This once looked so easy to me because I had seen Asian people (short and tall, young and old, strangers and foreign relatives) do this so many times without even thinking. It was second nature and they did not have to adjust or get situated before they could settle into the pose for indeterminate amounts of time. For me, however, this proved to be a huge challenge, if not an impossibility. I used to watch in awe as my Filipina mother and everybody on her side of the family could just, bang, go down and pop back up whenever they pleased. My American father, sisters, and I always ended up falling over or bouncing on the balls of our feet, unable to flatten out our soles completely.

I guess some of our muscles are just underdeveloped, or maybe having our centers of gravity behind our heels was too alien for our limbs and torsos to comprehend. My father once posited that it was an American belly fat issue, but I have seen plenty of portly Asian people pull this off with no apparent problems. Most of my Western friends don’t believe me when I point it out to them, but then they usually try and fail over and over again. Before any fabulously flexible and supremely balanced non-Asian readers pitch a fit, let me just go ahead and say that I truly believe everybody else on Earth can do it too.

I just think it’s a lot more common in Eastern cultures since children learn how to get down like this at such a young age that their bodies quickly become accustomed to the position.

Please indulge me…go ahead and try! Remember: knees together and feet flat. Let us all know how it goes.

One way we could go is have her go to court and change her last name. The only problem is that her family is wealthy and important and with the kanji used in their name being very rare, it will be ideal for me to take that name. 椙山 is her last name, in fact there is only 2 families in all of Japan that use this kanji.

There was only 2 concerns, how to do it and ask our fathers. After learning how to with help from Gaijinpot’s forum, I learnt it was easy since I was married. I contacted the passport office about it and after 24hrs they replied with instructions. Here’s how to do it.

1. Go to your city hall and get them to add an alias on the back of your card. e.g. 椙山ライアン
2. While you’re there, go and change your health insurance to your alias.
3. Now wait for your new Health card to come as you need the above as supporting ID.
4. Get all your regular passport application documents together along with the support Id, Marriage Certificate and Family Registry. Go to the passport center and you should receive your new passport with your new name in about 3 weeks.

Now I am Canadian and in Canada if we get married we can use our spouse’s name without any paperwork so I would check the law in your country. From tomorrow I start the first step and I will update you all on the process once it’s complete.

I have received a lot of grief over this decision but I think it’s for the best. As for asking my father, he said it is a wise idea in my situation. He also said I will always have my Norwegian heritage no matter what my name is. The truth is no matter what my last name is on paper, I will still be mostly known as Ryan Sensei and that’s great for me.

Ryan Solberg

I was lucky enough to meet a woman unlike any other I have ever met before; someone who I enjoyed being around, someone who embodied absolutely everything that I found attractive in women, and most importantly, someone who truly made me happy.  For the first time ever, I had met someone who made me reconsider this whole “marriage” thing.  For the first time ever, I had found someone who I actually wanted to marry, and someone I wanted to spend all of my time with.  I met her in America.  She was a Japanese exchange student who had come to America to study English at the University in my home town.  We dated for 3 years, and then when she graduated and her visa expired, she urged me to try something new and move to Japan.  I admit, I was hesitant, but she made the decision somewhat easier by packing up and leaving without me, all the while encouraging me to come to Japan.  I didn’t speak a word of Japanese, and knew nothing about Japanese culture, other than what I had seen on TV.

I had friends and family in America, but I knew I had no future without her.  So I found a job with an ALT company (who shall remain nameless) and made the trip.  I arrived with next to nothing, and even less cash.  When I got here, I asked her parents for permission to marry their daughter to which they bluntly replied “no”.  They said that I must first prove myself in Japan, and that meant prove that I can earn a living.  This also meant prove that I could live on my own; the very thing I feared the most in a country where I didn’t speak the language.  Before moving here, my girlfriend assured me that if I made the trip we would live together, but upon arriving, I soon came to realize that this wasn’t the case.

