My marriage did not survive.

The question I am always asked is, “How could you leave your children?” How could you be the mother who walks away? As if my children were embedded inside me, even years after birth, and had to be surgically removed? As if I abandoned them on a desert island, amid flaming airplane debris and got into the lifeboat alone?

Hyperbolic. Inflammatory. But that’s part of the point. Because my relationship with my children survives. In fact, it has improved.

It was a matter of months — perhaps two — when my husband and I began fighting long distance. Our marriage ran aground on expectations, promises and old habits. Shoulds. What we should be doing, what we should want, what we should do or say. We had been together since I was 17. We had spent more of our lives together as a couple than we had apart. And we destroyed our marriage in less time than it takes a credit card company to report you for nonpayment.

I will not tell you the children never noticed I was gone. Though there were plenty of times I could not get them to stop watching Barney to talk to me on the telephone, I also received some very sad phone calls and transcribed e-mails, including one that said, “When I called you last night I felt like I really missed you very much.” But when they arrived in Japan to live with me four months after I left, I was the one who was in trouble. They were happy — in love with their father and with me — thrilled with the temples and the trains and the samurai castles and the bean cakes shaped like fish. I was in “mommy shock.” Without a strong marriage to support me, after four months alone and in a new country I had grown to love but was only just beginning to understand how to navigate, I had no idea what to do with these bouncing balls of energy. Even feeding them, finding them a bathroom, was a challenge.

It raised a little issue for me that I have neglected to mention: I never wanted to be a mother.

I was afraid of being swallowed up, of being exhausted, of opening my eyes one day, 20 (or 30!) years after they were born, and realizing I had lost myself and my life was over.

Yet their father wanted a family. He begged. He promised to take care of everything; he removed every possible obstacle I could think of. He would be the primary caretaker if I would just have them.

It all makes sense now, doesn’t it? I am a cold bitch. I was never a mother in anything but name. I am probably one of those women who will be arrested for going to a nearby bar and leaving my children asleep in a house with a faulty pilot light: a house in flames.

I am a bad mother.

But that’s not true either.

My problem was not with my children, but with how we think about motherhood. About how a male full-time caretaker is a “saint,” and how a female full-time caretaker is a “mother.” It is an equation we do not question; in fact we insist on it. And we punish the very idea that there are other ways to be a mother.

My trip to Japan changed me. I went from being uncertain, ambivalent, loving but overwhelmed, to being a damned good mother. My marriage failed, and I gave primary physical custody to my husband. But I kept joint custody, and I did not take the house in Hawaii and jump a plane into the sunset. I moved down the block and began the long, hard work of proving to my children, and myself, that I am here.

These days, my sons live and sleep at their father’s house. They can walk to their “other house” — mine — which they do several times a week. They come over after school and get picked up at bedtime, and in between I help them with their homework, we cook dinner together, eat and clean up together, and we talk about the day. Normally, we get in a few rounds of Quiddler or Yahtzee, or we Hulu episodes of old TV shows, like “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution,” that we missed because we were on the plane coming home from a two-week vacation in Hawaii with their grandparents. And we cry together when Jamie cries, and when a 16-year-old girl talks about how she might only have seven years to live. We do a lot of hugging, even in public, even though they are now boys entering their teens.

I had to leave my children to find them. In my part-time motherhood, I get concentrated blocks of time when I can be that 1950s mother we idealize who was waiting in an apron with fresh cookies when we got off the school bus and wasn’t too busy for anything we needed until we went to bed. I go to every parent-teacher conference; I am there for performances and baseball games. My former husband is there too. Though it was not easy for him, he has made it possible for me to define my own motherhood, and for our sons to have a life of additions, rather than subtraction, of a relative peace, rather than constant accusation.

Yesterday, on a blog, I read a plea from a young woman who was planning to go to a residency and leave her 2- and 4-year-old children. “Am I crazy?” she wrote. “Someone tell me.” I thought about answering, but I didn’t know what to say. Would I do it again? Yes. Should she do it? Only she can answer that question. Then I looked at the date and realized: She was already gone.

I am hoping this year’s National Day of Remembrance will fill some of the silences that stand between me and the internment. I have been trying to find out what happened for the past eight years of my life.

My mother was interned as a child. And, although she has no memory of it, I imagine her there: a 4-year-old Japanese-American Shirley Temple with glossy black curls and a spray of freckles beneath her wide, brown eyes. She is a danger to no one, and yet she is posed on a swing made from scrap wood and borrowed rope, living in a 12-by-20-foot room with her family somewhere in the Colorado prairie. She is singing a song about a little red bird, “Akai tori kotori,” in the language she shares with her watchful grandmother. A language she has tried, and failed, to relearn.

