First Person: Crying in Uniqlo

 Alex and the author outside the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno Park. Photography courtesy of Dana Laverty.

I’m in a Target parking lot, sobbing in my car. 

The task was simple enough: I had to pick up extra-long twin sheets for my kiddo, Alex, for their first year of college. 

But as I waited for the cashier to bring out my bag, I saw a hot pink Barbie convertible near the register. It was a Little People brand; the squat little blonde doll grinned out at me from the box, perky and plastic as ever. 

At the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto. Photography courtesy of Dana Laverty.

Tears slashed my eyes as I recalled days spent on the living room floor playing with Alex’s Little People house. It was light blue and swung open to reveal the rooms inside. We’d spend hours having mommy or daddy knock at the front door, cooking pretend food in the kitchen, putting the kiddos to bed upstairs and placing mommy — always mommy — on the toilet. 

“Mommy has to pee,” toddler Alex would say, all serious-like, plunking the little doll onto her plastic throne. (To be fair, I do have a bottle of water by my side 24/7. But plastic momma tinkled constantly. I think it was her job.)

I practically sprinted to my car, holding back the sobs until I sat inside. In a few weeks, Alex would be off to college in Boston. I should be excited — it was the culmination of all their hard work in high school. The hours of reading and studying. Of taking virtual classes during the pandemic. Of being dropped off every day at the ungodly hour of 7 a.m. Instead, I’m keening in the parking lot of the North Attleboro Target, convinced my world was spinning off its axis.

Alex is the center of my universe, the heart of our two-person nuclear family. Memories flashed by like photographs: The sunny autumn day they were born, watching the trees sway outside as I wobbled through a hallway in the Women & Infants’ maternity ward. A midnight bottle, rocking under the moonlight and looking down at Alex’s sweet little face. The tearful goodbye (mine) at the first day of preschool, Alex decked out in pigtails and a Hello Kitty outfit. Drawing, always drawing. Hot-glue-gunning together improvised, extremely detailed Halloween costumes. Decorating Christmas cookies in swirls of icing and sparkles. Spelling bees. School dances. Summer camp. High school graduation.

How had a lifetime gone by already? 

A restaurant in Tokyo’s quaint Asakusa neighborhood. Photography courtesy of Dana Laverty.

The summer after Alex graduated, we took a dream trip to Tokyo and Kyoto. We’ve always been fascinated by Japan’s culture, food and history, and crafted our ideal itinerary with the help of a tour planner that catered to English-speaking tourists and booked all of our hotel stays, airport transfers, bullet train tickets and excursions.

The bustling Shinjuku district in Tokyo. Photography courtesy of Dana Laverty.

The “English-speaking” was key here: Neither of us spoke or read Japanese, or so I thought, although Alex has always had a gift for languages. They’re pretty fluent in Spanish, dabbled in Japanese and tried their hand at learning Finnish, just because. This is a typical Finnish sentence: Puhuuko kukaan täällä englantia? It means, “Does anyone speak English here?”

They learned this. For fun.

One day, they made reservations at a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant the only way one could — in Japanese, by downloading an app from the Japanese App Store. As we made our way through the crowded waiting area, I noticed we were the only tourists there. With the help of Google Translate, Alex adroitly figured out that we had to sign in at an automated kiosk to get a number that would be called when our table
was ready. 

They did all this AND hustled us to a table after our number was called. In Japanese.

We often took the Tokyo subway system to get around the city proper. Tokyo has a stunningly efficient — and completely Byzantine — public transportation system. It’s impeccably clean and the trains run like clockwork. But the stations are behemoths: The Shinjuku station alone serves more than 3.6 million passengers a day with twelve different lines. It has more than 200 entrances and exits. My eyes twitched just looking at the map.

But every day, Alex guided us through, deftly reading the signs and figuring out which line would take us to our destination as I shuffled, humbled, behind them. 

The (heads-on!) shrimp miso soup at Itamae Sushi in Tokyo. Photography courtesy of Dana Laverty.

Restaurant menus were also no match for my little linguist. They decoded all the meals and ingredients like a native speaker and said nothing when I ordered the shrimp miso soup one night at dinner. Miso soup with shrimp? It sounded delicious.  

Until the waitress set the bowl in front of me, and my briny friends stared up from their umami bath, heads, eyeballs and antennae intact. I gasped.

“Oh my God!” I cried. “Why do they still have their heads on?” 

Alex was nonplussed. 

“They had heads in the menu,” they explained, with all the patience of a kindergarten teacher explaining that one should not eat glue sticks. “Didn’t you see?”

“I did!” I said, sheepishly. “But I thought that was just for the picture.” 

Alex gave a sly smile, surely wondering how their nincompoop mother had kept them alive all these years. 

I swallowed hard and turned the pink prawns upside down. If I was going to eat them, the last thing I wanted was them staring at me while I did so.

We traveled to japan in mid-July.

Alex relaxes at the teamLab Borderless digital art museum. Photography courtesy of Dana Laverty.

All the guidebooks said the weather would be pleasant, if just a little hot. “A little hot” apparently is codeword for “scorching blast furnace.” 

The daytime temperature frequently hovered around ninety-eight to ninety-nine degrees, with the humidity levels to match. One day it hit 100. We soon realized why everyone traveled with sun-shielding umbrellas and portable fans around their necks — they had to. The blazing sun, coupled with the brutal humidity, started to heat things up in earnest by 10:30 a.m.

One morning, early in our stay, we walked from our hotel to Shinjuku station to visit a popular anime store. It was around 10 a.m., and the walk only took ten minutes. But as we made our way through the sweltering streets — minus umbrellas and handheld fans — we quickly succumbed to the heat. We ducked into a blissfully cool Uniqlo to figure out our next steps.

“My head feels funny,” Alex said. Their face was a worrying shade of crimson. I had them drink some water and made an executive decision: We were heading back to the hotel. This weather was no joke, and the last thing I wanted was to mar our trip with a case or two of heatstroke.

Alex started to cry.

“It’s OK, honey,” I said. “Let’s go back to the hotel and cool off. We can try again tomorrow, OK?” 

They nodded.

We spent the afternoon in our air-conditioned hotel room, drinking approximately three gallons of water and feasting on chilled onigiri (rice balls stuffed with tuna, avocado and other fillings) and sushi, with cooling, fruit-studded jellies for dessert. 

An ecstatic Alex at the conveyor-belt sushi restaurant. Photography courtesy of Dana Laverty.

We’d try again tomorrow. 

As our trip drew to a close, I had an epiphany. 

For ten days, Alex wove their way through Tokyo and Kyoto like a native, consulting maps and reading Japanese to guide us through the cities. They found an amazing, super-fresh food market in Kyoto and a soup dumpling restaurant tucked inside the third floor of a department store. I often let them lead the way, because the kanji characters they knew so well looked like hieroglyphics to me.  

If they could make their way through the Tokyo Metro — which has twelve lines and 6.5 million passengers A DAY — they could surely handle the quaintness of Boston’s four subway lines. 

They were ready to make their way in the world — I just needed to let go and trust that my baby bird would do just fine outside the nest.

That was two years ago. Alex is now entering their junior year. They have a great group of friends at school. They’ve made the Dean’s List each semester. And they’re thinking about studying abroad this spring. They’re not sure where, but they’re leaning toward Hong Kong. (I’m hyperventilating about this but keeping a brave face. The nervous momma instinct never really goes away, does it?) 

Wherever Alex lands, they’ll be just fine. And I’ll have their back every step of the way, even if it’s from halfway across the world.

The endless Tokyo skyline. Photography courtesy of Dana Laverty.