Only One Day a Week

I no longer teach at a nursery school, and I no longer live in Tokyo, but this passage from Chapter Two of Finding Yoyu comes from a time when I did. It shows how even working outside the home only one day a week quietly raises the stakes when you’re also caregiving.

Excerpt from Finding Yoyu

I’ve been teaching English part-time at a nursery school in Tokyo for 20 years. What started as only one class eventually evolved into a full day. I go in once a week to teach four classes spread out before and after lunch. I say nursery school, but really it’s like a nursery school, preschool, kindergarten, and day care all in one. The parents are all working professionals; therefore, the kids are dropped off in the morning and picked up in the evening. Most of the kids start coming as infants and stay until the start of elementary school. The nursery school staff and teachers become like family.

I have one class for infants and toddlers and separate classes for the four-, five-, and six-year-olds. When I started teaching there, I was in my early 30s, and though a day with children was tiring, I loved being around them. However, as I got older and became more attuned to how noise and people drain my energy, I noticed that I was more and more tired every week when I got home.

Door to door, it takes me about one hour to get to the school. The 15-minute walk from my home to the train station is pleasant—just long enough to get my blood pumping. The train ride is another story. I have to ride a train packed with rush-hour commuters—30 minutes of being squished and jostled between all the other people headed for work. By the time I get to school, I’m already exhausted.

I used to arrive at 9:30 and was in front of the first class of kids by 10:00. I had three classes back-to-back and then joined the kids for lunch. After lunch, I had an hour to prep for the final class, after which I’d get back on the train for home.

Compared with full-time teachers, I had no room to complain. However, because I closed my office and began working from home in 2013, this one day a week at the school became a noticeable energy drain. On Wednesdays (my teaching days), I’d arrive home exhausted and barely able to function even though it was only 4:30 p.m. I had trouble thinking of what to cook, let alone mustering the energy to do it. All I wanted was to crawl into bed for the night. I’d somehow push myself until 8:00 p.m., and then I was out. The following day, I felt like I had a hangover.

When it was just my husband and me, arriving home exhausted once a week was inconvenient but manageable. I love to cook, so in our home, I’m usually in charge of preparing meals, and Akira handles the cleanup. On Wednesdays, though, Akira took charge after we discovered I didn’t have the yoyu.

However, after Otosan came to live with us, I couldn’t afford to arrive home exhausted. Most weeks, my husband was home on Wednesdays and could be there when his father came home from day service. But once or twice a month, Akira couldn’t be there because of a faculty meeting or a business trip. So on those days, I had to make it home from school in time for the handoff and with enough energy to take on the role of caregiver.

—from Finding Yoyu

If you’re new here and wondering what yoyu means, you can read a simple explanation here.