See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid. I’ve actually finished reading this, after many months. Life and the battles for attention esp with Instagram and YouTube. And this is also not the kind of book you just fly through.
Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson. Continuing my obsession with books by people from the Caribbean who are no longer living in the Caribbean, but there’s a lot of Caribbean in their work.
Why are ghosts white? / Are all ghosts white?
Why are bananas yellow?
Touching my armpit: Why is it so fluffy here?
What is pain? Is it like when we feel itchy? (This could be because his younger sister seems to use ‘itai’ and ‘kayui’ interchangeably. Or ‘itai’ for every single unpleasant sensation she might feel. )
Everyone who has been around children knows that they ask a lot of questions. Some of the questions are mundane and annoying, some make you laugh out loud, some leave you stumped, and some give you real food for thought. The thing is I tend to forget even the most interesting questions from my son, so I’ve decided to start writing them down here. Randomly.
I have, in fact, always noticed Jamaica and Japan’s closeness in country lists on web forms. I’ve had to be careful in selecting the right one to reflect nationality or residence.
In reality, the two countries are geographically quite far apart, with many differences.One thing that bridges that distance is Japan being the biggest importer of Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee.
Coffee interests in Japan (and Jamaica) mark this particular fact on January 9, Blue Mountain Coffee day.
This year I attended the commemorative events in Tokyo– a lecture and cocktail party. Masaya Kawaguchi from the UCC Academy who gave the lecture, pointed to another iteration of the countries’ closeness on digital lists. Their order in opening parades of sporting events like the Olympics. UCC is a big importer of coffee. I remember hitching a ride on a UCC truck on a hike in the Blue Mountains. With a Japanese friend.
In the lecture, Kawaguchi talked about many things I didn’t know or cared to know. Most Jamaicans only know that our coffee is apparently famous or sought after. We don’t seek after it ourselves or even know why people love it. It’s easy to drink, mild, is apparently one of the reasons.
One section of the event was a brewing demonstration by a champion barista. Of course, coffee was served. I don’t typically drink coffee, but I couldn’t resist taking a few sips.
The lecture, given in Japanese, was sprinkled with video snippets of UCC’s farm, some Jamaican workers speaking. Norman Grant and Pearnel Charles Jr brought greetings,
The head of a company representing the Jamaica Tourist Board gave an intro of Jamaica in Japanese. The Jamaican ambassador was resplendent in kimono. Entertainment was folk songs. Food was jerk, festival, ackee cups. Coffee cocktails inspired by the barista’s visit to Jamaica were conversation starters. It was a mixed affair.
Personally, it kinda felt like I was a reporter in Kingston all over again. Fishing for a story, feeling slightly uncomfortable at these social events. Less so this time, as it gave me a warm piece of home in winter.
I only ran a four-kilometre leg, but I could feel my body saying, ‘we’re forgetting how to do this’, so I’m going to sign up for a longer race taking place at the end of March.
This relay race was the Chofu City Ekiden. I saw one of my son’s little classmates on the route, and he cheered me on! At the end, my husband said I looked like I was walking, in a bad way.
One. There’s only one you. With one lower back. That screams at you to move!
Two. You only have two hands. That are learning too easily how to get stiff.
Three-Four. About the number of hours you can meaningfully concentrate on anything. After that, diminishing returns.
Five. Number of hours you get on a good day before the main job (parenting) requires your full attention.
Millions. The number of ideas and projects you either need to think about, research or just want to explore.
Lessons Learnt
2022 taught me a lot about myself as a worker, a writer. Or allowed me to visit ideas or possibilities that needed my attention. For example, as stated above, I can only work for so long before I can do nothing. And it varies according to the work I am doing. I can write fiction the longest perhaps, but it is also the slowest. I have to wring the words out of me. But I can focus for about 5 hours on an article. Then with translation-type work, going for just 1.5 or 2 hours at a time yields best results.
As a writer, I know more than ever that I am a generalist, which is not such an asset in this age. Experts are valued. But I’m not quite down about it.
When it comes to creative writing, I still try to avoid it, but when I get down to it, I feel accomplished.
I remain grateful that I am able to undertake this interaction with language and make more time for family at the same time.
New Year’s Resolutions
I used to be big on these, using Yearly Compass for a while. Wonderful tool, can’t recommend it enough! Haven’t done it for a couple of years. Time, maybe. This year, I’m sticking to the big goals: 1.Write 2. Get that year-round summer body 3. Pay attention to the children.
There is something about not interacting with Jamaicans regularly and live, as opposed to via text, that causes some ways of speaking to go on a temporary vacation from your mind. Recently, a friend used this one in a written conversation: x a breed mi. Later when I was reflecting on my first few weeks in the MFA, that’s what came back to me: it a breed mi.
