Faith, Family, & Focaccia

A faith and culture Mommy blog, because real life gets all mixed together like that.

Tag Archives: Language


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Speaking of shame

It had been a while since I posted. This is not for lack of potential content. Actually the last month and more has been full of experiences that fulfill the potential of this European adventure to expose me to reflection-inspiring ideas. However, it turns out that the life that inspires writing actually takes a lot of time to live. Funny how that works. Now that my travel schedule and language training is taking a bit of a break, I have (at least in theory) a little more time to reflect on what I have been learning. Which has brought me to reflect on how this recent phase of frenetic activity started with my long-delayed return to formal learning: Italian classes.

Learning a new language, especially this beautiful latin tongue, was one of the many wonderful promises of our expatriate assignment. I studied spanish for 6 years in jr. high and high school, but while I did relatively well in class I never spoke with fluency. The ability to actually speak, not just stutter through basic requests, but to speak and think easily in another language has been a long-time dream. Since virtually all experts agree that immersion is the only efficient way to obtain such facility in adulthood, I moved to Italy full of expectation. As I have reflected in an earlier post (Mother Tongue and Limited Proficiency), all has not gone as easily as I expected. Simply being surrounded by the language is not sufficient in and of itself to produce facility with an unfamiliar language.

Perhaps an example can best illustrate my point. Immersion allows a language learner to repeatedly hear common phrases as they occur in daily conversation. Unfortunately, hearing a phrase over and over only embeds it in your brain when you can accurately hear the pronunciation. “Va bene” (roughly translated as “it’s good” or “OK” although the literal translation is “it goes well”)  sounds very much like “fa bene” when you are still learning italian pronunciation. Moreover, “fa bene” could very well be a perfectly reasonable phrase for all sorts of situations, because “fa” is the third person, singular, present tense of fare and fare is the most ubiquitous word in the Italian language. The dictionary definitions for fare fill up three-quarters of a page and include meanings as diverse as “do”, “make”, “build”, “be”, “manage”, and “act”  among many others. When first learning Italian it seems like “fare” is without limit in its applications, and the fact that you hear “_a bene” twenty times a day in all kinds of situations seems to match well with this versatility. I do not know how many times I said “fa bene” in my first months here before my husband was kind enough to correct me. To accurately learn a new language one needs more than just exposure – one also need instruction that can prevent the embarrassment of mis-learning.

Despite the mental fog brought on by the endless permutations of “fare,” however, I have approached my language acquisition task with gusto. For more than 19 months I consulted my Italian-English dictionary, drilled with written verb and grammar exercises, and compiled questions for my language exchange partners in my efforts to learn the language. But mostly, I just dove in and tried it. I knew I was making many, many, mistakes, but my other alternatives were worse: either simply staying silent, or speaking excruciatingly slowly as I stopped to conjugate every verb and to figure out the gender and number of each noun to assign the appropriate article. I just kept trying, mistakes and all, and looked forward to the day when I would finally have the child-free time to take real lessons and kick-start my fluency.

My first activity in my very first Italian class was a reading/conversation activity. We were given a list of statements in Italian that presented opinions about the necessary tools and activities for learning a foreign language. We were supposed to read them all, pick the three with which we most agreed and discuss our selections with a partner, in Italian, of course. The statements were all written in very absolute language (i.e. – “it is impossible to learn a foreign language after the age of 18″; or “the most important thing is to read something every day”). As a result, I only completely agreed with one statement of the ten, the contention that (in my rough translation) “it is better to try to speak even if you make mistakes.” This had certainly been my experience in the prior 19 months. My italian language experience to that date could be fairly accurately described as an extended exercise in “speaking even if you make mistakes.” While I believed this was important to the learning process, however, I was hoping to move beyond this phase now that I was in a formal Italian course.

Looking back over the past 8 weeks since I began my course, the unreasonableness of that expectation seems as obvious as the parallel pipe dream of fluency through “immersion.” Of course a mere 45 hours of classroom instruction were not sufficient to transform me into an easy bilingual conversationalist. Of course I could not decipher the complicated formulas of Italian grammatical structure through 1 hour lessons on roughly 15 specific grammatical topics. Of course the mistakes I made blithely for 19 months of halting speech in my new adopted language would not simply disappear once I finally got formal help to “learn Italian.” It just is not that easy. I was recently informed by an American acquaintance who has lived in Italy for 20 years that Italian still does not feel natural — and that is with the help of an Italian husband and a bilingual daughter.

