I don't know about you, but all these media reports about the current financial crisis just make me want to curl up in a ball and catch up on "America's Next Top Model." But no matter how loudly I hum the theme song to "Army Wives," I can't drown out the voice in my head asking: What the hell is going on with my money?

Today I took a deep breath, turned off the DVR and opened up my financial accounts online. It wasn't pretty. My brokerage accounts are down at least 30% year to date. The timing isn't good; the paid portion of my maternity leave is about to expire. What's more, with my dad moving in with us temporarily as we transition him back to the U.S., we need to make some small home renovations to accommodate his geezerness. All this means we need cash—at a time when liquidating stocks and realizing those losses would be a stupid move.

We're in better shape than a lot of American families. Our mortgage is safe; our savings, though diminished, are solid; we carry no credit card debt. But we've just grown our family, and judging by how much she nurses, this new baby could eat us out of house and home. My husband is a freelance classical musician, and I'm guessing the bankruptcy of big-money sponsors won't help struggling orchestras. Plus have you checked out the cost of diapers lately?

How's your money doing, and how's it affecting your career?

A couple of months ago, just before I left for my hometown in Japan, I canceled my newspaper subscription. My reasons:

a. Money. At $1.50 a day, plus the pricey Sunday paper, I was shelling out $42.50 a month. That's a wasabi pea compared to, say, my cable bill ($145 to Time Warner, with the employee discount of bubkis). But it seemed increasingly exorbitant, especially considering the extra mouth I now have to feed. Yes, I'm breastfeeding, which costs nothing, but still, there's the...

I pray at the altar of the dead tree.

b. Environmental impact. My personal subscription was producing a couple of pounds of newsprint a week. My husband peruses the sports pages for the Premiership coverage, and when I bake I cool the cookies on spread-out sheets from Business. But the fact remains that all this paper waste is created by and for my very own perusal. These trees died for my reading pleasure. Which brings me to...

c. Reader guilt. Mindful of the high cost and the extravagant waste, I am guilted into scanning each and every page. I flip through the Style pages, even though I don't own designer clothing and I don't care which socialites are getting married. (Actually, I adore the Style section. What girl doesn't?) I clip the Sunday coupons for products I don't need or plan to buy. I even pore over the occasional supplements about mutual funds and geriatric homes. Go ahead—ask me about Legg Mason Aggressive Growth and the Cedar Crest Assisted Living home. Finally, of course, there's...

d. Lack of time. Between the chatty four-year-old and the nursing infant and the household management, I don't have time for personal hygiene, let alone the self indulgence of a cup of tea with the morning paper. Once maternity leave wraps up and I add the job back to the mix, I'll have even less time, though if I'm hitting the office I figure what spare minutes I have I probably ought to use for a shower.

The only solution is to quit reading my paper. But oh, how I miss it. Especially now as we're up at 4 a.m. with jet lag and all I want is the sight of the little blue plastic bag on my stoop. I've tried reading online—in fact, that's my whole game plan, to move all my subscriptions online—but it's not the same. I miss the layout of the pages. I can't get a sense for the importance of the story without knowing its placement in the paper. I itch for the feel of the inky pages on my fingertips.

In yesterday's mail, I got this solicitation for 50% off to return as a subscriber. I'm taking it. I just cain't quit you, New York Times. Not yet.

BestCostumes.com

It's that time of year again. Even in Japan, the plastic Jack-o'-lanterns decorate store windows and candy is taking a more prominent position on shelves. My little one, the one who talks, is considering her costume options. At two, she was a kitty; at three, a princess. This year, she thinks, she will be a kitty princess. Or a princess kitty. Depends on the mood.

Scrolling around online for some tiara-wearing feline outfit, I am finding quite a number of so-called Japanese or Asian princesses. Unfamiliar with this particular line of royalty, I click and learn it's something of a cross between a geisha and Suzie Wong. Am I right?