But it is interesting.
I don’t know what part of me actually seriously thought I could do this while teaching full time. I suppose if I had to I would. But I am happy I don’t have to. Responding to submissions being workshopped and responding to others’ responses is one. Then there’s all the assigned reading (and responses) and exercises for a particular week, then the overall reading of texts and whatever else comes up in conversation. And, of course, your own writing. Times two. I hope I will find a rhythm soon. Or else early birth.
Spit ina di sky it ago fall ina yu eye sa.
Richie Spice, The World is a Cycle
Depending on how long I’m out, I’ll listen to as few as about 6 or as many as about 30 songs on a run. Some songs get you through kyaan bada moments, some make you forget what you’re doing, some you want to skip. Somehow, through it all, there is usually one line from one song that hits you. And it keeps playing in your head even after the run is over. Recently it was this line from a very popular song from a few years ago. I knew the song, and thought I knew its lines.
This particular line appears well after two minutes into the song! Obviously I wasn’t listening past the opening lines.
What a quick Google search has made clear to me is that this is actually a Jamaican proverb: If yu spit ina di sky it fall ina yu eye. What goes around, comes around, the world is a cycle.
This new experience of really leaving the past behind, of going from one place to the other and knowing that whatever had been would remain just so, was something I immediately accepted as a gift, a right of nature. This most simple of movements, the turning of your back, is among the most difficult to make, but once it has been made you cannot imagine it was at all hard to accomplish.
Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother, page 25.
I read this the day before I went to clean out my office space. Before I handed over my office key, computers, insurance card, ID card, and left the campus one last time looking like a mountaineer with a bag that’s still sitting unpacked in the passage.
Yes, it was hard to believe I had agonised so much about making the decision to stop working. But I also did feel something that might be characterised as loss. It’s a beautiful campus, the classrooms are nice, the colleagues (two of whom formed the waving party for my farewell, as the campus was empty) are among the best I’ve had. Not only that, but one of the only times I got to speak a not too filtered English was with my colleagues. They were an opportunity for natural communication. And the students are polite. I felt conscious of losing those things. Or perhaps it is only now, in retrospect. that I feel that.
When I was cleaning up, I came upon a list of improvements I was vowing to make before the start of a particular semester. It had things like, don’t let the marking pile up, don’t run home after fourth period. In my last term, both of those just happened naturally. I couldn’t imagine sticking around after fourth period ended at 4:20!
I suppose what I really feel nagging at me, which I know will just go away over time is a bit of disappointment, shame, that I wasn’t able to do it all. In my last semester, I just was not able to give the job everything I used to. Before the start of the semester, something was telling me that I needed to think about adjusting my approach; I needed a new game plan to account for a gained child. But I ignored that something.
Then there was what felt like a sensory attack after a year of online classes followed by a year of maternity leave. Things that I didn’t have the capacity to handle were coming at me from all over the place.
Perhaps I would have worked out a game plan over time, too. But the decision has been made to move on. The campus will remain beautiful, the colleagues cordial, the students polite. Somebody will make lists of things to do in each semester. The place will continue to exist. Is continuing to exist in this very moment. Its being unperturbed by, unaware of, incapable of perceiving my absence. As it was with my presence, for that matter.
A few days before I returned to work after having my second child, my husband put up a schedule on the kitchen wall. It had the days, times, name of each child and red and green lines for which of us would be ferrying them to or from nursery. Red was him. Green was me. There were more green lines than red.
Our daughter, the baby, would be turning one at the end of March and making her way out to nursery on April 1. Around that time, it had also become increasingly hard to convince our three-year-old son to do anything at all. Leaving the house, walking to the nursery, entering the nursery, getting to his classroom. All these things required wells of patience I often didn’t know how to access.
We hadn’t been able to get a space at my son’s nursery school for the baby, so they were going to be in two different places. Still, I told myself, it’s doable. I only need to actually go to work three days a week anyway. I had returned to work when my first child was ten months old, and it had been an adjustment, but I managed just fine. This time would be no different. I would manage.
Four months later, about a month ago, I resigned from my job teaching English at a university. I couldn’t, it turned out, manage.
But the whole truth of why I quit my job after just one semester back from leave, and with a young family at home requires context. In the end, I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice, but I still ended up battling fear, guilt and sadness.
Why I didn’t have a choice
Let’s start at the beginning, that is, April 4. Only a few days into the new business year in Japan. My first official day back on the job after a year’s childcare leave would be the next day, April 5.
When I went to pick up my son, I saw his teacher, sticking slips of brightly coloured paper in the wall pockets they use to send notices to parents. Oh, I’m so sorry, she started to say. What’s going on? my face said. What was going on was corona. The class would be closed for a week.