Upset, but determined, I decided to give it my all and “prove” myself.  Over the next year, I struggled with foreign customs, foreign food, and foreign people of which I had never known before.  One year later, I had finally crawled out of debt, found a respectable apartment, and was making do.  I wanted to buy an engagement ring and surprise my girlfriend with it, but unfortunately the language barrier, amongst various other things kept me from doing just that.  So, I used all that I had managed to save to take my girlfriend to a jewelry store of her choosing and let her pick out whichever engagement ring she wanted.  I then used that ring to propose to her in a manner she rightfully deserved.

To my delight she accepted.  But, you could tell her parents still weren’t too thrilled about the concept.  It was at that time that I also finally made the move to a much better (and higher paying) company.  Upon hearing this news, her parents finally gave the ok for us to marry.  The next thing was researching the marriage process.  For those who don’t know, it is incredibly expensive (I have heard on average about 30,000,000 yen).  So be sure to start saving if you’re considering marriage.

Although we didn’t take this route (which is another story in itself), here is the cheapest and quickest way to get married in Japan, if you are an American citizen marrying a Japanese citizen.  It is actually quite a simple process.  First go to the American Embassy webpage http://tokyo.usembassy.gov/e/acs/tacs-7114.html and read over the information.  They give you step by step instructions on how to get married as a foreigner, and if done properly, the whole process can be done in a day.  If you are short on money, but still determined to be married soon, this is definitely the way to go.  While it isn’t the “traditional” marriage, it is still a marriage nevertheless, and if the love is there, it is all that really matters anyway.  Once you save up a little money, you can always have an official reception down the line.  If anyone out there is considering marriage, I wish you all the best in the future.  If anyone is considering a quick and inexpensive marriage hopefully this info helps.

Tie a piece of dried squid with a meter of twine to a chopstick, lower your bait into any local parks’ ponds wait patiently for a crayfish (zarigani) to snatch the bait then yank the unwary crustacean out of the water. If you choose you can save them up in a small plastic “aquarium” as most kids do at the parks. I prefer to catch and release, which avoids the disposal of our fragile friends at the end of the week.

Walk along the rice patties close to the water’s edge in the spring when they are ’softening the earth’ before planting, a small frog (kaeru) will jump out from under your feet revealing its location, hopefully not into the leech (hiru) infested waters and you can scoop it up if you have fast hands. These aren’t big nasty toads, they are still cute while small, often bright green sometimes gray-brown. Don’t wade into the muck to catch them without sturdy rubber boots on though! The leeches are everywhere and while not painful, definitely unpleasant to remove.

The temperature is a wonderful 20C-25C the birds are singing and the Tokage (small brown lizards) are coming out to warm themselves on the sun heated rocks. Now is your chance to chase down one of these grass lizards. You have to move quickly with these lizards they require a higher level of commitment then the frogs or crayfish. The one I found I rewarded for its troubles by catching a fat little grasshopper (inago) for its lunch. I haven’t done it, but I’m told if you hold them by the tail they drop it and scamper away, but, I have seen a tail discarded as an escape strategy wiggling away on the sidewalk for the predator to claim instead of the owner.

If you’re reading this and hoping for wisdom from me, I have to warn you. I have only 4 words for you, and I’m not sure they are particularly wise.

It’s going to suck.

Forget all of those articles that you’ve read by someone in the States who was gearing up for their six hour flight to Grandma’s house. I’m sure that the goodies in their bag of tricks actually will get them to their destination without a minimum of trauma. It’s about hour seven that things start to get ugly.

Think of it this way. Imagine that you’re a child with minimal comprehension of what people are saying to you and even less ability to express yourself. What makes sense about being strapped to a chair for the equivalent of an entire day? Even adults hate it, and they understand why they have to sit there and hold their pee until a little light gives them permission to stand up and take care of their needs. However, adults have enough awareness of the people around them to not sit in their seats screaming at the top of their lungs for 12 hours.

The best defense is to remember every in-flight horror story you’ve ever heard. Everyone has one. I have friends whose kids have projectile vomited all over not only them, but the people sitting behind them. My own daughter has screamed for the better part of a ten-hour flight from Seattle to Tokyo. Take all of those visual images of in-flight nightmares, roll them into one, and expect your next flight to be worse. That way, if it’s even a tiny bit better, you’ll be relieved.