But here is the irony: the one statement I agreed with about learning a new language is less comfortable to me now than it was that first day that I stepped into the classroom. On an intellectual level I can agree that you have to just speak and not worry about making mistakes, but I am just tired of making them. What is worse, now that I have a little instruction under my belt, I am more aware of making them. Where before I would chatter away blithely ignoring the subjunctive tense, now I am paralyzed every time I begin a phrase by introducing uncertainty (“I think that…”, We hoped that…” etc.) because I now know that I need to conjugate the following verb as congiuntivo and I cannot remember how to form the verbs. Where before the versatile pronoun/participle “ci” was just another baffling mystery of the Italian language, now it is a a very unnatural part of speech (to a native English speaker) that I nevertheless feel that I should be able to use, and use correctly.

There is another memorable moment from my first day of class: I learned the word vergogna. At first I thought it meant embarrassment, because in the Italian-only context of the class where everything must be learned from context, this seemed the most appropriate translation. When I later looked it up however, I learned that the more precise translation is shame. Whether used to substitute for embarrassment or shame, the word has been painfully relevant in the weeks that have followed.

At the suit shop when we are buying Tyler’s new suit I deliberately interaction with the salesman in English. I don’t feel like I have the vocabulary to discuss cuts and fit in Italian and as an international company I know the staff speak English. At the end of an extended conversation he learns that we are not visiting; we actually live in Milano. “Oh, how long do you leeve here?” (English is not easy for him, you see) “Almost 2 years.” I feel vergogna that I have demanded this interaction be conducted in English, when it is now obvious to him that I have far less excuse than he does for my difficulty in my non-native tongue.

I meet the mothers of the Gigglemonster’s classmates and I try valiantly to converse with them in Italian. They are patient with me, and listen politely while I struggle, and stammer — a direct result of my new-found consciousness about just how poor my Italian really is. They make a point of calling me over to their group as we wait outside the gate for school pick-up to begin and they do their best to include me in their developing friendships. But they chatter away in Italian, talking over each other and exclaiming dramatically, true to all the classic Italian stereotypes, and I stand there in silence, able to follow only part of what is being said, and feeling like an outsider. I am wishing there were a polite way that I could just stand alone to avoid the embarrassment of my incompetence, and I feel vergogna for this response to their friendliness.

I snap back in response to my wonderful mother-in-law’s effort to encourage me about just how well I am learning Italian. Twenty months of frustration and embarrassment and loneliness come gushing out as I deliver an impromptu lecture about the difficulties of struggling with language every day. She doesn’t understand; she doesn’t hear all the mistakes I make and how humiliating they are; for her Italian is a fun exercise while for me it is a necessary tool that I do not wield as well as I need to in order to function in my daily life. She is as gracious in receiving this undeserved outburst as she is in everything else, but again I feel vergogna. I have received her kindness and support with recrimination rather than gratitude, and that is something of which to be ashamed in any language.

Shame is not a comfortable emotion. I have had moments in the past few months were I began to long for this experience to just be over. I began to anticipate the luxury of living in an environment where I speak the language better, not worse, than most people I meet. I began to dream of escape from days punctuated by embarrassment, and the shameful light that embarrassment casts on my own lack of maturity. As the limits of even intensive study have killed my dream of easy fluency I have wanted to throw up my hands and say “what’s the point? I am leaving in a year anyhow. Why keep struggling?”

But the answer is that there is a lesson in shame, if I will only learn it. If I abandon my efforts and resign myself to the shame, then it really has been pointless. All the study, and the effort, and the embarrassment will have borne no fruit in my life. I will not speak Italian well, and, even more importantly, my understanding of myself will not have been transformed by this experience. BUT. If I keep trying even when it is frustrating and difficult, I will have learned that I can do things even when I do them poorly. I do not like doing things poorly. It is not comfortable. But it is also NOT shameful. To continue to try, to make mistakes and not give up, to be the slowest person in the conversation and keep trying to participate; that is something to be proud of.

Up until very recently when people ask me if I speak Italian, or when Italian friends assert that I do speak Italian, my response has been embarrassed denial. “No, no, no. Non davvero. Not really.” But I recently realized something. The very first Italian phrase I learned, before even moving to Italy, was  “non parlo bene l’italiano” – “I do not speak Italian well.” From the very first days of my residency here I have been using this phrase to apologize when I do not understand something said to me, or to explain why I am speaking so slowly, or thinking of the right thing to say. I do not say “non parlo italiano” – ” I do not speak Italian.” I say “non parlo bene.” And that is true. I don’t speak well. But I do speak Italian. And that is quite an accomplishment.

