|
July 1993: Midwest Spread
When moving from one country to another, there are usually three big differences that most people notice almost instantly. Culture, language and food. Upon moving to the Midwest, I encountered all three. I found American culture to be stranger than TV had led me to believe, the English language to be far more idiosyncratic “in the wild”, as it were, than it had been in the closed circles of the base and the compound, and I found food to be quite different from that which I had previously known, too. Specifically, it was far more fattening In moving from Kyoto to the Midwest, my diet changed almost overnight. Steamed rice became potatoes with butter, fish became red meat with a thick layer of fat, and tofu and sweet been paste became ice cream with sprinkles. All of which came on top of candy, soda and pancakes dripping in Canadian syrup. I'm certain that I don't need to tell you twice what this meant. During my first few months in the Midwest, I put on weight. Not enough to be unhealthy (especially since I was too thin to start with), and not enough that I couldn't loose it by reigning in my diet a bit, but enough to make the needle on bathroom scale shift that little bit further over to one side, and enough to send my Mother's concerns into overdrive. To say that my she over-reacted would be an understatement; she literally went berserk. She treated the handful of pounds that I’d gained as if they were 100 each, and ordering me to go onto a crash diet of health food shakes and zero candy until I was back were I had been when we had left Japan. I found my mother’s behavior to be more than a little embarrassing, particularly as she took to proclaiming loudly, not to mention publicly, that I would turn into a blimp every time I so much as dared to glance at a beef patty or candy bar. However, I found her sudden attentiveness to be rather confusing because, at no time before, had my mother ever taken such an intent interest in any aspect of my life. Until the weight issue arose, my Mother had always take a very stand off approach to raising me. An approach which alternated between getting somebody else to do it (hence the amount of time I spent with my grandparents), providing me with the means to do something and then let me get on with it myself, and forgetting that I didn’t exist at all. In Kyoto, my Mother had paid a considerable sum so that I could attend private school and private after school classes; but almost never checked to see what my grades were. She had set me up with some of the best martial arts instructors available, but never asked them to report back on how my training was going, and she was usually so busy forgetting that I existed that she once didn't notice that I hadn't come home one night (on account to having been hospitalized by a rogue soccer ball to the side of the head) until she realized that my sister was crying at 3 in the morning, and I wasn't getting up to tend to her. After all of that, fussing because I'd gained a little weight seemed completely out of character for her. What I wasn’t to know, however, was that this was an early sign of something far bigger that was to come. My mother was about to switch from being the world’s most inattentive mother, to being the worlds most controlling one. |
||
|