Just for the sake of not being completely useless, here are my limited suggestions.

Dramamine. I’m always surprised by how many people don’t know about Dramamine. I guess it either doesn’t exist outside the US or has different names in other countries. The air pressure on the plane can make little ears hurt, which makes any bad situation worse. Dramamine is an antihistamine that helps alleviate air sickness, opens kids’ little ears a bit, and also makes some kids sleepy. You have to give it a test run at home, though, because it makes some children hyper, which is something you and your fellow passengers definitely don’t want. It can be ordered through Expat Express.

Overnight diapers. Something about sitting upright causes regular diapers to spring leaks like crazy. The seat will get soaked, and the only thing worse than being a spectacle is being a spectacle that reeks of urine.

At about 3 years of age, kids are old enough to use a special harness that’s sold by KidCares. Instead of lugging a car seat on board, you can use this little set of straps that goes over the back of the seat and has a 5-point harness. It is FAA approved, but some flight attendants don’t know about it yet and get snarky when they see it, so carry the literature that proves that it’s FAA approved. The harness can be ordered online.

That’s all I’ve got.

So, in less than two weeks, I’ll pack up my two sweeties and a bag of toys and stickers that they can reject for 12 hours. I’ll bring snacks that will end up as crumbs all over our seats and the floor. My daughter will refuse to sleep until the last 2 hours. She might scream the entire flight.

It’s going to suck.

But, I will still love my kids when we get off the plane, and every year will get easier. We chose this lifestyle, and along with the considerable perks come the approximately 24 hours per year of in-flight madness.  I’ll take that deal.

This week, I learned something new about myself. I’m a sex education wimp. With both my students and my own children, I’m a complete and utter weenie when it comes to discussing all things sexual with people younger than I am.

Case in point. For reasons that completely escape me, part of the fourth grade curriculum at my school is an introduction to puberty. For these two lessons, the boys go into another room with the male teachers and learn something puberty related. For all I know, it’s a complicated ruse and they’re really in there playing dominoes. The girls stay with the female teachers and we teach them that they will get body hair and periods. We squirm. They scream.  What the students don’t realize is that the teachers don’t enjoy imparting this wisdom any more than the kids enjoy hearing it. We’re just grateful that we can dismiss any questions that are clearly about sex with a simple, “Ask your mother.” Amongst the members of my teaching team, I’m not the wimpiest, but I am the first to refer kids to parental wisdom. After all, what parent doesn’t want to lay out life’s icky, sticky topics in their own terms and in their own time?

At home, though, I am that mother that my kids are supposed to ask about these things. I am also mother to a son who is drawn toward all reproductive topics. At some point during my pregnancy with his little sister, he clued in to the fact that my belly is the key to his getting more siblings, something he desperately wants. Somewhere in his viewing of either the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet, he’s figured out that there are eggs involved. Unfortunately, he’s not picturing eggs the size of the head of a pin. He thinks that I’m walking around with a belly full of the equivalent of your standard, hard-shelled, chicken eggs. So now, every time he’s in the mood for a few more siblings, I’m faced with a barrage of questions.

He waits until we’re walking somewhere or driving in the car and ask, “How many more eggs do you have?”

“Lots,” I answer.

He thinks this over. “When will more of your eggs hatch?”

“I’m happy with just my two children,” I say. “So, no more of my eggs need to hatch.” Notice I don’t dispute the hatching as reality.

“Well,” he’ll ask in a sly voice, “Why did Aunt Terri’s egg hatch last year?”

I don’t even think twice before throwing out the biggest line of crap ever. “Because she REALLY wanted it to.”

So now, because I’m a wimp, my son has confirmed that the chicken eggs in a woman’s stomach hatch through sheer force of will. (As long as we’re tallying up the mistruths, Terri isn’t even his real aunt- she’s one of those “mommy thinks it’s cute when her kids call her best friend Aunt Terri” aunts.)

