“Why are you different from a normal child?” “Can’t you just live more normally?” “There’s something a bit off about you.”
Hurt and suffering under my mother’s words, day after day of protecting myself with abuse, resistance, fighting back.
Right before turning fifty, a diagnosis of severe neurodevelopmental difference finally revealed what had been behind that difficulty, that suffocation — and freed me from it.
There is a road to happiness, and to enjoying life, even with neurodevelopmental difference!
(Something I already knew, but now I can only feel gratitude for whatever it was that led to the diagnosis.)
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Whatever wall I ran into, I have lived my life pushing forward honest to my own commitments, and it has caused a lot of trouble for people around me — but I can feel, now, that it was the right way to live.
“Perhaps taking your own commitment to the absolute limit, even on a road different from everyone else’s, was your life-support system doing exactly its job.”
The doctor’s words, when I got the diagnosis, landed with an odd sense of rightness inside me.
Perhaps some instinct in me knew that living an ordinary life, the same as everyone else, meant nothing but dying.
What I could only see once I put distance between myself and my parent
I never once said “yes” and simply accepted what my mother told me — I lived always resisting, always fighting back, in a permanent rebellious phase, and every time I heard people around me say “live with gratitude towards your parents”, it hurt.
“You’re my parent, you should understand me.” “If you’re my parent, recognise me, praise me.” That scream, inside.
Every time we met, I was showered with words that sounded like nothing but denial of who I was, and I lived in constant conflict, asking why she couldn’t understand.
But one day I decided, in my heart, to put a full stop on days like that.
Rather than killing off who I was and blaming my parent for it, living each day with a laugh felt more like me, and more fun. And more than anything, I genuinely believed that would be better for my mother too.
I still remember, clearly, how furiously she reacted when I told her that.
“After saying whatever you liked all this time, is this how it ends — cutting ties?”
“So she still didn’t understand, after all.”
Hurt, I did not answer a single call or email from her for three years after that. I never even told her about the cancer. She heard it from a relative — I cannot imagine how much that hurt her, and at the time I could not even feel that much myself.
Noticing that “support” comes in shapes that do not match your own values
Even through the years I kept my distance from my mother, I lived running into wall after wall, holding on to being myself.
And taking on this huge challenge, Peking to Paris, I have lost count of the times I received scolding much like my mother’s from other people too — but I received far more understanding and support alongside it.
Getting to know so many people through this challenge, I noticed something.
Whether it felt like scolding, or like being held up, however different everyone’s values were — all of it, every time, was a cheer sent my way.
“Maybe the words from my mother I had taken as scolding were, in her own way, her cheer for me all along.”
Once I could see that, I went to visit my mother for the first time in years, using “I want to visit the family grave” as the excuse.
What I had decided in my heart beforehand was to give, thoroughly, without holding back.
My sudden homecoming surprised her, and she was genuinely delighted.
All I actually wanted to do back home was eat white rice my mother had cooked, topped with salmon roe. Beyond that, I only wanted some quiet time for an easy conversation between mother and daughter …
My mother was exactly the same as ever (laughs).
“There’s something I want you to eat, let’s go get it!” “Let’s go to the hot spring!” “Let’s eat that too!” “Let’s do this too!”
I had wanted to take it slow and go nowhere, just rest (laughs),
and normally I would have snapped at her for it — but this time my mission was to keep giving. “All right — let’s happily go along with whatever Mum wants to do!” I shifted my mindset.
I said yes to everything, spent freely from money I had been carefully saving, coffee by coffee, to get through Peking to Paris.
On the day I left for Tokyo, my mother said something I had never once heard from her before: “Something about you has changed, hasn’t it. What happened? I feel bad, letting you do everything for me the whole time …”
Feeling that something had reached her, I told her quietly.
“All I ever wanted was for you to recognise me. I know all too well how much the world’s denial hurts, how it feels not to be understood. But even so, I wanted you, of all people, to tell me it’s all right. I didn’t need anything else, didn’t need to go anywhere — that alone would have been enough.”
In tears, my mother said “I’m sorry” — and I found myself crying too, saying “don’t apologise. I’m me, and you’re you, and that’s fine.”
Just before I left, she quietly handed me freshly cooked white rice with salmon roe on top. It was, truly, delicious.
Each person’s own shape of cheering someone on
Something that mattered, that I had never noticed until this age, came into view the moment one thin layer peeled away.
That homecoming, I decided, meant I could spend the rest of my life laughing alongside my mother, from here.
It is a world I could only see because I never stopped taking on challenges.
When I told people “I want to take on this rally”, a great many told me, just like my mother once did, “you can’t do it.”
Sure, the word “dream” sounds wonderful, but taking on the real thing is one failure and setback after another.
But my real purpose behind this adventure, the Peking to Paris rally, is to share the failure and the setback both, and by pushing past the limits fear and denial put on my own heart, become courage and support for someone else taking something on themselves.
I will drive the 14,000 km of Peking to Paris with everyone, smiling the whole way.
Thank you for reading to the end.