The hands coming out of the holes represent those who wanted help from me as I served them as a mental health therapist. As I stopped to help them, my road home grew longer. When my daughter was very young, I’d rush to my car at the end of the day, hoping that she wouldn’t be the last child picked up from preschool– in my guilt-filled mind, that would make me one of the worst mothers on earth. It would mean that I valued my work more than my daughter. This was irrational. My guilty feeling came from conditioning, under the influence of a traditional belief in Japanese culture that stay-at-home mothers are better mothers than those who work outside the home. The path in the image represents my desire to return to my cultural roots with my daughter in my arms, even if some parts of the culture were unhelpful to me as a working mother. As I became “Americanized” during my stay in the U.S., I wondered if I still knew the way home, back to my culture, in order to share it with my child.