A Christmas present from Namie.
I was finally able to visit SAM and Namie’s residence in Tokyo in mid December, 2 months after the announcement of the ‘nyuuseki’ (from now on I will just use this word as it is… remember it means ‘entry into the family register). I went with my husband, and it was the first time he visited Namie’s home in Tokyo so he was more nervous than me. I, on the other hand, could relax a little because I had seen them once before and so said (to her husband) ‘There’s no point in a country bumpkin like you to trying to act normal, so just relax, okay?’
Once in Tokyo my first priority was to teach Namie how to cook, which was her biggest weakness that she would definitely need to master from now on. However, once I entered her home I was shocked. Namie had bought many books on cooking, and had been studying very hard all by herself, and trying her best to make homemade meals for SAM.
Namie immediately started asking me for advice: ‘How long should I boil these for?’ ‘How strong should the flame be?’... From my perspective, it still looked like ‘mamagoto’ (a young child playing- pretending to be a mother by doing things like cooking and cleaning), but I felt a new kind of deep emotion, thinking ‘THAT Namie (the girl who had nothing feminine about her when she was a child) is standing in the kitchen, cooking…’
And more than anything, it felt as though she finally became my child again when I was teaching her how to cook in the kitchen. When she was working for the show business world all the time, it felt like she wasn’t my child, even though she is.
And now, I can naturally have mother-daughter conversations with her, just like the time when we were living in Okinawa. I cried tears of joy because it felt as though Namie was my child once more.
Namie asked me many things about the baby inside of her.
‘Mum, what did it feel like when you became pregnant?’
She would gleefully ask questions like that to me.
I became embarrassed and replied: ‘I can’t remember that far back. Your elder sister is a closer senior to you, so why don’t you ask her’, but Namie had already asked her over the phone. Namie too, probably felt as though she was finally my child again, and probably just wanted to make communication (like a spoilt daughter who relies on her mother for answers). That’s how I feel right now.
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