It’s not that I don’t want him to know about sex. It’s fine if he has this knowledge. I’m just worried about how many other people he will tell. This is the boy who once greeted the meter reader at our front door by announcing, “I pee standing up.” My son would tell absolutely everyone, male or female, young or old. Because he’s bilingual, he could inform the entire population of Mitaka about exactly where babies come from, and then we would have to move. At least if he tells them the chicken egg theory, it would just be confusing and slightly ridiculous.

And it’s not just me. My husband, Rob, was reading the paper and drinking his coffee the other morning as Max watched Animal Planet. Invariably, if Max is really paying attention to a show, the topic turns to copulation. Rob must have been totally absorbed in his paper, because he almost didn’t hear Max shout, “Hey Dad, what’s sperm?” Presented with a teachable moment, a moment in which my husband could have pulled Max onto his knee and begin the birds and bees talk, my husband thought for about one second and said, “Eggs need it to turn into babies. Hey look, there’s a huge lizard in the backyard and I think it’s eating a tarantula. You’ve gotta see this.” When Rob repeated the story to me later, I asked him, “Why didn’t you just tell him it’s something that shoots out of penises?” If Rob had ever been tempted to question my lack of candor, he never would again.

So last Friday, as I was finishing off a long week of dodging sex questions, both at home and at school, I set out to retrieve my daughter from daycare and begin a relaxing weekend. On the way to my car, a friend asked if I could grab her four-year-old son who attends the same daycare, and bring him back to the school. Happy to help, I collected both kids, buckled them up safely, and pulled out of the parking lot. Just as we were getting moving, I heard my little guest rider pipe up from the backseat. First, he told me to change the radio station, which I didn’t do. Next he asked loudly, out of the blue, “Why does milk come out of boobs?”

My brain went immediately to my fallback “Ask your mother” response. But then I thought, let’s see what happens if I just dabble in truth. I focused on my driving and replied, “To feed babies.” Simple, but true.

There was a pause in the conversation while he considered my response. Finally, he said, “Did you know me when I was a baby?” And that’s when I relaxed. Whether or not he understood my response, he was willing to accept it and move on. Maybe, just maybe, I could get away with telling the truth at my own house.

Or not.

photo credit: kawarano

For six years, I worked as a tour co-coordinator at the Melbourne Branch of one of Japan’s major travel companies.  It was during the boom years when Australia was one of the major destinations for honeymoon couples and indeed most time deficient Japanese travelers opting for the ‘package tour’, which catered for their every need.

At the time Melbourne struggled to maintain its position on the standard package tour itinerary with only two flailing attractions: the penguin parade and her older European style buildings.  Our frustrated branch manager’s frequent remonstrations on the necessity for Melbourne to simply create a new attraction fell on deaf ears.

Having just spent the spring holidays taking my children to various Japanese made attractions, which effortlessly seemed to accommodate thousands of patrons, I finally understood what my Branch Manager was talking about.

Three such attractions, Thomas land, Sanrio’s Puroland and Hakone Kowaki-en’s Yunessun are magical places which I enjoyed every bit as much as my children.

At Puroland five different theatres run five different shows almost every two hours.  More shows, spectacular parades and acrobatics feature in the main atrium and a delightful boat ride took us on a tour of all of the characters that Sanrio has created.  If you do not mind riding at the back of the boat and there are only two of you, when the attendant announces “futari dake no okyakusan” answer “hai” loudly and you will be taken right to the front of the queue.

‘Kitty Chan’, Sanrio’s most successful creation, is 25 years old this November and although retailers continue to flog Sanrio’s latest creations which are currently the ’sugar bunnies’, she reigns supreme at Puroland.  My five-year-old daughter cherishes and often talks about how kind ‘Kitty chan’ was to talk to her and hold her hand.

For anyone with boys aged between one and four, Thomas Land, located within the Fujikyuu Highlands Amusement park in Gotenba, is a must.  Thomas with all of his friends and foe come to life and my sons who delight in the sight of any train were thrilled at being able to ride on their favorite characters: Percy, Toby and Harold.

