I sometimes work late evenings, training clients in Japan via video conference. I like one-on-one sessions, as I get to know the client on a personal level. However, these sessions come with an occupational hazard. Afterwards, I often need time to decompress. So, with a cup of tea in one hand and a TV remote in the other, I flip through numerous channels. What I look for is a low-key program with slow narration that lures me into the hazy world that hovers between consciousness and unconsciousness. Most times I end up with a crime analysis program or a documentary.
One night, I came across a program called “My 600-Lb. life.” It caught my attention because the young woman in the program had the same name as my daughter. At the beginning of the program, they explained that the success rate of long-term weight reduction is less than five percent. So, I wanted to cheer her on and see her become part of the five-percent club.
But first, I was curious how she maintained her weight at such high a number. She couldn’t leave the house, as she didn’t walk or drive. I wondered how she got her hand on so much food. The program soon revealed that it was her husband and her mother who delivered the food and sabotaged her efforts to become healthier, or in her doctor’s words, to survive.
“Taking care of her is the job God gave me.” Her husband says. He follows his wife to the bathroom to clean her. It must be very hard, but he looks calm, innocent and kind. He has probably tried to make sense of his life and find meaning in it. But he fails to see the contradiction between his belief and his behavior; if you love your wife, you don’t take away her chance to live. I wanted to tell him,
“Please let her live and walk and go back to school!”
The scariest part of the program to me, though, was her mother’s smile. After she smuggles food for her daughter, she claims that she can’t bear to see her baby go hungry. She is actually trading her daughter’s life for her need to feel that she is a good mother. The mother’s smile looks like that of an angel, but her need to provide is blinding her from seeing the connection between the food and the threat it poses to her daughter’s life.
“Isn’t that a crime?” I surprised myself with my own voice, loud in the silence of the wee hours.
Their daily routines, their usual, has become normal to them. But doing something for a long time, or something being pervasive in the world doesn’t make it normal or healthy. What people experience in times of war may become something they expect day after day, for example, but their experience is far from being normal or healthy.
When the program concluded with the girl’s walk towards the five-percent club, I wondered how the shift from usual to normal had occurred in her life.
When my daughter was in 1st grade, a boy sitting in front of her would lift his butt up high. To do this, he needed to put his feet on his chair and fold his body in half. I thought it was funny at first, but then I worried about whether he might hurt himself. I asked my daughter about him for a few weeks, but it quickly lost its newsworthiness and was then considered to be a normal pattern.
How do we realize that our usual isn’t normal, while we’re in it so deep? Like the proverbial frog in hot water, who adjusts to gradual changes of temperature and misses the chance to get out of the hot water, do we often miss seeing the point at which the usual situation crosses over the boundary of normalcy?
When my son’s friends came over, I saw one boy somewhat playfully punch another in the stomach. My husband heard one asking another to choke him. We stopped them on both occasions and later reported the incidents to their mothers. One of them commented,
“Kids see things on the Internet and think they’re funny. And then they copy that behavior. My son says it feels good after being choked.”
I shivered inside; our boys are old enough to surf the Internet, and yet they don’t know what violence is. They have no idea how fragile life can be and that their practical jokes could change lives forever. How can we counter the flood of harmful information on the Internet that they have access to and regard as normal?
A psychiatrist I met at a nail salon a few weeks after President Trump’s inauguration told me that many of her patients can’t discuss their real issues before they share their worries about the new presidency. Another person, a pediatric psychotherapist, also told me that many children are now experiencing anxiety as a result of the turmoil of recent weeks. Kids are vulnerable being in society, and very sensitive to the changes that America is now going through. I, too, feel America’s mores are shifting. When even adults don’t know where we’re heading as a society, the world may seem wobbly to children. My daughter says,
“Adults say that it’s going to be Okay when they don’t know whether it will be Okay.” So, I can’t use that phrase when I don’t mean it. So, instead, I try to identify the differences between the new usual and what my husband and I think is normal, healthy and kind in everyday life.
I feel one of the defense mechanisms I can employ is to say something when I see something, very much like the messages we see at bus terminals, train stations and other public places. As an individual, what I can do is very limited. But we can collectively influence others in spaces where we live: home, school, work, supermarkets and so on.
Life is precious. Every life matters. What we all need is a safe place to go back to and feel that we’re Okay, even when our family or the world or anything else is going crazy at that moment. Creating spaces and moments in real life that are safe and kind may be a unique challenge of our time.