It Takes A Village

One rainy Saturday I had to take our two daughters to the pediatrician’s for shots. The doctor’s office was a twenty-minute walk from our house, across the train tracks. This meant that I had to collapse the baby's stroller and wrestle it up the station stairs, my baby clutched under one arm and my four-year-old clinging to the other, a diaper bag slung around my neck. On the trip back down the stairs after the visit, my four-year-old decided that she too needed to be carried. Somehow I made it down the stairs, my jaw clenched, a kid tucked under each arm, half dragging and half kicking the collapsed stroller. As I neared the bottom I suddenly saw another foreigner standing there staring up at me, a censorious look on his face. I’m guessing his expression was due to the odd expletive I felt perfectly justified in using. Here is what got me: this man watched me struggling down wet stairs with two kids, a stroller and a diaper bag. At the very least, I deserved a smile and a thumbs-up, but all he could do was frown -- and peg me as a Bad Mommy for swearing.

It takes a village to raise a child, but it's a sad fact that not everybody knows what that means. Some people don't realize that a kind word or the offer of help at just the right moment can make all the difference in the world. That sometimes helping the child means helping the parent.

And yet some people know exactly what this means. Like our neighbour, Murakami-san, who I used to see almost every day, usually on her bicycle, bags of shopping balanced on her handlebars. Night after night I would see her, out for her evening stroll, walking briskly down the cherry-lined lane in the park. Murakami-san was a few years older than I, a woman with five teenage children, all at home. Her husband had suffered from cancer and I knew she’d had a tough time while he was in the hospital having first surgery, then chemotherapy. But even while he was recuperating and she was commuting to and from Tokyo to visit him in the hospital, Murakami-san always greeted me with a wave and a smile of pure, genuine serenity. I envied her calm manner, her effortless placidity. With small children and an almost full-time job, I often felt like I’d bitten off more than I could chew. Murakami-san, it seemed, was a wife and mother who had it all worked out.

Raising kids while going out to work every day is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. At six thirty every evening, I’d arrive at the childcare center, tired and hungry. It would take me a full thirty minutes to get the kids packed up, then another fifteen minutes to walk home. Another twenty minutes went to shopping for dinner – always with the kids in tow – and if someone threw a temper tantrum, which she very often did, that might easily turn into forty-five. There were many times my husband or I ended up cooking dinner as late as eight o’clock. When bedtime came, only two of us were ready to pack it in. And it was never the kids.

One evening, after a particularly rough time on my own with the kids, I left the house as soon as my husband got back from work, telling him I’d be back as soon as I’d cooled off. It took me a good five minutes to get my breathing down to a normal rate, and as I walked, my hands were still clinched into fists. After fifteen minutes, as I was summoning the courage to turn around and go home, I ran into Murakami-san. She took one look at my face and hopped off her bicycle, her friendly smile morphing into a look of concern. “Are you okay?”

“I am now,” I told her, “but fifteen minutes ago I could have kicked a hole in a fence.”

“Kids or husband?”

“Kids. They were driving me insane!”

“Oh, you poor thing!” She smiled. “You’re doing the right thing.”

“What, you mean going for a walk?”

“Absolutely.”

“My husband’s with them,” I told her, struggling to keep my voice steady, “because if I’d stayed, I would have hit somebody.”

“Well, I’ve been there and done that!”

I stared at her in amazement. “Really?” She always looked so calm, so relaxed, so good-tempered.

“Of course!”

“But— you never look upset!”

“You’ve seen me out on my bicycle?”

I nodded. “With your shopping bags—”

She laughed. “I go shopping when I can’t take another minute of my kids. When I can’t stand their bickering or their wilfulness for one more second. That’s when I go.”

“But…you always look so relaxed.”

She looked astonished. “Do I?”

“Yes!”

“Well, believe me, I’m anything but. Sometimes I tell them that if they don’t get out of my way, somebody’s going to get hurt.” She smiled. “The oldest ones hold the door open for me when that happens. Because they know.”

After talking to Murakami-san that evening, I went home with a spring in my step and renewed confidence in my parenting skills. By letting me know that her patience had limits, she made me feel like I wasn’t alone. She told me I’d done the right thing, getting out before I flew off the handle and let someone have it. Every time we met after that evening, we winked and smiled at each other. It was like we had a secret handshake.

When I look back on those early parenting days, I remember many other women I am indebted to. The receptionist at our local swimming pool who saw me struggling with my temper-tantrum prone youngest daughter, for instance. “You know, the really smart ones give you so much trouble at first,” she whispered, as soon as my daughter had quietened down. “You wait and see: one day that child will be as good as gold, your best friend. I guarantee it.” Amazingly, she was right. And even if she hadn’t been, her words on that occasion were like a soothing balm. Or another neighbor, Takahashi-san, who caught me in tears, just outside the house, after a nasty spat with my eldest daughter. “Hang in there, Mary!” she said, taking my hands in hers. “We’re all in this together, you know, all of us mothers! And don’t worry – it gets easier!” Her kind words made me burst into fresh tears, but they comforted and fortified me no end.

Being a parent is the single most difficult and rewarding job I have ever had and my husband feels exactly the same. Our girls are teenagers now, very capable and self sufficient. We look at them and shake our heads just remembering all we’ve been through with them. And we will never forget the village that helped us raise them.