturally generally expect that their kids will move to another country after high school. Most of our expat peers here with adult children are living in a different countries to their kids. So in that sense it is normal.

Arggh, basically parenting is an emotional business, there's no way around it, not even not having kids.

On the positive side of things, it is wonderful watching our sons living life independently (even if we're doing it from a distance). There were many years when I wondered if they ever could learn to take showers (or go to bed) without us prompting them. But to be all taking care of their own basic needs (including feeding themselves) is nothing short of amazing, when I think about it. None of them have someone else cooking or housekeeping for them. None of them has someone else driving them around or keeping an eye on their schedule. That they are all functioning as independent adults is a source of great joy.

It must be said that there is less stress in not living in the same house as them: out of sight out of mind, is fairly true. It's not that we don't care and we don't think of and pray for them often, but we aren't spectators to their daily lives and so things that are stressors don't weigh us down like it would if we were closer. We are also not rubbing each other up the wrong way on a daily basis (living with someone on the autistic spectrum who also struggles with anxiety and misophonia isn't a walk in the park). I think we have more to give others as a result.

There's joy in doing (and eating) things that we could never do when they were here. Eating out has gotten more affordable, and so has eating in! We can be more spontaneous too. I still remember, as a young adult hearing that my parents has spontaneously gone out to the movies. It seemed quite out of character...but I only knew them as people who had children at home and they were discovering who they were without that responsibility.

Yes our house is quieter, that is mostly good. What's weird to me is that they all moved out more than six months ago and I'm still feeling the difference. We left on our two month sojourn just after they left, so didn't have much time to grieve then. Then we got back only three months before leaving the country, so there was a lot to do to plan and execute that move. 

Now it's all over and there isn't much to plan, not so much to talk about. That's weird. We've sat for so long with trying to figure out "what's next" and especially wondering how we'd be able to achieve all that was necessary for our guys to all move out and us move back to Japan without them. After living with that tension and stress, it's an adjustment to get back to a more "boring" life. Living life with contentment is obviously something I need to work on.

So, overall it's good, but there's no quick answer to "What's it like without your kids?"