Yunessun is a celebration of sensual fantasy and takes the Japanese penchant for bathing to absurdly extravagant extremes.  Here we can indulge in coffee, wine, green tea, honey and maple syrup, strawberry or sake spar baths.  During our visit we lined up to place our feet in a shallow pool for four minutes while ‘Garra Rufus’ fish devoured our dead skin.  They sure beat the pumice stone.  My girl wouldn’t have a bar of it but the boys loved it.

My children loved the slides, the pools and the spas so much that we stayed until 7:30pm when they finally kicked us out. The last two hours, with the dispersal of the masses, were the best.  The kids did not have to queue for the slides and we could swim in the pools.  A delectably hot bath is positioned perfectly for maximum viewing of the slides.  I love the pebble floors which put an immediate stop to kids running and slipping.

The highlight of my day was the Dead Sea bath, which contains ten times more salt than the sea.   Following the instructions on the wall, I rested my hands behind my head, closed my eyes and released all of the strength from my muscles. Floating buoyantly above the water and with the entire bath to myself, I drifted dreamily into oblivion.  As much as I love the tranquility and sereneness of the whole Japanese onsen (hot spring) experience, I have never felt at ease enough to achieve the degree of relaxation that I achieved in the dead sea bath.  And that night my skin felt as soft as silk.

Yunessun does have a traditional section for serious hot spring patrons where bathing suits are not worn and the sexes are segregated but we never made it to that area.  For as crass as some of the spars may appear to some, in particularly the coffee spa, the entire location seemed in sync with the crass behavior of my children.

photo credit: Kanko*

At university I was required to memorize an inordinate number of kanji (Chinese characters) each week. However my motivation never quite reached sufficient levels to ensure the complete transference from short term to long-term memory.  Until now!!

Having recently arrived in Japan from Australia with my Japanese husband and our three children, my children have only varying degrees of Japanese ability ranging from zero to low.   We have taken them from their beloved home, friends and schools and plunged them into the local Japanese elementary school and kinder.

To my horror I discovered that the majority of children in my daughter’s kinder class could already read hiragana while my little girl is struggling to write her name in English.  By the end of grade one, children are expected to have mastered the two Japanese syllabaries: hiragana and katakana and 80 kanji.   My eight year old will be expected to know 440 Kanji by the end of grade three.

In Australia, it is my understanding that on average a boy’s ability to read English begins around age seven with girls achieving this slightly earlier.  Both my boys started school around the age of six and after a year of struggling to sound out the most basic of 1,2 and three letter words in their nightly take home readers, towards the end of the year almost overnight something miraculously clicked in their brain and suddenly they could sound out and sometimes even recognize words and sentences.  Admittedly the Japanese writing system is totally phonetic, but I find the speed and ease of Japanese seven year olds reading ability remarkable.

Reassuring myself with thoughts of how resilient children are and what a wonderful experience a year (or more) in Japan will be, I embark on what has become my nightly ritual. The cards!  Vocabulary cards, hiragana cards, katakana cards and now Kanji cards.  My children are not allowed to play until they have passed each of their age specific drills.

At this stage the Chinese characters do somewhat resemble the picture that they represent which is fun for the kids, but the number of ways to read each character is a nightmare for a seven year old. Take the character for the ’sun/day’.  Though ostensibly there are only four readings: ‘nichi’, ‘jitsu’, ‘hi’ and ‘ka’, there are so many so-called exceptions to the rules.  The word ‘day’ in the days of the week is consistently read as ‘bi’ with Sunday (NIchiyoubi), using both  ‘nichi’ and ‘bi’.   The dates of the month are a little more challenging with the ‘first’ having the difficult reading of ‘tsuitachi’, the dates up to and including the ‘tenth’ end in ‘ka’, the ‘twentieth’ also ends in ‘ka’ and then the remaining dates end in ‘nichi’.  However the word ‘today’ can be said as ‘honjitsu’ or ‘kyou’; the word ‘yesterday’ can be said as ’sakujitsu’ or ‘kinou’, and the word ‘tomorrow’ can be said as ‘myounichi’ or ‘ashita’.  Three new and totally different readings!  This is almost unfathomable to my seven year old but he trustingly accepts that it is so and tries hard to memorize everything I ask of him.

