‘Don’t Say Hurry Up, Hurry Up’

Recently, this picture book title caught my eye.
Thump.

I imagine many mums would be startled by these words.
Mums are busy. We can’t always move at our children’s pace.
Before I know it, the words

“Hurry up!”

slip out of my mouth.
I wonder if I say it almost every single day.

The other day, my 13-year-old son said this to me:

“The words I hate most are ‘now’ and ‘right away.’
I want to do things at my own pace.
I hate being rushed and told, ‘Hurry up!’
When I become a parent, I’ll never say that to my child.”

My son has always been slow-paced and easygoing since he was little.
When he woke up and got dressed in the morning, if left alone, it could take over an hour.
That would make him late for school.
The world doesn’t turn at a child’s pace.

When he woke up and got dressed in the morning, if left alone, it could take over an hour. That would make him late for school. The world doesn’t turn at a child’s pace.

But…

Actually, I was just as slow-paced as my son when I was a child.
I was late for school almost every day.
My walk to school was full of temptations for my endlessly curious mind.

If I saw tadpoles in a rice paddy along the way, of course I wanted to stop.
If I found an unusual pebble on the ground, I wanted to pick it up.
At school, I couldn’t finish my assignments on time.
I couldn’t even finish my school lunch on time.

When I was rushed with “Hurry up, hurry up!” my mind would go blank, and I couldn’t move forward.

As the adults around me kept saying, “Hurry up, hurry up!”, I got used to living in a race against time.
And before I knew it, I had become an adult who says “Hurry up, hurry up!” to my own child.

Even though, deep down,
I knew those were the words I hated hearing the most.

In the picture book, ‘Don’t Say Hurry Up, Hurry Up,’ the murmur of a small boat sailing alone on a vast ocean overlapped with my son’s inner voice, and my own voice from childhood.
Tears welled up in my eyes.

“Why are you rushing?
 Where are you going in a hurry?”

“When I’m compared to others,
 my heart starts to pound.”

“Each one of us is different.
 What we can do is different.”

“Please don’t ask,
 ‘Why can’t you do it?’”

“Don’t pull me.
 Don’t push me.”

“Each one of us is different.
 What we can do is different.”

“Each one has a different length.”
“Each one has a different time.”

When I was a university student, I met a teacher who changed my life.
I think it was a moral education class in the Faculty of Education.

At the end of every class, he would hand out sheets of A4 paper, cut into quarters, and say,

“Please write what you are thinking right now.”

I was always the last one to finish.
While the other students left one after another, I was always the only one left, writing down “What I am thinking right now.”

I would rush, thinking,
“I shouldn’t keep the teacher waiting because of me,”
scribbling with my pencil, my heart pounding.
But the more I rushed, the less I could think of what to write.

That’s when the teacher said to me,

“You don’t have to rush. I’ll wait, so please take your time.”

I was shocked.
He’ll wait for me?
No teacher had ever said those words to me before.
For the first time in my life, I felt accepted for who I was.

Another time, he said,

“Noriko has Noriko Time.
 If you can work within Noriko Time, you’ll surely do good work.”

With my teacher’s words in my heart, I am now working as a children’s book author.
And through another children’s author’s work,
I was reminded of an important message I had almost forgotten.

“I’ll go slowly.
 Come along slowly.

 Will you wait for me?
 I’ll wait for you.”

This is it. The message I needed to hear. And the message my son needed to hear.
To the author, Miri Masuda: Thank you for reminding me of what truly matters.