Klingsor's First Winter

My wife and son have been home now for about three weeks.

He was 5 weeks when he got here, and he’s now 8 weeks.

My wife’s back still hurts, which means she can’t pick up our son to console him when he’s crying. It’s hard on everyone.

Yesterday and today, after his 4am feeding, my wife has been able to get him back to sleep. For today, I’ve used this time to have my “me time”. I volunteer to sleep with my son at 8am, and my wife gets her me time at night.

I played Dragon Quest V for PS2, and now I am writing here while having some tea.

I cannot express how comfortable it is to play Dragon Quest V for PS2, and there would need to be so much background explained for our non-video game enthusiast readers, so I will need to ask you to take me at my word.

I haven’t read Narnia in a while, but I want to start again soon. I’m hoping the crying gets less in a few weeks, making it easier to do.

I recently also bought beautiful hardcover copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I haven’t actually ever read them before, but I look forward to doing so after we finish Narnia. (I will have to start reading more than a page a day of Narnia.)

My wife and I realize just how much we are on our smart phones around our son, and we have such good intentions to stop that once he is a little older, and we’re not constantly waiting for the next cries to start. We want to read more in front of him when we are having our “adult time”.

We look forward to being able to play with him more. We now sometimes do exercises that it mentions online, or that the person from the Ward Office mentioned when she came over to visit. That visit was a good experience, and when I am clearer thinking, I would love to write something about this.

I have every intention to restart my podcast that I do in Japanese, Saitama Freeway. I would call it Saitama Freeway: Season 2, and it would be about more than video games this time. I feel there was something more I wanted to say about this, but I have forgotten it already.

I’m not sure what our plans are today, but perhaps when either of us (my wife and I) has time, we will continue cleaning up the house so that the entire house is clean. I would love to talk more seriously with my wife about moving and what sort of location is realistic and what sort of price we could do. I think I am in a stable position at my company, but I would still want to wait until next year to go ahead with it. Just planning for now.

That’s all really. I’ll post this now, and edit grammatical mistakes later.

It’s probably been a week since I last wrote.

Caring for a newborn has gotten easier in that I’ve gotten used to it, but I’m still super tired. Nothing deep to say about it just yet. I realized last night I needed me time and I took an hour or two of that today. (My wife has her me time too.)

Some online stuff says weeks 6-8 may be the hardest, and we’re in week 7 now. Who knows.

I’ll have a drastically reduced number of work days until the end of July, which is 12 weeks from birth, the end of what some online stuff calls “the fourth trimester”.

We have a night time routine, but we need to try and have a better routine for feeding. I’m just happy we’re able to feed him for now though.

Easy to think about life now, and how it’s changed, and how I try to not really show that it’s changed, because it hasn’t changed for others.

So this isn’t really anything to say, but more of a record to read in the future.

I wrote something, and then made it private, because it seemed a little more silly than usual. If the blog titled “Words” or something like that ever shows up, that is what I am referring to.

This last week I have been so stressed, so frazzled and so everything else like that.

My son slept through the night for the most part last night. I mean that he got up and was breastfed, but then he went back to bed right away. No drama.

He never really was good at sleeping through the day at home, but I was able to lay him down two hours ago, and he is still out. My wife took a turn watching over him, and I just checked, and she’s asleep too.

I now have a little leisure time to myself.

And in this time, I will ponder to myself about the hardships, and feel that I am happy in the end.

That’s all really.

There are many ideas bubbling in my head, but they need more time to stew.

I was worried over the last few weeks about my wife’s health and stressed about the uncertainty of it all.

Now that they’re home, this uncertainty has somewhat gone away. I mean, life is always uncertain and I’ll find reasons to be worried about everything, but we made it here.

There’s now a baby in my life that will forever be there, forever changing every aspect of my life forever.

I got this I think, but not really. I thought about my video game schedules. I thought about which drinking parties I could make. However, perhaps in the trenches of the first week, all I can think about is how to survive as a parent.

Lack of sleep was something you can hear about, but hearing about it and experiencing it are obviously different.

Having a baby cry uncontrollably and not knowing why is something you can picture for a few minutes, but when you realize it’s not going away ever, and it’s up to you to do the right thing, then it’s different.

