The Story of Fried Chicken Tag | Essay | Parenting | Child-rearing

Recently, on the way home from nursery school,

My son shouts with his whole body,

"I want to go to the arcade!!"

You can find our family's New Year's
UFO catcher situation here.
I updated it during the New Year holidays,
so please take a look here if you'd like.

The more tired I am,
the louder his voice gets.

To be honest,
I can't keep up with it every day.

My energy runs out
before my wallet does.

Then, one day,

I suddenly said,

"Well then, shall we play tag at the park?"

A complete alternative.

A proposal for tag
instead of the UFO catcher.

There was a brief pause,

"...Tag?"

He tilted his head.

"Yeah. Mommy will be 'it'."

The moment I said that,

his expression changed.

The switch was flipped.

In the next instant, he was already
sprinting at full speed.

After running a little,
they suddenly stop,

turn around, and ask.

"So, what kind of tag should we play?"

I am a little bewildered inside.

Huh?

Are there really,
that many kinds of tag?

Being from the Showa era,
I couldn't think of that many.

At most,

high tag, color tag, or,
something like cops and robbers.

Games with rules, names,
and set ways to play.

But my son's "what kind of tag"

was much freer.

My son says.

"Well then, how about fried chicken tag, or,
hunter tag?"

I understand hunter...

I saw a future where I'd be forced to run like crazy
and wouldn't be able to make dinner, so I rejected it immediately.

Huh?

But
by the way

"What is fried chicken tag??"

I was so curious,
that I chose that one.

Then my son,

nodded with satisfaction and said.

“Okay, I’ll be it, so you run away, Mom.”

…Huh?

Is tag a turn-based game now?

For a second, I felt like I had won.

But the next moment, I was already being chased at full speed.

No, in the end, whether I rejected something or not, I was going to be made to run anyway.

And then, I suddenly wonder.

That’s not the problem.

“What am I supposed to do if I get tagged?”

I don’t know the rules.

I couldn’t see the world after being caught.

Then my son said.

“Put both hands on your head and become a piece of frozen karaage.”

Without understanding what that meant,

I was tagged, so I tried becoming a piece of frozen karaage.

I put both hands on my head, and stood perfectly still.

In the middle of a vast park,

I was the only one playing the role of frozen karaage.

It was probably, in my life,

the most surreal scene I've ever seen.

Just as I was thinking that,

my son spotted his dad, who had just joined us on his motorcycle on his way home from work, and loudly dragged his reluctant father over ꉂ🤣𐤔

So I asked, "How can Mom,
be freed from being a frozen fried chicken?"

I asked this while still being a frozen fried chicken.

Then my son said,
a little proudly.

"There's the person who becomes the frozen fried chicken, and two people who are in charge of heating it up."

The next moment,

my son and his dad surrounded me and held my hands.

They lifted those hands from bottom to top,
with a big heave.

As if they were opening an invisible door.

"Ding, done!"

Apparently,

by having the frozen fried chicken heated up, I would be freed from my role as the fried chicken.

In a vast park,

a mother playing the part of a frozen fried chicken, surrounded by her family, getting thawed out.

Who would have ever imagined,
such a resurrection in life ꉂ🤣𐤔

And then, I suddenly realized.

In the first place, fried chicken is,

Perhaps it is only me, a child of the Showa era, who thought that things were meant to be deep-fried.
Maybe that is just me.

For these children,

To them, karaage is something you reheat from frozen.

The fundamental assumptions of the world are already different.

When I think about it that way,

I think the person who first came up with this game discovered something amazing.
I really think so.

A system that keeps the game going by changing roles,

instead of making being caught the 'end'.
That is the mechanism.

Even if someone stops,

if two people work together to warm them up, they can return to the story again.
They can return.

That is surely a microcosm of life,
in the form of a game.

Today, too, I thought I would surrender myself to my son's world.
I decided to do that.

I hope you will all try it, too.

I felt it was a game that could be played even in a nuclear family.

I hope you have a wonderful day today as well!

May you and I both have the best luck and smiles (^^♪

Every day is a good day.

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