I speak Italian poorly, and there is no shame in that.

 


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Talking “the Talk”

I started this post two weeks ago, but could not finish it. It felt too unsettled and raw. I didn’t know how to conclude my observations honestly while still leaving the possibility to move forward in a positive direction. Well, I think I am starting to see that way, but I am leaving the beginning as I started it, because it is honest and hopefully witnesses to the important lesson I have learned. I hope the resulting narrative is coherent enough to make a good read…

Well, school has started. If I were to judge by Facebook posts from other stay-at-home moms, or advertising targeted at the same audience, I should be in a state of delirious bliss. For the first time, both of my babies donned school uniforms and backpacks and set of on the adventure of formal education. This leaves me with that previously elusive commodity; free time. Time to walk the city without a stroller or diaper bag; time to exercise; time to read non-picture books; time to engage in activities because I find them personally enriching (with no offense intended to the Itsy bitsy spider or Giro giro tondo).

While all of these things are a blessed luxury that I know I am incredibly privileged to have, I do not find myself luxuriating in the promised relaxation. Rather, I am feeling anxious. Anxious because of the one thing I am not free to do. I am not free to help my children deal with the stress that comes from being some of the few foreign children in an environment of Italian children; children who all share a common language and culture which creates unintended barriers to friendship.

Despite the fact that Princess Imagination has already spent nearly a year and a half attending their English-language school in Milan, the challenge for her of being a shy, American child has come home to me in a new way this year. Perhaps this is because I myself have begun to feel more comfortable here. I know the routines of the school schedule; I know the other parents in her class; I am even her class’s parent representative to the Parents Advisory Board, with some share of responsibility for welcoming new families. With this is mind, I sat my Princess down a few days before the start of school to have “the talk.” I was inspired by a wonderful entry on the momastery blog (see: http://momastery.com/blog/2012/08/23/the-talk/), although I simplified it down to be appropriate for a newly five-year-old. In essence, “the talk” is the exhortation to one’s children to be aware of other children in the class that are excluded, and to be intentional about including them. It is a wonderful lesson to teach children from a young age, and I am very committed to teaching it to our children. I also know that it may be a challenging lesson for Princess Imagination, given her shyness. Nevertheless, I talked about this responsibility to Princess Imagination. I reminded her how it felt to be the new kid in her class when we first arrived in Milan it February 2011. We talked about her first friend here (a sweet, Milan-born, British girl who has since moved to Australia), and what a difference this friend’s welcoming smile made in her first months at school. I encouraged her to be actively looking for any children in her class who were having a hard time fitting in, and to make a point of being a friend to them. We talked about all these things, she agreed, and I felt very good about my parenting.

Then I picked her up from school the first day. When I entered the classroom the children were busy talking and playing together. Or I should say, almost all of them were. My sweet Princess was sitting alone on the little reading couch looking around at all the other children with a sad little look on her face.  When she saw me she ran up for a big hug and was suddenly all smiles, but that look of loneliness had struck at my heart.

On the walk home we talked about her day. She liked her teacher. She liked being back at school where she could engage in focused learning activities. She liked the praise she received from her teachers for her good behavior and academic work. They had a music lesson that she really enjoyed. Then I asked about garden time (“recess” for my American readers).

Me: “How was garden time?”

P.I.: “Ummm, OK.”

Me: “Who did you play with?”

P.I.: “No one.”

Me: “Why not?”

P.I: “They were all playing with their friends from last year.”

Me: “But you have friends from last year.”

P.I.: “Um, not really.”

Just 16 words, but they hit me like a wrecking ball impacting somewhere in the region of my solar plexus. Emotions went spinning off from the point of impact in a variety of directions. I was devastated at the thought of my sweet little girl wandering around that play yard looking for a friend and not finding one – for an hour! I was overcome with the awareness of just how much I loved her and longed for her happiness. I could sense my mother bear instincts let out an internal roar, and I felt an instinctual impulse to protect her from anyone and everyone who hurt her with this rejection. I wanted to cry, and hug her, and tell her that she was the most amazing, kind, fun, lovable girl in the world and that anyone who did not recognize what a privilege it was to know her was blind.

