filling in the gaps

Oh man, I'm convinced somebody out there is watching over me because just when I started very gently mulling over the possibility of being able to handle a second kid--BOOM, here come the molars. And the celestial memo to me would be: You can't even handle ONE kid. Okay, it hasn't been awful, so far--I haven't stared longingly at my bottle of Infant Motrin, the way I have sometimes done during past teething episodes, when completely depleted of any inner resources--but the past week hasn't been fun.

Yesterday was probably rock-bottom. There was a lot of poo--both the child and dog variety--that I was forced, beyond the norm, to come in close contact with...I don't really want to talk about it. Today, I still don't feel completely clean.

Teething always leads to mom abuse at the small but sharp-nailed hands of my almost-two-year-old, but A isn't getting off easy, either, poor guy. He's been facing increasingly harsh rejections by R, during their limited time together. Lately, she only says "daddy" in combination with one of two words: "no!" or "work." The other night, during dinner, she looked up suddenly and declared: "Daddy work, grandma bye, grandpa bye." This was pretty soon after my parents left and, yes, A was at work, as he almost always is when R is awake. It was funny and tragic at the same time, and she still says this combo sentence, apropos of nothing, every so often, as if assessing her tribe and finding it somewhat lacking.

I do feel increasingly worried that R needs more of a life than what we have right now. Her dad isn't really around. She sees her Japanese grandparents once a week, but they aren't very demonstrative people--or, at least, they are very careful about not being too pushy--and I think that is the reason R seemed to bond more with my aggressively loving parents in their two weeks here than she has seeing A's parents weekly for the past eight months. We do meet up with a few babies on a regular basis, but they are all much younger than R for some reason, and aren't able to really interact with her yet.

As an English-speaking wife and mother in Japan, I've found the Tokyo Mother's Group and the Married in Japan Yahoo Group to be okay online resources (the latter can be fairly entertaining; there is currently a pretty busy conversation thread going on that began with one of the members sharing that Japanese women consider it bad manners for other women not to wear makeup, which is certainly interesting since I never wear makeup and have possibly been offending women in this country for years), but haven't had great luck meeting up with many of the members in real life, since Tokyo is so huge and we few foreigners are fairly widely dispersed. Also, simply being the mother of a toddler and trying to get together with other mothers with toddlers is a near-impossible feat when you throw in varying nap times, conflicting work/play schedules, tantrums, meltdowns, etc. I also don't live close to where the expat community congregates, but I'm not interested to mingle with that crowd, to be honest, since none of them are here for the long haul.

I recently learned about another group, the Association of Foreign Wives of Japanese, that is supposed to be smaller and better organized than the MIJ Yahoo Group, but there is something like a 7,000-yen annual membership fee.