It's fucking hard

Today is Mountain Day, a public holiday in Japan.

For many people, it is a day off from work.

I, however, had a treatment appointment scheduled first thing in the morning.

As usual, I got up at eight.

I stretched.

I prepared my body for the day.

I ate a protein-rich breakfast.

Then I got ready for work.

For me, it was an ordinary morning.

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Then I received a message from my Taiwanese friend, Kokoro.

“He’s here.”

Along with those words came a photograph of her newborn baby.

He was adorable.

I could not tell from the photograph whether the baby was a boy or a girl, so I asked.

A boy, she told me.

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A few days earlier, I had happened to see an Instagram post from Kokoro saying that she was 38 weeks pregnant.

We had not spoken for some time, so I contacted her.

She replied that she was giving birth the following day.

At the time, she casually said:

“I’ll send you a picture when the baby is born.”

But she had just completed the enormous physical task of giving birth.

I assumed she would send one after things had settled down.

I did not expect to receive a photograph taken so soon after his birth.

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She then wrote:

“I’m completely exhausted.”

And in English:

“It’s fucking hard.”

I am sure it was.

I will never experience childbirth myself.

I cannot truly know how painful, difficult, or physically exhausting it is.

Still, Kokoro is energetic, determined, and exceptionally tough. If she described it that way, it must have been one of the hardest experiences of her life.

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“I’ll send you a picture when the baby is born.”

And then, after giving birth:

“It’s fucking hard.”

Seeing those two messages together felt entirely characteristic of her.

She did not try to conceal how difficult it had been.

She did not replace the experience with beautiful words.

It was hard, so she said it was hard.

And then she immediately sent me a photograph of her newborn son.

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It left me with a strange feeling.

I had been going through an ordinary morning.

Then, without warning, a photograph arrived of a baby who had just been born in Taiwan.

Only a short while earlier, he had not yet entered this world.

Through that message, I felt as though I had come close to the very moment when his life began.

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When I thought about it, I could hardly remember another time when someone had sent me a photograph immediately after giving birth.

Most people probably wait until both mother and baby have settled before informing their family and friends.

Yet just after giving birth, she remembered me in distant Japan and sent me the photograph.

That made me genuinely happy.

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Kokoro and I now live in different countries and lead very different lives.

She became an entrepreneur in Taiwan, built a family, and is now a mother.

I work with clients in Japan, lead training programs, and dance tango.

Our daily lives have very little in common.

Long stretches of time sometimes pass without any contact between us.

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But we once spent four days together in Taipei.

We ate together every day.

We danced tango.

We talked at length about marriage, work, and the lives we hoped to build.

The time we shared then still remains somewhere between us.

That is why she sent me a photograph immediately after giving birth.

And because she did, I was able to witness the beginning of a new life far away in Taiwan.

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Perhaps a relationship does not disappear simply because two people are no longer in constant contact.

When people have truly shared time together, they can suddenly find themselves back on the same timeline, even after years apart.

A single photograph.

A short message.

Sometimes that is all it takes to reconnect the time that has passed between them.

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A child was born in Taiwan.

His mother said:

“It’s fucking hard.”

I stood in Chiba, getting ready for work, looking at his photograph.

And suddenly I thought:

Life is not so bad after all.

It was that kind of holiday morning.