Then another thought supplanted all of these emotions with a new fear: that I had made this experience worse before it even happened. Suddenly “the talk” we had a few days earlier sounded much different when I considered how it may have sounded to her little ears. I had initiated “the talk” based on the blithe assumption that my daughter would be in a position to offer inclusion to any excluded child. But how would my encouragement to include others sounds to a little girl who felt excluded? Would it sound like an irrelevant instruction that was outside her control? Would it sound like a judgment of the other children, with whom she nevertheless wanted to be friends? Would it sound like a declaration of her failure to be included?

I had to do something, both to help her overcome this difficult experience and to manage my own swirling emotions. So I started to game plan with her. I identified children she should approach at playtime (based on friendships from last year and facility with English). I coached her on strategies to coax others to include her. I reassured her that the first few weeks of school it was hard for the Italian children to get back into the habit of speaking English. And I, perhaps belatedly, reminded her that she was a wonderful friend and that she did in fact have friends from last year who knew this.

My sweet, patient, little Princess accepted all of this well-intentioned Mommy interference with more grace than it deserved, and faithfully implemented most of my advise in the coming days. Each day after school I would ask about her day, and (I blush to admit), would quiz her about her social interactions when the information was not forthcoming. Some days the reports were good: she had played with a friend, she was getting to know the new girl in class, she wanted me to invite this or that friend over for a play date. Other days, she reported solitary garden time “just walking around”, or replayed an interaction where she sought inclusion and was rebuffed.

As we engaged in this daily report three things slowly began to dawn on me that have both humbled me and made me incredibly proud. First, I began to realize the intensity of my own reactions to her reports. When she talked about time spent with a friend I was elated. When she reported difficulties I was crushed. All mothers, of course, are invested in their children’s well-being and want them to experience acceptance and friendship, but I started to feel that perhaps I was taking this too far. Perhaps I wasn’t entirely reacting to Princess Imagination’s feelings of happiness or loneliness, but was rather projecting my own past experiences onto hers. As a shy child myself, who often felt excluded and longed for inclusion and friendship, perhaps I was responding more to my own unresolved insecurities than to her current feelings. As I confronted this possibility I made my second discovery: that Princess Imagination’s reports did, in fact, lack the emotional intensity of my responses. There were shades of sadness in descriptions of “not being able to find a friend to play with,” but no desperate loneliness or self-loathing. There was some happiness in reports that she had played with a given friend, or been included in another group, but not elation. In fact, Princess Imagination was generally taking whatever came as it came, and not making a big deal out of it. And this led to my third, most humbling realization: my own anxiety was creating a much bigger crisis for my daughter than would have otherwise existed. She was now required to report each day on her success or failure in a task that she found challenging. She had to process my emotions and insecurities as well as her own, and mine were substantially more volatile. She had to implement my strategies and solutions to improve her social standing, because if she did not she would certainly face questions about this failure. I had turned the understandable social awkwardness of an introverted American 5-year old in a class comprised almost entirely of Italian children into a problem that had to be solved.

I have recently been reading Dorothy Sayers’s amazing book The Mind of the Maker in the later pages of which she lays out a very detailed and cogent argument for why the habit of approaching life as a series of “problems” to be “solved” is both irrational and dangerous. I can now add my response to Princess Imaginations lonely garden time as another illustration of her point. When I approached it as a problem, with whose solution I was obsessed, I lost sight of the life that was experiencing this challenge and I forgot the truth that each day of her life is a part of her story that is building her character and providing her with the opportunity to grow into a strong and creative young woman who can cope when life is imperfect. A young woman who can even cope, with amazing tolerance and love, with an interfering, anxiety-ridden mother trying to re-write her own past through my daughter’s present.

As I said, this past few weeks has been very humbling. But it has also been a blessing. I am blessed to have a new vision of my daughter’s strength and wisdom as she takes a challenging experience she never asked for and makes the most of it. I am blessed with the knowledge that my mistakes are not irrevocable because she can forbear them and find some nuggets of helpful advice mixed with the garbage. And I am blessed with another reminder of just why I am not relying on my own goodness to perfect my soul, but instead resting in the grace of my Savior.

I have heard it said that parenting is the hardest job you will ever love. I would add that it is also among the most humbling experiences that will ever make your spirit soar.

Although I sometimes fail to recognize it, my Princess has her own kind of confidence

They always have each other.