In our baby bath styrofoam thing we have, you put some warm water where you rest the baby’s body. I did this first and then got the baby ready. When I put the baby in it, it was lukewarm and the scream the baby made was out of this world. My wife rushed from the living room that is up a floor. In a panic, all I can think is I have to make the situation better as soon as possible. Pick up baby. Hug baby. Warm baby. Don’t drop baby. Get new warm water. Put in styrofoam thing. Don’t drop baby. Ensure thing is warm. Put baby baby back while showering baby’s body. Do the above in three seconds.

I should mention how unprepared I was. I thought I was prepared, but I was wrong. It’s less about a place for things, and more about a mindful schedule for life. When to do what and why. It’s all not just shits and giggles. when he sleeps do laundry. Pay bills. Cook healthy food for wife (haven’t yet). Clean shit that gets everywhere. I couldn’t imagine any of it.

My wife’s back hurts a lot, and so she can only really breastfeed and even that hurts. She tries to do more because she feels bad, but that will just make her back hurt for longer.

There’s more to say, but first there’s this word jumble that’s trying to say that words don’t do this justice. I’m in the land of not words.

And this is obvious to all other parents. And I knew other parents. They’re everywhere.

My wife and son are set to come home tomorrow. Not 100% confirmed, but the last problem is now fine apparently.

It will have been a total of five weeks at a hospital.

The realization that I could’ve spent the time I had alone better becomes apparent now. It was already apparent, but now I have a very busy day today (in the office for the most part), and then tomorrow too. All that emotional wah wah things are tough really got in the way.

Feelings and love for my wife and child were super strong in the last month, and I’m sure they’ll stay strong, but now coupled with a potentially constantly crying baby, a postpartum wife who may be quick to snap, and a (hopefully not too much) bewildered me.

As my company’s HR, it came the week I need to calculate everyone’s raises, bonuses and confirm the amount of residence tax everyone needs to pay, so I will be doing a little working from home, but only the bare minimum.

So it is go time. This is not a test. Time to shine.

In British Columbia, where I’m from, you are able to get a license from age 16. Most of my friends did, but I never did.

Around 17 or 18, I did get a Learner’s Permit, but I had a huge mental block about driving. Like with other things (that were equally silly), I thought it was too late for me, and the buses and SkyTrains were good anyways, and hey, maybe something about the environment too? I never got my license, and then at 21 I moved to Japan, where the trains were even better.

However, in my first marriage when I lived in Chiba, I constantly relied on my wife to drive us everywhere. I just took this for granted. Sometimes she got frustrated about it, and I was sorry, but it’s not like I could afford going to driving school, or that an English one was nearby. If I was better with money I could have though. When I look back at my mistakes in this marriage, not having a license was definitely one of them.

However, despite it not really being on my mind for most of the duration of our marriage, once we separated, one of the first things I did was spend a lot of money to get a Japanese driver’s license. I was comfortable enough to do it in Japanese this time, and I even did it so I could drive manual transmission (do we say standard? I’m never sure). The driving part at the driving school was easy, which is another story for sure, and the driving test at the driving center I failed 3 times I believe. I refused to take it in English, because I’m stubborn like that sometimes. I suppose this is also another story.

After that, I drove around a few times in the first year. I even used the highway once! However, I then became a paper driver for 5 or 6 years. If that’s a Japanese expression, it means that I had a license to drive, but I did not feel confident or that I had the actual ability to do so.

Once my wife was pregnant, we decided that it would be good to have a car. I decided to practice driving with my brother-in-law, and sometimes alone. I panicked quite a bit driving alone, as sometimes I just didn’t know what I was supposed to do, and was worried that I was being a nuisance to those around me.

The most stressful part was my small driveway on my small road. The road is three meters wide. To open my door in the driveway, I need to be about 15cm from the left side of the driveway. Furthermore, there is a telephone pole just ahead of the left side of the driveway, meaning I need to come in at an angle.

I went online and found a guy. I paid him 15,000 yen, and we drove around my block five or six times and went over how to best park.

