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POEM AND ESSAY
A Comfortable Home
Ideas on what to do when you do not have one
If your spouse said to you, “I don’t feel comfortable at home,” what would you do?
I did two things. First, I worried. This is something I am very good at. But it is not very helpful.
The comment came several days after I had returned to Japan from a recent solo trip to America to attend my little sister’s wedding. My husband had been acting strangely distant and dissatisfied, and his attitude combined with recalled conversations I had with family members about rocky relationships, themes in movies I had seen on the plane, lyrics of songs my children were singing, and episodes in manga I randomly re-read, convalescing into one unpleasant conclusion: either my husband was having an affair, or he was likely to in the near future.
Be wary of media influence. If I had stopped to think calmly, I would have realized this conclusion was both unfounded and insulting to my husband’s integrity. Unfortunately, however, my teenage daughter had come to the same rash conclusion. That was also not helpful, but a line from the TV drama she recommended was: “If you cannot have a conversation to clear up your doubts, then infidelity is not the real problem.”
