How to Be an American Housewife - Margaret Dilloway [49]
He still stood there. “I’ll call Mike,” he said slowly.
“Yes.” I didn’t know if he would come. You never knew with Mike.
Charlie kissed my forehead, then left. Right away I wanted him to come back, but I didn’t call for him. Now there were just machines beeping at me and Navy nurses sweeping by, some nice, some acting like hell demons. I felt like crying.
Child-rearing in America is a good deal more callous and cold than in Japan. Americans do not believe in letting the baby sleep with them, or carrying them all the time, the way a Japanese mother does. They take a far more disciplinarian approach to child-raising than we do in Japan.
Every mother must do what is best for her children and her conscience, as well as adhere to the wishes of her husband. Ideally, the father leaves such details to the mother, but this is not always the case.
—from the chapter “American Family Habits,”
How to Be an American Housewife
Fifteen
Late that night, I awoke to find Mike staring at me, his chair only inches away from the bed. “Last time you in hospital is when I had you,” I said, remembering decades ago like it was yesterday. I even remembered my Naval Hospital room, the big blond woman sharing it who screamed, “Take it out already!”
“Really?” Mike said, as though he had not heard this story a million times before. I knew I retold stories. I wasn’t senile.
“I was in labor forty hours,” I said. Charlie had wondered if this was why Mike seemed to be on his own planet, since his head had been squeezed over and over and his heart rate had dropped with each contraction, but I was sure the doctors would not have let me labor so long unless there was no danger.
He took my hand, which he hadn’t done since he was four years old. “Are you going to be all right, Mom?”
Part of me wanted to tell him, of course, and the other part of me wanted to scream that I wasn’t God. “I don’t know,” I said, for the first time since I’d been admitted. He looked down at the ground, his long dark lashes casting a shadow on his cheek. Such beautiful lashes wasted on a boy, I used to say. My poor daughter had skimpy ones, like mine. “Don’t you cry like Daddy.” I slapped him gently on the face.
He looked up and his eyes were clear. “Get some sleep,” he said. He settled back into the chair with his book.
“It not too late for you, you know it?” I said. “Get out there, and get what you want, Mike. You waste your life sit around.” In my hospital bed, I felt brave. I would never have said anything like that to my son before. He was stubborn and proud, and if anyone criticized him, he would turn away forever, like he had from Charlie when Charlie tried to make him stay in college.
Mike would have been happier as the son of a farmer. Just him and the land and some animals. No people to worry about.
In the past, I thought about what life would have been like with Mike and Ronin, if we had come here and started a company. No moving around for the Navy. Maybe it would have been better, maybe it would have been far worse.
But then—I wouldn’t have Sue. Or Helena. I didn’t look backward. The past was past.
When I thought of Ronin today, it wasn’t with heartache. It was with fondness. Nothing could have been different in the circumstances I was in. The person I used to be could have made only one choice; the grown-up Shoko might have made a different one. That was how life was. You only figured out the right thing after you were old.
MIKE SHUT HIS BOOK and leaned into my face. Even though he thought I was dying, I was still surprised by his response. “I’ll do better, Mom,” he said simply.
“Good.” I smoothed out the blanket with my hand. I’d done it so often I had a waffle-weave burn. My mouth felt parched, but the pitcher at my bedside was empty. I pressed the nurse buzzer.
“What do you need?”
“Water.” No one was at the nurses’ station. They were always so busy here.
Mike stood over me to reach the pitcher. His hair, already well streaked with white, fell into his eyes, and