My fifteen-year-old son E likes cats. Since keeping him engaged is one of my priorities and challenges on this trip, and twenty-year-old C is generally up for anything, we do a lot of cat stuff in Japan.

Which isn’t hard, because Japan has a national obsession with felines.

In our first week, we visit a cat temple, a rescue cat café, and a cat museum. Later we stay in a guesthouse with three resident felines that seem to run the place. Small ceramic maneki-nekos—beckoning cats, also known as lucky cats—crowd the shelves of souvenir shops and dwell behind registers at convenience stores. Most are made of white ceramic with red inner ears and a red collar, their right front paw raised in greeting, though some are gold, black, or red. The arms on the larger ones are sometimes mechanized, the raised paw perpetually bobbing up and down. There are even cat islands here—eleven of them— where untold numbers of cats roam free.

Travel, ParentingTanya ShafferDecember 21, 2023travel, Japan, parentingComment

Japan Journals 2: A Night in Asakusa

Tokyo’s Asakusa neighborhood is hopping, and unlike Takeshita Street (which I wrote about in Japan Journals 1), the crowd of humans enjoying its alleys, restaurants, and covered outdoor market appears to contain more locals than tourists.

Here I encounter dogs for the first time in Japan. Small dogs, well-groomed, on-leash, many wearing glowing neon collars, trot obediently alongside their owners. They pass each other with nary a bark or a yank. My incorrigibly exuberant pups would probably get me arrested here.

D is meeting with colleagues tonight, and E has gone off in search of more clothes. Within the first 48 hours in Tokyo, fifteen-year-old E has absorbed the Metro system, and with the help of Google Maps and Google Translate he’s off to peruse a giant mall. Though well-versed in the city buses of Ann Arbor, Michigan, this is his first time traversing a foreign metropolis on his own. Fortun,ately Tokyo is not only the most populous city in the world, but also the safest. Although E maintains a perfect deadpan at all times, I sense his elation. Or perhaps I’m just projecting onto him the sense of wild liberation that comes to me, even now, when I find myself alone in the great wide world, ditching the expectations of ordinary life and following my senses the way a gull or a squirrel or an off-leash dog might, answerable to no one, if only for a week, or a day, or even an hour.

Travel, ParentingTanya ShafferDecember 5, 2023travel, Japan, parentingComment

Of Sweethearts and Sperm Banks: A Twenty-First Century Love Story

On May 10, 2001, I sat on a mountaintop near Dharamsala, India, watching the last rosy gleam of the sunset reflect off the snowy peaks of the Himalayas, and made a decision. Throughout my adult life I’d boldly proclaimed to anyone who would listen that if I found myself 35 years old and single, I would have a child on my own. Yet for all my bravado, I’d never imagined that day would come. Now my 35th birthday loomed large, and I was, in fact, unpartnered. Blame it on the writer-slash-actor’s peripatetic lifestyle, excessive pickiness, a volatile emotional temperament, or just plain bad luck: my intimate relationships had not panned out as I had hoped.

Your Inner Dog

Years ago, before I had kids of my own, I yearned for every baby and toddler I saw. I had only to pass someone pushing a stroller or toting an infant to experience a sensation in my chest that felt simultaneously like a constriction and an expansion. I loved those babies and toddlers, every one of them, and by love I mean I ached for them with a ferocity that bordered on frightening. I wanted to grab them and make a run for it, to pour my vast untapped reservoirs of maternal affection into their little selves. Fortunately I managed to keep those impulses enough in check to stay out of jail.

Now, with my own two baby boys grown into towering teenagers, I no longer feel that craving when I encounter the three and under set. I still think they’re cute and all, but I’m perfectly content to smile and walk on by. But even though I’m also the mother of three charming canines, a huge and painful tenderness still wells up within me every time I pass a dog.

A Place Where All is Forgiven

Earlier this month I traveled to Iceland with a group of differently wired teens from my son D’s school. Iceland is an extraordinary place: traversing its starkly magnificent terrain, you have a vivid sense that you’re standing on planetary crust, its transformations unfolding before your eyes. D’s school—I’ll call it A3—is an extraordinary place too.

