Three days it took me to realise that I was facing the wrong way, and that the stars did not revolve around me. Three days of crying and looking at plane timetables; three days of eating chocolate until the smell of it made me sick; three days of wearing pink sunglasses on the train at 8 in the morning so that nobody could see my even pinker eyes. Three days, and then I was trumped by my two favourite children: one in tears, and one in sadness.
The beauty of children is that whatever you feel, they feel it stronger. Their happiness outshines any happiness you can hope to experience; they find incoherent laughter in things that you can only snicker at. Their world is infinitely larger and scarier than yours, and their tears are hurting them more than yours possibly can. Which is why any intense emotion makes an adult feel like a child again, simply because that was the time when our emotions were at their most pure; unsullied by any weariness or experience or knowledge that things will, eventually, get better, and that nothing is as black and white as it initially seems. The knowledge that makes everything - no matter how awful - somehow easier to handle, and simultaneously less beautiful in its ever fluctuating shades of greyness.
Three days after I had cried for my mum, I watched my favourite little boy - Shinnosuke, a sensitive, sweet, sunny, artistic and unfeasibly tiny two year old - curl himself up on the floor in pain and sob into the carpet; crying for his mum as if he thought his whole body would break without her. Trying to pick him up had no effect whatsoever - he was incoherent and rigid with missing her, and his whole body lifted in the same bent and tiny shape like a scared and shaking little hedgehog - so I stroked his hair as calmly as I could and ignored the impulse to curl up on the floor next to him and cry for my mum too. I knew what he could not, at two years old - that I would see my mum again - and so I talked to him quietly until he lifted his little distraught, pink face and tried to explain in Japanese that he didn't know where his mum was, and I tried to explain in English that she would come back. I then held my arms out and asked if he needed a cuddle, to which he responded by climbing immediately onto my lap, putting his tiny arms around my shoulders and sobbing into my neck as if his little heart was falling apart. Trying not to cry with him, I continued my class with the little boy on my hip until - six or seven minutes later - he stopped crying, smiled at me, climbed down and promptly started doing the Hokey Pokey with the bravery of the world's smallest soldier: a bravery I realised in shame that I, twenty six years older than him, had yet to really display.
A couple of hours later, my other favourite child - a tiny, thoughtful and incredibly intelligent little girl, who has an adorable tendency to refer to herself in third person, both in Japanese and English - sat down at the small writing table with me as I tried to explain basic emotions: happy, sad, exited, angry. Giving all of my students a piece of paper with different faces, I produced a range of coloured crayons and asked them to colour in the emotion they felt: a task that was too advanced for almost all of them (being between one and three years old), and which therefore resulted in a mass of yellow and pink squiggles over the page, the table and their hands. Shoko, however, looked at me with a frown as I pointed to each of the faces, and then grabbed a black crayon. Watching her in shock as she scribbled furiously over the angry face, she then took a yellow and drew briefly on the happy face, and then took a blue crayon and carefully coloured in the sad face.
"Shoko sad," she said in a serious voice, and pointed to the blue face.
"Are you?" I said in confusion, still trying to adjust to the fact that a barely-two year old knew how to associate colours with emotions. "Why are you sad?"
"Happy!" one of the older children shouted, scribbling on the floor with yellow.
"Shoko sad," Shoko repeated, ignoring the other child with barely contained contempt. Then she looked at me with a face full of the kind of sadness that I barely remember, and I realised that something inside me felt ashamed for the second time that day.
"Why are you sad, sweetheart?" I asked her again. Then - because I needed to know - I asked my assistant to ask her in Japanese, in case the language barrier was causing a problem. My assistant asked her, and Shoko simply shrugged and looked at me again.
"Shoko sad," she stated in a quiet voice without the slightest self-pity, and then handed the picture to me. "Finished," she added, and went to play with the toy rabbit in the play box.
Between them, Shoko and Shinnosuke ended my three days of crying. Shinnosuke, for having the bravery to dance the Hokey Pokey when he was exhausted and all sobbed out, and Shoko, for understanding that it's okay to be sad sometimes, even if you don't know why.
I was facing the wrong way, that's all. The sun was up behind me all along. And it took a couple of two year olds to make me realise that - when you've got your back against the dark - there is nothing in this world that can't be handled with a pencil, a good dance, and a little old fashioned bravery.
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