Languages
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Hi, this is Secret Blog. This week: languages.
This is my first time sharing a personal essay. I struggled a lot with writing it, both in terms of the subject matter and the classic fighting-off-the-embarrassment-oh-god-what-am-I-doing of it all. I’ve never shared something like this before, and I’m grateful to embark on this new journey.
As always, thanks for being here.
Estoy agradecida *°•★•°∵ ∵°•☆•° . * * * *
My mom is a native Spanish speaker, it was an undeniable fact, and one of the few about herself she could not erase. I am not. This is an unfortunate fact I also cannot erase, but can confuse with — I look like I do, and should, and in certain situations I can force rough shapes of meaning out of words, but frequently don’t or cant.
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One of the earliest memories I have of my mom is a rollercoaster spike of terror, a free-fall of relief when separated by the flank of our station wagon, then terror again as we get into the car together. The memory ends there. I don’t know what I was getting washed out for but the feeling of full bodied relief, as brief as it was, stays with me.
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I hated inviting friends over. My mom’s whole focus, as many people of parents who themselves were raised in an incomprehensible world of dirt and struggle can attest, was my success. It was my singular task in this life to succeed, and as a charismatic and bookish kid, I was the recipient of numerous scholarships by institutions desperate to pad some administrative or federal numbers.
And here, greeted with your first understandings of “lack,” you quickly figure out that playdates at someone else’s house is a better idea.
Aside from the obvious — no TV, no game consoles, parents who’s permanent answer to fun was “you can just play outside!” aka dig holes in the yard (which was chill!) — my mom loved, and I mean loved, to make me and friends do “workbooks.” God, even today that word sends a shiver down my back.
See, my mom, obsessed with success and me getting into Harvard or I’d die and bring the family name down with me while I was at it, felt that school (in nice lottery-earned districts with advanced courses and strict dress codes, I might add!) wasn’t enough. She would pluck me and my friend (the brilliant child of two parents who are the creators of an ABC show that remains a cultural mainstay today) from our diligent hole-digging and repeated attempts at successful dandelion consumption and sit us down with workbooks before a squat, ugly timer. Workbooks with anthropomorphized letters and numbers, eyes seductively winking and lips smacking from their shiny covers, a weird attempt to lure us in with the thrill of bizarre sexuality only 90’s educational materials and canned food products dare hint at. Peel those back and reveal a dismal sight however; dull brown pages that muffled and absorbed the nibs of our cheap wooden pencils.
Where she got these workbooks remains a mystery; she had HUNDREDS of them, with more always on the way.
A nice(????) thing about LA is that you can get literally anything you want if you’re willing to voyage for it. It is a fertile landscape of stuff, rich in strip-malls, and mall-malls and tents or blankets set up alongside the street with cheap DVDs as far as the eye can see… May no wish, fleeting or permanent, be left unfulfilled!
This creates a constant churn of spots going belly-up and out of business, creating an ocean floor of commerce crammed with the skeletons of places. If you get there early enough, which my mom somehow always seemed to, lucky members of the feeding frenzy can come away with unbelievable riches — boxes of Crayola Crayons for 5 cents a box, buckets of novelty erasers, and always workbooks. It never seemed like the whale carcass was anything fun like a toy store or a chocolatier’s workshop, just dusty SAT prep shops and claustrophobic early education outposts deep in the middle of the sprawl.
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One more note on the workbooks — they were just straight up bad! No imagination, no drama, no story! I’m sure you can imagine those panic inducing times-tables sheets we did at 1st graders — the ones that you’d hear your classmates flipping over violently while you were still on question four, desperately trying to figure out how to make 8 bounce four times into a bigger number, before shamefully having to turn in a mostly-empty sheet. Now, imagine a workbook full of those that you and your friend had to do while the world’s angriest woman stomps around or criticizes how you hold your splinter-factory of a pencil. O, Workbook Creator, With So Much More Real Estate To Work With, Could You Not Have Put A Single Interesting Question Or Comic Or Even The Answers Just In The Back? Need We Toil Over 8x4 Again And Again Into Eternity?
You take a break from praying for your immediate and painless destruction to look over at your pleasant friend, and see them melting and losing mass in real time.
Yeah, let’s do your house next time.
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After a while I stopped being allowed to go out, and I lacked the constitution and second-hand embarrassment threshold to subject friends to workbooks or weird invasive questions about if their parents let them wear bras yet. My world dwindled considerably.
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My mom is one of those Mexicans who fucking hates other Mexicans, most Central Americans, really any immigrants at large (another essay for another time). But Spanish, Spanish.
Having Spanish in your pocket makes your existence make sense in Southern California. There is a palpable relief when the language switches, and switched frequently she did. Just not around us. She took a random approach to her opinions on the language; it was either not important (possibly even dangerous for its potential to mar us with an accent), or an essential cultural touchstone she needed to pass on. The opinion of the day was never immediately obvious.
She tried teaching us once upon a time, but it was always on a whim, usually right during a kid’s prime hours for doing literally anything else (holes), and almost always via (puts a coin in a jar) workbooks. I’d sit there, watching my life slip away on the broad ticking face of that impy little timer, getting screamed at for not pronouncing “morada” right. I wanted this language so badly, but not as badly as I wanted to be very far away from where I was.
The words were pebbles in my mouth, then boulders, then ashes.
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I wanted to please her, but there was no way in the slightest to do so. Couldn’t sound out the words? “You don’t even try, see? You know what shit you’re pulling here.” Yawned because it was late? “Aiya, so tired, so tired…. Why are you tired? You just hate your family.” It was unrelenting, I would blink back tears, staring at the workbook pages so long the illustrations of coked-out zorrillos grinning wildly would melt together.
Eventually, respite. The timer rips its hideous bell and my sister and I flee to our respective hovels. My mom sits alone at the table as the scene fades to black.
Eventually those lessons stopped too.
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Sometimes, a lot of times, I feel guilty for only kindasortaunpoquito knowing the language, and then I try to do something about it. I’ve left that Duolingo owl to rot more times that I can count. I Google “spanish classes nashville” and imagine the delicious fantasy of myself as the kind of person who has enough energy at 6pm on Tuesday’s and Thursday's to chatter and laugh my way through a three hour class. I try Youtube classes and fail at not developing a parasocial comparison relationship with the red-lipsticked instructor. Recently I’ve just been reading Spanish to see if anything happens, with moderate success.
I’m on the other side of a thin window. I can pick up things, muffled, and not as easily as I did in California. If they see me, an intruder peeking through the window, I freeze. An imposter, an interloper, a burglar with no target.
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When I left home I felt like I was making a deal with a god I did not know or understand. A friend’s lockscreen has the quote “The price of your new life is your old one.” I feel that.
In leaving California I lost a lot. I saved myself, sure, but sometimes I try to get the coin-pieces of myself from the bottom of the well I threw them into during this dark time of desperation. I feel like Orpheus leading his bride to the sun — if I look back, my current life will disappear, but curiosity and guilty duty gnaws. A ghostship of the life I left behind sails on the horizon.
The three times I’ve gone back to my childhood home since moving away I open every cabinet and door in the house, crying. Few things are the same, and the things that are — a plastic bowl now black from years of microwave use instead of the teal I remember it, an alarm clock, a bedspread — shocked me for some reason. I didn’t open the cabinet where the workbooks lived. I didn’t know if the which result would be more comforting, or if comfort can exist in a wound at all.
No sé. Así que va.
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