Why can’t my mother speak Japanese? Why were there no pictures of the barracks on the walls of her childhood home? None of snowball fights in front of a barbed-wire fence, or Christmas dinners served in shifts in the crowded mess hall? We didn’t talk about the internment in our family. When my mother eventually found out about it in high school, she was shocked, but felt no need to pass this information along to me.

This silence about internment is not unusual in the Japanese-American community. In fact, the reluctance to talk about it has become something to be remarked on, a well-documented curiosity. If you ask someone what happened — what it was really like to be swept from home and put in a camp for years — you might be told a funny story. One woman I have heard of said, “If it weren’t for the internment, we never would have had a vacation.” My uncle told me that the internment was “the best thing that ever happened” because it allowed the Japanese-Americans to prove their loyalty. These disclaimers are incredible and so at odds with the racial hysteria, the stigma and upheaval of the time.

In my search for the genesis of this silence, I have been told it is cultural: The Japanese don’t complain; the Japanese respect authority; the Japanese are indirect, and do not say what they mean. In other words, they are silent because they are Japanese, just as they were untrustworthy because they were Japanese. Inscrutable, inexplicable — and internable — because they were Japanese. By tracing everything back to race, we don’t have to concern ourselves with it. But, given the choice between feeling pain and deflecting it, who among us would endlessly relive such a terrible betrayal?

I learned a valuable lesson about deflecting this pain from two sisters who shared their memories of the internment with me. The younger one spoke about the terrible hardships her family went through after Pearl Harbor was bombed — stories, she admitted, that she had never been able to share with her children, despite their repeated requests. She cried as she told me how her father and her older sister’s husband were taken in the FBI sweeps because they were leaders in the community; how her sister, who had a small child, was separated from the rest of the family by travel restrictions.

It took years for the family to be reunited, and when her father was finally returned to them, the dust and dirt in the incessant wind that blew through the camp left permanent scars on his lungs.

Her older sister didn’t say a word to me about her family. Instead, she spoke very passionately about the community in camp, the socials they held to raise people’s spirits, the crafts. When she laughed, which she did often, she held her hand casually over her mouth so her teeth wouldn’t show, and whenever I tried to steer her gently back to her own experiences, she replied with, “Well, I think maybe most of us …” “Most of us.” I could not get her to say the words, “to me.”

The stories these sisters told me were diametrically opposite and equally true. But the most interesting thing was how each woman used her silence to protect not only herself, but also her children, from the pain that sprang solely from being Japanese in America during the war. It is a simple fact that the most pervasive silence about the camps can be found within Japanese-American families. And that’s not all. In my generation, most of us don’t speak the language; we don’t bear Japanese names or follow Buddhist or Shinto religions; some of us don’t even live “too near” other Japanese. And although we do eat at least some Japanese food, many of us –including me and all 14 of my cousins — are biracial. This Americanization is intended to be a safeguard, and the silence a gift, to ensure that we will never again be sent “on vacation.”

Despite the failure of my Web search, I know that Japanese-Americans will use the National Day of Remembrance this year to remind the country about the internment so that no other group will ever be systematically excluded because of race. They will also speak out about the larger issues of constitutional rights, tolerance, prejudice and race — all of which are unfortunately all too relevant as thoughtless, hostile racism continues all over the world.

But this civil rights agenda is only the beginning. The silence within our families also must be broken. My generation needs to hear — and feel — the individual experiences that our parents and grandparents went through, and not only to complete our family histories. The internment is within us; its effect is hereditary. But if we cannot recognize it, if we believe we are immune, we may fail to see the racial boundaries that still exist all around us.

This happened to me. The truth is, I didn’t suddenly find out about the internment eight years ago. Like my mother, I learned about it in high school. When I was a junior, my grandmother was invited to school to talk about her experiences during the war. She told my class about the evacuation, and how the family was given a week to sell everything they owned. One of their neighbors agreed to buy their brand-new player piano, then did not return until several hours before the family had to leave and gave them some piddling amount for it “to be nice” because he could just as easily have taken it for nothing once they had gone.

The story should have haunted me, but I ignored it for almost 15 years. I didn’t have the information or the empathy to ask my grandmother what happened next, or any of the questions like “Who am I?” and “Where did I come from?” that I want answered now. Instead, I accepted the minor celebrity her visit brought me, and marveled with all my friends about those poor people and what they went through.

The assimilation my family had worked so hard to achieve was complete — at least at that moment. There was still so much silence in our family that I barely knew then that I was Japanese. The internment was over; there was nothing to remember.

They had made me untouchable. It would never happen to me.

Eric is looking for a new car.

Mama’s profile flickers through the doorway, tossed clothing hanging over the basket on her hip as she slips down the hall. Eric sees the smooth bun of gray hair she has twisted against her neck, wrapped in a thick, blue ribbon. The ribbon confirms everything he knows about the day. She, too, is expecting something, though she’s still in her housedress and isn’t quite ready. He freezes, straight and tingling, hoping she will pass, and knowing he’s never been that lucky. She doesn’t even pause to drop the laundry basket as she steps into the room.