Each night I face my own test, when I empty their bags.  Daily letters from each teacher, a timetable with items to be brought from home that changes EVERY day, pages summarizing the week’s events, notes about excursions, special activities, homework and more.  Now I am motivated to read every kanji I can fathom because when I do not, my children suffer even more.

The tears have slowed, as has the pleading to return home, but my heart nearly broke when one night my five-year-old daughter tentatively and shamefully confided to me that she couldn’t understand what anyone was saying.

photo credit: elbragon

For various reasons, I find myself in Japan and a “Home-life Quality Technician”. Ok, so I am a housewife… with no children.

In my own country, this is called being “unemployed”.

In Japan being a housewife or shufu is a profession in itself, which requires years of practice and training. If you don’t believe me, just open any kid’s lunch box at kindergarten, perfectly formed rice balls decorated with happy faces and wiener sausages cut to look like an octopus. Puts the peanut butter sandwiches I took to school in a very sad light indeed.

I have never been one for cleaning. I don’t like baking, cooking or grocery shopping either.

Being a housewife is not what I had in mind when I graduated from University.

However, I chose to look at this in a positive light. I have decided to apprentice myself and train in the ancient Japanese art of housewifery from some of the best housewives in the world. In the next few weeks and months, I will be documenting my progress towards becoming a Super Shufu.

This blog isn’t just for other housewives out there. This is for anyone who: Has no idea how to use 50% of the items in a Japanese supermarket, currently has a mushroom farm growing in their bathroom or just wants to know how to avoid ironing business shirts.

My first official blog will deal with a topic that is close to everyone’s heart and pocket: Savvy Supermarket Shopping.

http://gaijinhousewifeinjapan.blogspot.com/

I didn’t always think I’d be this kind of mom. I remember, years ago, when my husband and I were living in Costa Rica, there passed a bizarre series of circumstances that included a missed ferry and a stranger with a shark bite story. During the course of these events, we met River and Joaquin Phoenix’s father, a really decent, friendly guy who was living under a pseudonym on the ranch that River had bought for him. He didn’t share any stories about his kids or the family’s history, but a close friend of his confided that when River was young, while the family was on a Christian mission in Venezuela, Apparently, God told River’s father that he needed to get River to Hollywood immediately, that he was going to be a big star. As fate would have it, there was a ship leaving for California shortly thereafter. We all know how that story ends. I heard this tale while I was young and didn’t have kids of my own. I remember thinking that it was so tragic that a father’s choice could lead to such disaster. In hindsight, I may have been a bit unfair in my judgment.

Anyway, it seems ironic that here I am, ten years later, doing whatever I have to do to keep my own son working. I resist the urge to pull him from school to work, but I’ll gladly blow a whole Saturday dragging him around Tokyo. I catch myself rationalizing dry spells, deciding that it’s just his age or his height that isn’t in high demand at the moment. I was the one who coaxed him through the first jobs and tried to keep it fun so he wouldn’t want to quit. Ultimately, I have to admit that I’m the one who is fascinated by all of this.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a pageant mom. I meet pageant moms at these shoots, and I am so not a pageant mom. I don’t put mascara on my two-year-old daughter, even though she loves my make-up and says that she wants to “get some beautiful on me.” I don’t take Max to auditions because he finds them to be pointless. He’s either got the job flat out, or we’re not interested. I’m not envisioning a life on the red carpet for my children, and if you ask me, I’ll tell you that I’m just doing this to bolster his college fund.

With that said, I love this stuff. I love walking into a studio and seeing the equipment and cameras. I’m fascinated by how many people work on the set of a photo shoot for 7-year-olds. There’s the make-up person, the person who dresses them and adjusts their clothing between shots. There’s a photographer and an assistant whose entire job is to run around and click the light meter every time a cloud passes over the studio window.  And of course, there’s the extra person whose job seems to be to wrangle the strays. Some kids get antsy and literally run off. This person’s job is to chase them down and get them back into the shot.