The reason I took this step is because when I winged getting out of my parking spot with a car share car, I scraped the side of my house. I was so focused on not hitting the pole, I didn’t notice I hit my house on the other side, and when I did, I panicked more and kept driving a little. The guy told me how silly and stupid this all was, and was very convincing about this.

I now have specific ways I get in and out of my driveway. Getting in sometimes is still hard, because it feels like I’m driving diagonally into the wall, and my car beeps away. It works though.

The actual thing I wanted to bring up, or perhaps complain about and say woe is me a little about, is that our new car arrived a week before my wife went into labor. I was still super nervous about driving, but there really wasn’t any time for that. We drove to the hospital. I stayed as late as I could. I drove home on dark unfamiliar roads. I did it again. My wife moved to a different hospital. The drive became an hour each way. I sometimes took the train, and I sometimes drove.

I had expected I would get used to driving with my wife in the car, and us doing fun little short drives. However, I got used to it with the great uncertainty of what was happening with my wife instead.

One incredibly silly part of me had a huge mental block on getting gas for the first time. I had never gotten gas, and the idea for whatever reason frightened me. In the end, I called a local friend, and we got gas together. I made a million mistakes doing it, but someone was there, so it was fine. Now I can get gas a million times and will never have any mental block about it.

So now I can drive, after not being able to drive really for the last 25 years. Better late than never. I got over all those weird mental obstacles in my head. I still have a few regarding driving though really. I need to drive on the highway again. I always rely on my navi for everything. Parking close to cars makes me a little nervous. However, I will get over all these silly things, as I have gotten over past silly things.

And compared to my wife’s health and the birth of my son, none of it seems that important really

.

We didn’t have our hopes up yesterday, but there was a good chance we felt that my wife would have the all clear to leave the hospital.

She ultimately didn’t.

We ultimately did have our hopes up a little.

However, we rebounded back faster than in the past. There’s one final thing to overcome. It’s being more stubborn than it is for most people, but the doctor is trying his best, and she is safe in a hospital. She can hand over the baby to the nurses and get a good night’s sleep. We have done this for four weeks, we can do this a little longer.

When there hopefully is an end to this, I will read what I have wrote here about my wife’s hospital stay with interest.

For now we’re used to the limbo.

Adulting is someone everyone does, but whenever I do it, I get the urge to climb onto rooftops and be like, “See! I’m an adult too!”

I have a guy coming by tomorrow to look at our floor and see if we can do some glass coating to make it look nicer and easier to wipe up messes. We should have done it when we bought the house five years ago, but better late than never. (Please note guy is gender neutral.)

Two other guys are coming to clean our washing machine, and to clean our “range hood” above our stove. The washing machine may be fine, but when I finally opened the filter things in it, and saw with shock and horror what I should be have been doing regularly, I thought it would be good to have a professional clean where it is known needs to be cleaned. One is on Saturday, and the other is next week. We should probably eventually buy a drum-style washing machine. I think that’s what people with kids do.

I forgot to take my new car in for its one month checkup last week. I didn’t exactly forget, but I didn’t go. So it’s now this week on Friday. The parking is a bit tight apparently. That gives this inexperienced driver anxiety.

Our property tax came for the year this month. With money I would usually put into savings, I’m going to just pay it all off. I didn’t do that last year, and I was then late on two payments due to being forgetful. I wonder if I wanted to naturalize if that would play a part in it all.

I got a small car loan for some reason (I thought I could get a better deal then, but I think I was likely misinformed), and that car loan couldn’t be taken out of my main savings bank account for some reason. Prestia isn’t liked I guess. When setting it up, I also had my regular SMBC bank card with me, so I set it up to be taken from there. I never use the card, so I want to put a bunch of money in there so I can forget about the loan for a few months.

I’ve received my son’s health insurance card, MyNumber card, and that paper from the city that states they will pay the remaining 30% of fees. (A translator would have a good name for it.) I’ll pay hospital bills today. I’m not sure what in hospital stays is not included in health insurance, but we will find out today.

See! I’m an adult too!

“Studying Japanese” is something that can feel omnipresent as a foreigner living in Japan. I would think no matter how fluent you become, this does not really change.

