A story about bucket lists, language barriers, and a child who will do anything to avoid lunch
I have wanted to go to Japan since I was little. I don’t know if it was the Sailor Moon
phase or the sushi addiction I developed later or just some general pull toward a
place that felt like nothing else on earth. Japan has been on my bucket list for as
long as I can remember.
Then my neighbor told me they went to Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea.
And then it became a problem.
I fell down the YouTube rabbit hole. Tokyo Disneyland. Tokyo DisneySea. Tokyo
Universal. Everything Tokyo. Hours of content. Neighborhoods, food, train
systems, hotel reviews, park strategies. If it existed and it was about Tokyo I
watched it.
Kiddo was around for most of this. Eight years old, doing his thing, playing Legos,
running his games, generally existing in the same airspace as my YouTube spiral.
He absorbed more than I realized.
One day I paused a Tokyo Disneyland video and asked him something I had
genuinely been wondering about.
Hey kiddo. If we went to Japan would it bother you that all the words you know
aren’t the words they say? Everything would be in a different language. Your brain
wouldn’t be able to read any of it.
He thought about it for approximately one second.
Yeah. Hard pass. That would break my brain.
Fair enough. Honest answer. I respected it. We moved on.
Later that day I asked him what he wanted for lunch.
He said choose.
Now. Kiddo is working on options. This is a whole thing. Too many choices is a lot
for him so we keep it simple. One or the other. Yes or no. This or that. We are
not doing a litany of possibilities over here. We are doing binary decisions like
civilized people.
I said how about grilled cheese.
No.
I said okay and then without fully thinking it through I circled back to the earlier
conversation.
You don’t want grilled cheese. You don’t want to learn Japanese. You don’t want to
do anything today!
Just teasing him. Just mom being a little annoying the way moms are.
But his brain heard two options. Grilled cheese. Japanese. He had said no to both.
And then decided he had to say yes to one of them.
He looked at me.
Fine. I’ll learn Japanese.
I want to be clear about what happened here.
He did not suddenly discover a passion for linguistics. He did not have a change of
heart about international travel. He did not decide Tokyo Disneyland was worth the
language barrier after all.
His brain looked at the two options on the table, determined that one of them had
to get a yes, did a rapid cost benefit analysis between grilled cheese and Japanese,
and chose Japanese.
He would rather learn Japanese than eat a grilled cheese sandwich.
I don’t know whether to be insulted or elated.
Because somebody in this family needs to
learn Japanese when we go to Tokyo. Better him than me.
So. We might be going to Japan.
All because I asked what he wanted for lunch.
Not bad for a Tuesday.