BestCostumes.com

Which brings me to the disturbingly sexualized nature of Halloween costumes for little girls. If you're not a princess or a kitty—and sometimes, even if you are—the outfits appear to be designed by some pedophiliac shut-in. It's gross.

For a hilarious pictorial on weirdo costumes particular to Japan, check out this Cracked.com post.

Yesterday was Keiro-no-hi in Japan, or Respect for the Elderly Day. It's a national holiday, which means the press, too, gets a day off. The entire press corps of the entire country goes to the beach. With Obaachan and Ojiichan. It's nice, isn't it? Because it means that no matter what happens in the world, there is absolutely no news reported that day in any newspaper, because there are no newspapers.

So I had to learn from my CNN-addicted geezer of a dad (at our house, every day is No Respect for the Elderly Day) that the world is imploding. Lehman, the company whose headquarters sit across 50th Street from TIME's; Merrill Lynch, where my sister-in-law works; AIG, where my younger brother has been employed since he graduated from college. All these firms are in various stages of shrieking, agonizing, horror-movie strangulation.

On the phone with my brother Ken, my Pop begged him to stick it out no matter what. "It's a tough company," he pleaded. Not that Ken is planning to jump ship. But it got me to thinking. For a guy who left the U.S. in his 20s and made his own way in Japan with no skills or contacts or capital, our dad is heavily averse to job risk. He urged us all to land jobs with large firms, and, when we did, to hang on like burrs.

What about you? Would you—or have you—bailed on an Enron before it hit the ocean floor...or wished you had?

We are in the process of clearing out our mother's home. It is not easy work.

After all the fuss of the funeral had settled, my sister Emy and I settled down to the job of sifting through three-plus decades of junk that had accumulated in this, our childhood home. I say we but really my sister has been doing all the work; I have taken the less physical role of sifting through the paperwork that arrives with a death in the family. So while I wade through the insurance forms and the family registry and the charitable donations, Emy sorts through my mother's closets.

They are deep, those closets. Our mama was a fashionable lady with many a social appointment, and she kept all of her fancy suits and ballgowns and hats. Hats. Who wears hats? As for the outfits, we would keep them if only our mother was over five feet tall. I just can't walk into a meeting in pants with a knee-high crotch.

Throwing out trash is a complicated affair in Japan. We have a large chart on the wall that explains the highly detailed procedures. Here are the instructions from the Kobe ward office for throwing out diapers;

Remove waste from paper diapers, wrap them in newspaper, put them in in a small plastic bag, then into the large plastic bag. (Wash waste down the toilet.)

Like, right. I'm going to scoop out the crap from my baby's Pampers so I might throw out a used but clean disposable diaper. Uh huh. And the Pope cleans his own shoes.

Anyway, late this evening we put out what the government calls "bulky garbage." The old vacuum cleaner; fishing poles; the desk with the bullet holes (from the time our house was shot up in a yakuza gang fight—long story).

It's so strange. We feel we're trespassing on a life. Would she approve of us throwing out this cracked vase? Did she want us to keep this silk scarf over that one? We are stripping this house of the very things that made it a home. But of course it was never a green glass clock or wooden shelving that made it a home. It was a smiling little person, and she is already gone.

This morning I set off to secure my daughter her Japanese citizenship. The three-month time limit that began at her birth is tomorrow. Let no one say I don't meet my deadlines.

Anyway, here's what the local ward office needed from me:

1. A two-page form covered in monkey scratch registering my marriage to Kana's dad in 1996 B.C., which I had never bothered to do because I don't live here.
2. My marriage certificate, plus a form translating it into Japanese.
3. Two copies each of Chris's passport, both the current one and the one at the time of our marriage.
4. A form explaining the delay.
5. A two-page form filled with more monkey scratch registering Kana's birth.
6. Her original birth certificate plus two copies of its translation. (Is Bergen County a "ku" or a "shi"? This question takes 20 minutes and three government workers to solve.)
7. A vital organ, a working limb and three of Kana's toenail clippings.