A3 is described as a school for kids who learn differently, but in reality it’s not just about learning differently, but about thinking differently, acting differently, being differently. Or just being different. Some of the students are on the autism spectrum, some have attention challenges, some have sensory issues or social anxiety or gender dysphoria or learning disabilities of various types. Some have no diagnosable condition but are there because it’s the first place they’ve found where they feel comfortable and welcome.

My Special Needs Kid Got Kicked Out of the Social Justice Club

This is the story of how my high-functioning autistic son was unceremoniously ejected from the Social Justice Club at his pricey private San Francisco Bay Area school. I know—no irony there whatsoever.

D attended our local public school (School #1) through the end of sixth grade. Challenges that year prompted our district to offer him placement for the following year in a non-public* middle school (School #2) geared specifically toward kids on the autism spectrum.

School #2 was an unmitigated disaster for a multitude of reasons, not least of which was the staff’s inability to stem a series of anti-semitic slurs, culminating in a group of kids following D around his classroom chanting “Hitler Hitler Hitler.” When I asked the principal whether they educate the kids about diversity, she said, Of course. We tell them it’s not nice to point out when someone is different. Ummmm…no.

The Hardest Thing

As a parent, the hardest thing I do is witness my children’s suffering.

Four months ago the Buddhist monk Ajahn Amaro—an elvish man with protruding ears, a wicked grin, and a British accent—came to speak in Ann Arbor. He spoke of three principles, espoused by an ancient sage:

1. Don’t push; just use the weight of your own body.

2. Don’t diagnose; just pay attention.

3. Don’t try to help, but don’t turn away.

Since then, I think of these principles regularly with respect to parenting.

As I said, I find my children’s suffering excruciating. So if they’re crying wildly, claiming people don’t like them, or they don’t like themselves, or they don’t like their lives, all I want to do is fix it, as quickly as possible. I want their suffering to stop, and I want the expression of it to stop. Because I can’t stand it.

After the Giddy Plunge

How to describe the beauty and challenge of that day? How high and steep the dune, how fine and bright the sand? How the ocean—no, Lake Michigan (ha, I wrote ocean!)— spread out below us, an impossibly pure colorscape, gradations of aqua, turquoise, teal leading out to a deep true cobalt?

We were at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, in the Northwest corner of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. We were traversing the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive when we stopped at #9, the Lake Michigan Overlook.

At first I tried to stop D and E from rolling down the nearly vertical dune, fearing they’d lose control, plummet over the edge and disappear. They started rolling anyway, tentatively at first, stopping and starting, looking back. I glanced uncertainly at my husband—I’ll call him H—and he, ever the cautious one, shook his head. I called, half-heartedly, Boys, come back. They ignored me, of course, and I discussed with nearby adults whether it was safe to go down. A couple with toddlers shook their heads and left. But then a man with two young kids, maybe 7 or 8 years old, appeared on the horizon as if by magic.

Sometimes Lines Are Blurred

As a mother of two boys, one of whom is on the autism spectrum, I experience the stories of the #metoo movement from a multiplicity of perspectives:

As a woman in the world, I’ve had encounters ranging from the frightening (a man locking me in a room with him and pulling out the key) to the sleazy (a professor intimating that he’d sponsor my project if I’d pose nude for his art class) to the merely disgusting (a guy jerking off in front of me in a public park). I’m relieved and cautiously heartened to see the culture finally begin to shift.

As a mom, I take every opportunity to alert my sons – ages 10 and 14 - to sexism and gender discrimination in its many forms – through language, media imagery, externally imposed constructs of masculinity and femininity, etcetera. We’ve discussed consent and the right of each person to decide if, when, and how they want to be touched.

As the mother of a person with autism, however, there’s an aspect of the whole conversation that frightens me. My older son, D, by virtue of his neurological difference, has trouble reading non-verbal social cues. Because of this, I’m terrified that he’ll make some mistake that will get him into trouble.

Off-Leash Writing