“What are you doing in here?” Her palm swings in a wide wing to slap his mouth. “Get off that couch.”

The slap misses his mouth and tears his hand away; it tears his feet off the ledge and his body follows, his shoulders hunching while the rest of him stands still. “Waiting for my mother,” he says.

Mama sways toward him again, but doesn’t strike. “Who said …” Her voice trips, her thought unfinished. In a peek, Eric sees she looks pale. The lines in her face stand out strangely, like little rivers on a map, and his dizziness returns once more. It’s not a bright light in his head this time, more like worms, like Mama’s wrinkles, and they tickle as they make their way to his stomach. As time stretches this unexpected moment, Mama kneels in front of him and places the laundry basket at her side with some effort. Their faces are at the same level, peeking over the top of the sill. They are close enough to touch, but he doesn’t expect it; they never do. Eric watches, indirectly, as the light turns silver in one of her black eyes.

“Your mother?” she asks finally, taking the hand she slapped to rub it lightly between her own.

“Jack says I have a different mother. Last night. He said she’s coming here today.” Slowly, so she won’t notice, Eric parts his lips and draws a new breath to hold.

Mama withdraws — he can feel it — until she is far from him, far even from her own stroking hands. Sadness pulls at her singsong syllables when she finally speaks. “What were you doing, Eric?”

“Jack … my mother — ” Eric bursts, another wish released. “I asked Jack if my mother was coming to live here. He said, ‘Hold your breath’.”

Mama leaves Eric by the window and calls for his Uncle Jack. He can sense her anger in the quiet that crushes her words. In other houses on the block, Eric knows, arguments scatter with yells and the crash of objects into walls, but Japanese is different. Not a language to be shouted. Maybe the words fly apart and lose their meaning, he doesn’t know for sure.

As Mama and Jack begin to fight, Eric finds his little sister, Mariko. He tucks her thumb into his fist and leads her onto the scrawny patch of grass between their house and the street. Cars whoosh by on black pavement. Eric expects to see army trucks and jeeps, even after a year of living outside the internment camp, but these cars are low and shiny. They look like bubbles, with half-mustaches over their spoked, skinny wheels, and they drive too fast to see inside. Eric’s world is smaller now that they moved to Los Angeles. There are so many bright and painted houses and no prairie that runs forever through the barbed wire.

His house is a good change though, with everything, even the toilets, right there inside. There’s a kitchen with flowers on the walls and two magic boxes: a hot one, called an oven, and one that’s icy cold. The floors are made of wood stripes so smooth and clean he can lay on them. They don’t hurt the way the brick floors at camp did. More than anything, he loves his new floors.

Under the tree, Mariko grabs the swing Jack made for Eric one day when he was in a good mood and could remember Eric’s name. Her first jump up misses. “Help me, Eric.”

“Jump higher. You’re knocking the seat away.”

His sister’s impossibly round eyes examine the wood plank, then she smiles. “Please?”

“All right.” He wonders why he always gives in to her. “But don’t get dirty. Our mother is coming.”

Mariko yanks her head toward the house looking for Mama. “Not.” She is pleased with the wiggle she’s made with the swing and shakes the ropes to broaden it. “Swing me.”

Eric sighs. “Mama will push you later,” he says. She is not yet four — too young to understand that her mother was missing and has been found. He didn’t know either, not at first, until Jack pointed out that Mama was an old lady, as old as a grandmother, which was what she really was. Eric’s grandmother. But it was the words old lady that stuck and reminded him that Mama had always been too busy for anything he wanted to do. Like last month, when she wouldn’t help him make something for sharing time at school. She gave him her Bible — a book filled with tiny drawings of faces and shaking leaves, stickmen and falling boxes. He made up an entire story using just the first page, but Mrs. Morris, his first grade teacher, stopped him before he was partway through. She told him the drawings were Japanese characters; he was horrified, suddenly Japanese again when he was trying so hard to be American.

He wished she’d take back the words, let him sit down gracefully, but as each second passed, he was standing there. In front of the blackboard, in front of the class, with each tick on the smiling clock, still unable to read the book. And with nothing left to say.

Eric’s sister hangs from the wooden seat beside him, waiting. “Swing me.”

“I can’t, Mari, you aren’t big enough!”

“I am, I am,” she sings, dazzled by her lifting legs. “Swing me.”

Since this isn’t what he planned, Eric says, “I have a secret. You want to know what it is?”

He waits for her nod. “Then come over here.”

Mariko slips off the wooden seat and settles between his legs, facing the driveway. “What is it?” she whispers.

“A surprise. You’ll see.”

She considers his words, then says, “I’m going to swing.”

As she tries to rise, he holds her down. “Someone’s coming,” he says. “We have to watch for her car.”