I love the chaos of location shoots. If you gather up four to eight kids under the age of eight in any setting, along with their parents and a full photo crew, there’s going to be chaos. Now, put them all on a bus and drive them around Tokyo from site to site for different shots. By then end of the day, you will see unrestrained children swinging from the luggage rack of the bus, trashing displays in Agnes B, and wiping their noses on a six hundred dollar Roberto Cavalli sundress. And that’s before they get cranky. By afternoon, half of them will decide that they hate the clothes that they’re supposed to wear and throw a full-blown tantrum while their desperate mothers try to wrestle them into eighty dollar Benetton sweatpants. It’s fantastic. Little divas in the making, every one of them. Or perhaps, more accurately, they’re just normal kids with a highly unusual job.

What else do I love about it? I love Tokyo style. It’s great fun watching how the clothes are combined into outfits in ways that could only work in the land of Harajuku Girls. Purple plaid pants and a yellow floral blouse? No problem. Just grab a pair of pink cowboy boots off the rack to balance things. You’ve got the perfect outfit for a 7-year-old boy. It’s all good.

I love it that my son will sit and let a total stranger do something wild, like airbrush his face. When he’s modeling, he’s at work and follows instructions with this beautiful compliance that both his first grade teacher and I wish we could bottle. (Of course, his teacher and I aren’t paying him a hundred bucks an hour.) He usually hates the clothes, but knows that he doesn’t’ have to wear them home. He can be pretty goofy on set and sometimes pushes his luck making monkey faces for the camera, but it’s all digital, so it’s not like he’s wasting film. I must say, that Max has a much clearer idea of professionalism than I did as a first grader.

However, none of these things are what I like best about modeling.

Ultimately, I love it that when I see my son on film, he becomes this being who is separate from the kid who takes 10 minutes to put on his shoes and forgets to take his backpack to school. On film, he becomes otherworldly. Honestly, I think that the emotion I experience on set transcends pride. I’m not religious, so I don’t really know what reverence feels like, but I can imagine that it feels kind of like seeing your child’s image captured in perfect light and detail.

As I mentioned, most shoots are digital, so there’s a moment after every outfit change when the crew huddles around a computer to see if they got the shot. They flip through monkey face pics and shots of him with his fingers in his nose or his ears in an attempt to make everyone laugh. Then, in the midst of the madness, there will be that single click of the mouse that reveals the frame that makes the entire crew gasp just a little bit. Invariably, it’s the shot in which he’s looking directly into the camera; dead on with those deep blue, almond-shaped eyes that are surrounded by thick, dark lashes. The perfect symmetry of his face is endlessly fascinating to me.

The crew gasps, but I’m no longer surprised by this image. Nonetheless, I’m still hypnotized by the profundity of my child’s beauty. Parenting is such a train wreck much of the time that we need these moments to balance out the snarky ones, which sometimes seem to outweigh all else. Even on the day of a shoot, the mother-child dynamic is very much at work.  At today’s shoot, he was in an especially patriotic mood, and as we changed him into the navy blue nylon jacket that he was modeling, he said that he wished the jacket had a big American flag on the back. I told him that he looked like an DEA agent, and that would have to do. I know I’ll still bitch at him on the train ride home to stop kicking the people sitting on either side of us. I’ll still be sympathetic, but secretly annoyed when he wants to change trains because an old lady is looking at him.  I think it’s good for me to occasionally just stop and really look at the face of this incredible little person and be awestruck that he exists and that he’s mine.

So, I’m assuming that my friends will have comments to offer about appreciating my seven-year-old for his mind. I do. Honestly, he such a bright, inquisitive, loquacious kid that there aren’t many opportunities for quiet reverence. There are few chances to just observe him while he’s awake and marvel at how positively gorgeous he is.

So, do I have my son modeling for the college money? Sure. Is it so that I can have a glimpse into a world I might never otherwise see? Probably. And yeah, I love seeing my kid in a 500 dollar Burberry coat and thinking, “Yeah, baby, that’s my kid in a 500 dollar Burberry coat. How you like me now?”

But, ultimately, it comes down to that single second, that moment when his perfect face appears on that screen and everyone in the room catches their breath. Right in that moment, I’m completely enraptured by the wonder of my own child.

I guess I can teach him about inner beauty later.