Undokai Apprehension

Last month, Miyagi was full of undukai or sports festivals, or school sports days, or field days, depending on which one of the terms you would prefer to use. My child's school like many others had the event thankfully on a Sunday so I could actually attend. 

I had such anxiety about it for about a week beforehand which was really uncomfortable and owed mostly to the discomfort I felt at the last event I had gone to at my daughter's school a few weeks previous which happened to occur on the anniversary of my miscarriage. That event also featured lots of happy tiny babies, making me feel all the more worthless and the without proper distraction as I was at that event by myself. I felt really isolated and sad. 

Since my in-laws would be coming to the undokai, I knew full well that my normal tactic of just having quiet English conversation with my husband was not going to fly. Instead, I would be stuck being either entirely silent and drifting through my own thoughts (which the last event proved was not the most healthy of ideas), or exhausting my brain trying to pick through their native level, native speed Japanese. 

Luckily, the event actually went pretty well. My daughter's team lost almost every event, but they did their best. 

The funniest part was the tug of war in which my daughter's team lost all but one rope for three different rounds. At one point, my daughter was pulled entirely off of her feet holding only onto the rope to stay aloft.

Once her feet touched the ground again, she ran to try to help out with one of the other ropes, which they also lost. That was one of the rounds where the parents could help out, so once the whistle blew, my husband ran in to try to assist.

He grabbed the exact same spot on the rope that our daughter had, and the exact same thing happened. After he got up, he kept fighting with the rope and they kept losing.

At the end of the day, they lost by more than 100 points across all events, but what I took away as a win was watching my husband wrap his arm around the shoulders of our daughter, both of them feeling a little bit down for losing the game but both of them smiling and being okay. 

That's the real win. We can play a game and we don't have to win to feel good. That's what winning really looks like in real life to me. 

In addition, I failed to have a panic attack and the worst thing that happened for the whole day for me was forgetting that wearing sunglasses and a mask and a hat means that no one can see enough of my face to know if I am smiling at them. 

All in all, not actually a bad day