mom's great ideas

My mother is a great mom.  By which I don't mean we always get along well.  In fact, we still argue sometimes.  But I'm very grateful to her to have always been honest to me.  She has always tried her best to be a perfect mom, and yet she has been brave enough to show me that she is just another human being with many flaws and weaknesses.  I'll probably get into this deeper some other time -- today, I want to write about some of my mother's great ideas that I recalled lately when I was back home.

☆ My first halloween costume
The second October we spent in New Zealand, I had my first halloween costume parade at school.  I actually don't know if it was my mother or my father that first came up with the idea, but they decided to dress me as Momotaro, literally translated as Peachboy.  In the famous Japanese fairy tale, he is born from a peach an old couple finds floating down the river, and grows up to go off on an adventure to fight the demons.

He wasn't my hero or anything; I didn't want to dress as a boy in the first place, and I did protest, but my parents were convinced that they had come up with the most awesome idea.  My mother picked up a brush and wrote "桃太郎(Momotaro)" proudly on a large white piece of paper so I could hold it as a flag just like Momotaro did in his story.  She dressed me in a small kimono I had worn two years before for shichigosan* and said my pink pajama pants would match perfectly.

So that was that.  I went to school the next day dressed as Momotaro.  Of course, no one knew who he was.  I looked around at my female classmates nicely dressed as Snow White, Cinderella, Tinkerbell... They all looked back at me as if to ask "Who are you?" but after all, I think everyone was too busy admiring themselves.

From then on, I never asked for help on halloween costumes.  A couple of years later when we were abroad again, I wore another kimono and dressed as something like Kaguyahime (another character in a Japanese fairy tale but not a boy), and when I was out of Japanese fairy tale characters, I chose a vegetable: a carrot.  And of course everyone knew what and who a carrot was.

☆ Fart art
When I was back from New Zealand, I once had to write a poem for Japanese class.  I didn't enjoy any form of writing back then.  Japanese class was a pain.  When my mother read what I had written for my homework, she didn't really like it -- it lacked uniqueness.  She picked up a collection of poems by Shuntaro Tanikawa, read me a couple of his works, and said I should write a poem about farts.  I don't think she said it like that, but that was what I ended up doing anyway.  I guess I thought it was a great idea too.

But very few third graders appreciate the art of fart.  Not many teachers have poetic sensibility like Tanizaki.  And most of all, not many eight-year-olds can be truly confident in what they've created -- especially when it's "controversial art".

At school the next day, a boy sitting next to me glanced at my open notebook and said we weren't allowed to write about dirty stuff like farts.  When the teacher asked me to read out my poem, I turned the page over and read a different one -- probably something boring and ordinary, but something that was not about farts.

*Shichigosan（七五三） is a celebration for three, five and seven year olds.  Back when the death rate of children was still high in Japan, they started celebrating the health and growth of children who managed to live up to these ages.  I guess nowadays in an age when parents expect a lot more from their children, it's a good occasion to remind them that a couple of years ago, before their kids were even born, they only wished they would be born healthy -- just that and nothing more.