Little Earthquakes Everywhere

This morning, just before 5 am, a 5.0 earthquake somewhere northeast of us made a Tokyo’s ground tremble. I happened to wake up to the bed shaking a bit; this is the fourth time I’ve felt one in my life. Three of those four times I’ve wondered what Brian could possibly be doing in his sleep—a constant leg twitch? a terrifying nightmare?— to cause our bed to shimmy this way. One of those times was three days ago in the middle of the night in the same hotel room, but it didn’t occur to me then what it was. This morning I heard the wall shift slightly as it was happening and it became clear. Japan has small earthquakes almost every day, so this should be no surprise, but of course my nighttime self is not the most reasonable version of me, so I lay in bed another half hour wondering what might come next.


I am the family seismograph—everyone else slept through both tremors this week. 


This echoes my function in our family in real life. When one of our children is going through something, it registers with me and shakes me in ways it doesn’t shake the rest of the family. Someone feels hurt? I feel it too. Someone feels left out? I’m standing on the sidelines with them.


When we traveled as a younger family, there were always little cracks to smooth over. What can you do that is educational and fun for young elementary kids that is still good with a toddler? What is a great activity for high schoolers that will also be appropriate for and inclusive of a middle schooler? 

Now we’ve hit a new set of fault lines. We have an adult who pretty much lives on his own. We have a slightly younger adult who has been living in another country for four months. And we have a high school junior who places a high value on time spent as a whole family. You can imagine where the cracks appear.


The oldest has his own ideas of what he would or would not like to do. He must sometimes wonder why he agreed to travel with our motley crew. The next up has only been able to join us for a couple of days at a time. She feels both like she’s missed out on some things we’ve done, and she feels the pull to get back to her friends and her program now that she only has a month left here. And the youngest savors any moment of togetherness, a desire that has been greatly complicated by two days of illness. She’s feeling better now, which we are grateful for!


What should we do today? That’s a loaded question. We probably planned less for this trip than any other big trip we have taken because Natalie’s schedule was up in the air until the last minute, and we’ve been working around it. Which led to a sad realization this morning. Both Natalie and Allison had one wish in Tokyo. I can’t explain it, it certainly wasn’t on my list of attractions. But they each separately expressed a deep desire to go to the Meguro Parasitological Museum. I can’t say why. We lured Natalie to join us in Tokyo, over her anxiety about train travel alone, with the promise we would hit that museum today. Guess what. It was closed yesterday, today and tomorrow. Oops. I do recommend planning ahead more than we have if you can.


And so they will both miss out on it. Allison was too sick to go anyway.


I take everyone’s wishes very seriously, and I’m highly attuned to their disappointments and frustrations. In any given difficulty, I’m always putting out feelers for what the aftershocks will be. 

Tsujiki fish market

But you know what? You can’t make any trip perfect. There will always be a few things that go wrong, or at least not as planned. It’s helpful that we are here for almost three weeks—2 sick days in a 10-day trip would be painful. Once in a while the results of disruptions are a bit disastrous, but a lot of the time it works out okay. True, my girls may have been deprived of their one opportunity to go to the world’s only parasite museum. But Brian took the older two to the Tsukiji fish market this morning (if you’ve seen the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” this is where he goes to the tuna auction at 3am every morning—my husband and children got there more like 11am), and I went with the older two to the surprisingly fascinating Advertising Museum that is about a quarter mile from our hotel. It was not only a history of advertising (which would have been okay by me) but also a new angle on the history of Japan and how it’s different eras of rule changed the character of the nation. And I took them for tacos and watched Natalie nearly melt into a puddle of happiness at real tortillas and guacamole. Allison was feeling well enough to go with me to see one of the bazillions of winter illuminations in Japan tonight. Meanwhile Brian and Andrew hit the wild and weird robot show in Shinjuku. It’s all okay in the end.

"Aladdin" winter illumination

And so I try to pull back the needle on my seismograph. At the Museum of Nature and Science, I tried to figure out Japan’s history of measuring earthquakes without, as I may have mentioned in an earlier post, the benefit of English explanations. It seems that early seismographs had a stationary pendulum that would stay still while the stylus anchored to the ground would scratch out the movement of the earth. Sometimes motherhood feels like being that stationary pendulum while everything is motion around you. Being in a different country or on vacation does not change that arrangement; sometimes it exacerbates it. 


This country is constantly in motion. Trains, traffic, people, tourists, even the ground itself. What a joy to watch over the way my kids interact with it, with each other, and with us. I feel like I’ve gained a new perspective on all of them. And while I may still be measuring little earthquakes everywhere, navigating the aftershocks becomes less of my responsibility every day.