Moving to Japan

I’ve been feeling the pressure of this news escalate in my body for weeks. I want to tell everyone from the cashier at the grocery store to a person I meet at the park. We’ve had to tell people slowly, in tiers. From our work places, to family and close friends and school, and we are finally ready to share it far and wide.

This has been a project for many months and a dream for many years.

I find it interesting that many people thought this was simply a spur of the moment decision. A lot of folks have expressed concern that we haven’t thought this through. That we have simply been dreaming a little too much and for a little too long.

Well, we certainly are dreaming. And as Gloria Steinman says,

“Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”

But as with two small children and a life picked up and altered so drastically, I can also tell you this was no last minute decision. Why would we leave everything behind and start over? I’ll share that here. Not as a reason for people who seem to need reasons. Instead, as an intention for myself. A reminder for when things will inevitably get tough and I’ll want to come back to these mountains and hide under my comforter with a box of macaroni and cheese and speak English.

We want the girls to be immersed in Japanese culture, as it is a part of their cultural heritage. A lot of our day to day life has aspects of the culture embedded, food and eating, art, language, but we want full immersion. Children who can be fluid in their ability to live in either place.

My grandmother was a refugee from Lithuania because of WWII, and I regret often that I know very little about my cultural heritage. It’s challenging to explain why that feels so important, but as someone who was been given no depth into the culture I come from, I feel grief at the loss of layers to my identity. I don’t want that for my girls. I want them to understand their layers, relish in their depth.

We want the girls to be bilingual, which goes with being bicultural, but teaching them to read and write in Japanese felt impossible to our situation. I can teach them to read and write in English, whereas my husband wouldn’t teach them Japanese at home. And we wanted to get there before my eldest turned five.

I also want to live abroad. I’ve been studying Japanese since my first was born and I can tell that my self expansion from this experience is going to be immense. I’m all about stepping into the woman I am meant to be and this feels like part of that step. I’m not sure why, I simply know it is a truth.

All of this we’ve planned for, imagined, conceived of, and then we simply had to jump in and trust.

I’m still getting a hang of that trust and what it feels like.

Trust in finding work and community. Trust in learning the language, and that the girls will find ease. All of this trust has very little evidence. But I’m learning to sit in this unknown discomfort and know that this is our next step. This is what we are meant to be doing.

I’m mothering myself through it. I’m mothering my children through it. I’m expressing to my children that “I don’t know” and that’s ok. We are in this together.

Trust is the only way through here.

A few nights ago my husband and I had our, recently common, back-and-forth where one of us expresses doubt and the other helps the first through. My husband said,

“Maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe this is all a terrible idea! Why would we uproot and start over?”

I replied, “Yes, you’re right. It’s all too scary. When the girls get older and ask why they can’t speak Japanese, or why they can don’t understand their cultural heritage, or why we just always lived in a non-diverse, small town that’s too expensive, we’ll say. We were just too scared to raise you anywhere else.”

I refuse. I refuse to be held in place by fear. And so, I’ll acknowledge it’s there, and then I’ll expand.

Onwards we go.