The next day, my first day back at work, I teach four new groups of students online. My son watches too much YouTube. We get through the day. I hate teaching online, but he likes watching YouTube. Win-win?
By the end of that week, my family had all tested positive. After being at home for almost two weeks, everybody had gotten better, and I felt finally able to start my semester. But it was nearing the end of April.
This feeling of not having quite started, but needing to feel and show that I was making progress would shadow me the entire semester. As anyone who has ever taught knows, teaching is rarely an in and out operation. Prep and marking take more time than the time spent in the classroom. Time was something I could never find. At home and at work, I felt like I was just doing enough to keep things from crashing. In other words, I was not on top of things, things were on top of me, pressing me down.
In June, my son turned 4. At his nursery school, parents were invited to a party for those born that month. In another year or semester, I would have taken the day off, but I had already missed all those classes due to corona. I had make-up classes scheduled on Saturdays for weeks. I couldn’t add any more.
On the day of the party, I sat at my desk and watched a video of him in his neon green t-shirt and green and white trousers, ebullient, doing his birthday interview. His favorite fruits he told his teacher were apples, pears, plums, strawberries and oranges (just like The Very Hungry Caterpillar). I cried. Later, in narrating what happened at the party, he told me of all the parents who were there, and, he told me, as a matter of fact, you weren’t there.
What is Anxiety?
I started to really consider what anxiety might be after I started feeling quite tense before my fuller days at work. In the dark, after my younger child had fallen asleep beside me, I googled things like how to deal with work anxiety or signs of anxiety. One thing I took from that ‘research’ was that preparation can help with anxiety, which I agreed with.
Commuting time became marking time, on my days off or whenever the children had gone to bed, I would prepare. Prepare, prepare, prepare. What that meant, of course, was that for every minute spent preparing, there was something else I was not doing.
I felt prepared for my classes for a few weeks, and that reduced the anxiety a bit. But what I wasn’t doing was cooking or sleeping or anything entirely selfish like reading. Which led to uneasiness. And weariness. And tension took up a permanent space inside and outside of me. I could never relax.
The end of the semester snuck up on me. After weeks spent in what felt like the trails of Superman’s whizzes, it was summer break, and I could think. Then, while eating his dinner one evening, my son clutched his throat and yelped as tears, sudden and real, rolled down his cheeks. Omicron BA.5.
Deciding to Quit
The thought of quitting my job and not looking immediately for full-time employment was slow in coming to me. I am Jamaican. I live in Japan. Overseas. When you go overseas as a Jamaican, you work. Two, three, four jobs if you can. We work.
I enjoyed the security of a full-time job (though I was on a contract), and I enjoyed the opportunities for interacting with various personalities that teaching provided. Did I really know what I was thinking? Could these things not outweigh the heaviness that I had come to associate with work? Maybe it was just my schedule. Yes, that had to be it. I had been working in this same job for six years, and my schedule was, objectively speaking, quite hectic this year.
I entered into communication with my superiors, and I agreed to a lighter schedule. Resolved. Except the heaviness returned. Why? Because I realized that when I had considered the idea of just leaving it all behind, in addition to the fear and sadness, I had also felt free. I’ve left jobs before, so I was familiar with that feeling. Having experienced it, even for just a moment shrouded in indecision, led to a yearning.
What I’m searching for
Recently, tennis star Serena Williams announced her retirement from tennis to focus on growing her family. Many professional women, famous or not, make the decision to focus on family every day, and more discussion is taking place about whether women can have it all–family and career–at the same time. The pandemic has also set the Great Resignation in motion with more people searching for careers that suit their lifestyles.
I can’t say that I wasn’t influenced by each of these phenomena, but there are two specific things I am in search of.
Whenever our children got sick, my husband and I took turns missing work. Or we decided based on whether one of us had a stronger need to be at work that day. But I still felt guilty or bothered about it. I would like a work situation where missing work for a valid reason leaves me at ease. At the same time, I would like for the children to be able to recover from their ailments slowly.
Even if they just have a little cold, we take them to the doctor anyway, just to confirm that they can go to nursery. Why? To be able to tell the nursery that the doctor said it’s OK, so we can go to work.
The more important thing I want to be able to do is give my children time to be. Children move at their own pace. Hurrying them along takes more time and energy than just letting them be. Yes, sometimes we have to cut off the playing at some point, and, yes, sometimes we have to leave the house right now. But I don’t want to be thinking all the time about that train that I have to catch, which I’m surely going to miss if this child doesn’t come now.
I realize that there are parents who achieve these two things while holding down full time jobs, and maybe I will return to a regular job soon or someday, I don’t know. But right now, I have to try to make life easier for all four of us in my family. The first step toward that was leaving full-time employment.