For a country with a birthrate that assures its people's extinction as a race within the century, Japan sure does make it hard to become a citizen. Know how you become a citizen in America? You get born. You pop out of the womb somewhere within its borders, and howdy do, you've got yourself a passport. A lot of folks have a problem with this, of course. And now I see a downside: jobs. Japan's numbing bureaucracy keeps a good chunk of the populace employed, if only to push pencils around on paper.

Normally I'd complain. Today, I don't care. It's done; I did it; I scaled this mountain of forms. My second daughter is a dual citizen of both Japan and the U.S. Mama would be so proud.

Say konnichiwa to my blue-eyed Japanese baby.

I need a decoder ring.

I have enrolled Mika, my four-year-old, in a Japanese kindergarten for the remainder of the month as I stay in the country to sort out my parents' affairs. It is a fiendishly difficult business, this settling of an estate, in a land that never saw a government-required form it didn't like. Also it would help if I could read at the level of a ninth-grader.

But the language I am finding even more opaque is the one of the full-time mother.

Mika has attended school for three days now, and not one day have I gotten the etiquette right. The first day, I drove to school. It's not far, but we live on a steep hill, and I didn't want to traumatize my American-bred tot with a hike on her first day of foreign kindergarten. Big mistake. No one, and I mean no one, drives to school. It turns out I need special permission, which of course means filling out forms, lots of forms.

Yesterday I turned up for the 11:30 a.m. pick-up at 11:30 a.m. Big mistake. We are to arrive at 11:20 for the morning greeting by the teacher. By 11:30, Mika was the last child left in the room, her little shoulders quivering with abandonment.

Today I arrived at 11:15 and marched over to the door of the classroom. Big mistake. We are to wait until the teacher gives the signal, which of course all the other moms knew, because they are not American dorks.

Thursday is the first lunch day. I have so far spent about $100 and four hours assembling all the necessary tools to create the obento lunch. I will not sleep the previous night as I sweat over the proper assembly of the onigiri rice ball.

How do moms work here?

My sister Emy and I visited with the pastor of our local parish yesterday to hand over a wad of cash. In Japanese funerals, guests offer up money as a condolence gift, and our mother had insisted it go to charity. Her longtime church is to be one recipient, and so we take this thick envelope to Father Sakurai. He was the one who visited with my mom in hospice all these months, and the one who agreed to baptize my baby there so that Mama could be present. He is an elegant man with beautiful English and a penchant for tears.

After a teary visit in which he accepted the donation with a waist-deep bow, the priest calls us back.

"Do you have three more minutes?" he asks.

"Of course," says my sister. We immediately sit down again for what must be serious business. I stuff a cork in my baby's mouth to buy those three more minutes.

"I am dying," he says, "to show you my card tricks."

I've been composing this blog post in my head for so long and now that I'm here, typing, my mind is completely blank. I suppose I'll simply tell you what I've been up to so far on my maternity leave:

1. I had a baby.
2. I took my family to Japan.
3. I lost my mother.

All three things happened in such quick succession that I have yet to catch my breath. Sometimes, I have to remember to breathe. Sometimes, like tonight, I cradle my baby girl as she conducts her ritual evening celebrity temper tantrum and I hear my mother telling me how precisely to calm the little bugger down, and I remember my mother is gone, and it knocks my breath away.

I'm not ready yet to analyze my loss in a blog-appropriate way: with quips and funny quotes and clever observations. I can't yet describe to you the mornings I lay my baby Kana on the sofa in her hospice room and fed my mother an increasingly liquid and sparse breakfast (but always of only the best quality: her last meal, I think, was a juice my brother pressed by hand of the finest white peaches from her hometown in southern Japan). I can't yet find deep meaning in my mother's final words to me, or mine to her. I can't sketch for you the weirdness of planning a big funeral and picking up my mother's cremated remains with chopsticks. It is still too raw.

But I did want to tell you, friends, that my mother died last week, because so many of you have inquired after me and my family during my absence from this space. So thanks for indulging me by letting me broadcast private news in a public space. I miss WiP horribly and I hope to be back soon.