I haven’t studied Japanese in many years. I play video games in Japanese. I talk to my wife in Japanese. As part of my job in HR, I talk to many external vendors and government offices in Japanese. However, I don’t really study Japanese.

Since I changed from working at a Japanese university to working as a foreign company, I have been using Japanese a lot less, but a lot more externally. However, as the only HR person in my company, for whatever reason I have been a lot less shy about my lack of natural fluency. When I worked in a Japanese university, most people’s Japanese was really quite mindful and well constructed. I don’t really find that is the case in my current situation.

What I am trying to say is that I use Japanese a lot in daily life, but I haven’t really been studying it, or trying to improve it. There are chances that what I am doing that works is incorrect, and everyone around me just gets used to it. Sometimes when I speak with people I haven’t met before about complex topics, they have a hard time understanding me. I of course blame them for their blatant racism and oppression of me, but perhaps if you’re not used to how I speak Japanese, then I am very hard to understand?

I got up early this morning, and instead of being mindless on the old phone, I decided to turn on the TV. (Amazing to be in a world where turning on the TV is seen as the non-mindless action!)

They were analyzing poems and tanka, which my dictionary tells me is a 31-mora Japanese poem. (I didn’t look up mora).

In this non-business world, where people are playing with language for the expression of something in the soul, as opposed to the functioning of administration or accumulation of capital, language (perhaps obviously) becomes very different.

It makes me think about all the shortcomings of my Japanese, and how having better Japanese can enrich my life so much. Not just in this poetic sense, but this obvious shortcoming allows me to understand more the shortcomings in talking with my wife, my Japanese at work, and in other instances where it is “good enough for a foreigner” for sure, but let’s not shit ourselves, more fulfillment and meaning can be had.

(Note for my longtime readers: my wife appears to be getting better all around, which is allowing thoughts to spill out of me.)

When reading Narnia to my unborn son (who is now born), there was one concept in particular that has really made an impression on me, and that I think about every day.

The magician himself (the selfish uncle) in The Magician’s Nephew could not hear the animals speaking in land of Narnia. This is because when we first heard them speaking, he assumed it was absolutely preposterous, and that there was no way an animal could possibly speak. Then, from there, slowly, it turned from refusing to believe that they could speak, to not actually being able to physically hear them speaking at all, and only being able to hear growls from them.

I believe the intended message here is about God and the religious world, and being unable to hear God anymore if you have refused to believe anything you see or hear has to do with him. (Excuse the small h, it is what I am comfortable with.)

However, it doesn’t have to just be about God, and I think it can be a general statement about being caught up in a way of thinking that other phenomena get ignored. To get all Kuhnian, it would be ignoring what our paradigm considers anomalies. (After writing this though, I am not sure how similar these two ideas are though, and I will be sticking with the Narnia one when in doubt.)

Anyways, regardless if it is about science or religion, the concept that there are things that make us physically unable to see or hear the Truth (excuse the big T) is something that I have been thinking about a lot.

I group it all under alienation, but I am not sure if this is Correct.

For example, alienation from reality due to not seeing the trees and the sky and the concrete outside your window, but only short form videos on your phone.

Or alienation from history and humanity due to have experienced so much fiction that history and humanity do not feel any heavier than any other story.

The idea from Narnia is that this isn’t a matter of just needing to look up from your phone, or from your TV show or video game, the idea is that even when you look up, you are no longer physically able to see the Truth.

As an aside dear Reader, I have alluded to it, but I am more comfortable with Truth than I am with God. Feel free to judge on that what you will.

I mention phones and TV shows, but it can be painted with a very wide brush by just saying “modern society” (too wide?). Are there Truths that modern society has influenced us into not being able to see? Is this why we go hiking and camping?

A sticking point in all this is that it is saying that there are some things that humans can consider as the Truth if unimpeded. A more Materialist (as in only the material world exists, not consumerist) approach would be there is only a combination of instinctual nature, and learned nurture. This approach is more comfortable for me, and it paints any human predisposed notions of Truth as perhaps a cognitive mix of instincts and societal norms.

This is where I always bring up Robert Pirsig’s Lila in my head, but I am not ready to go there yet, so I will leave these thoughts unfinished for now.