Is this how it feels?

In the last few months my heart has been on a rollercoaster. Not physically, just emotionally. My son goes off to college in a few days. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not going to write like those bloggers who write so beautifully and fluently about the philosophy of bidding farewell to teenagers. Mine is just going to be my take on the bicultural balance of raising my son in an Indian household in the American soil with our parenting skills learnt from both cultures and letting him take on the American world by himself. 

        It's not like this was a surprise. This is like waiting to deliver a child. It's not just waiting nine months, we have waited for almost 18 years. We knew this was coming and yet when I realize how soon this is coming at me, my heart tightens.

       When I consider all the friends he's going to have, the strides he will make in his life, the degree that he will earn at the end of the next few years, the job that he will land, my heart swells.

       When I see my younger child gaze at her lifelong companion in wonderment and bewilderment as he prepares to leave her behind for college, then my heart races. In his absence, will she blossom? will she wilt?

       When I see that his clothes are packed, his toiletries being readied, to do lists scattered here and there, then my heart sinks.

       When I see him pray in earnest, recite Bible verses,when he takes so much pride in his summer jobs, when I see him beam with confidence and apprehension all in the same moment, then my heart rate rises and falls.

       When I ponder how he will be treated in his life, will it be for who he is? for the beauty of his heart and his personhood? or would it be based on his skin color? and be treated different from others? then my heart stops.

       I cannot begin to imagine what his mind is going through. After all at the end of the day, this is more about him than me nursing my arrhythmic heart back to rhythm. 

      When I begin to panic,I turn to my solace and read these verses. "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight". Proverbs 3:5-6 

   "Be strong and take heart, all you who hope in the Lord." Psalm 31:24

At this, my heart calms down. He’s got this and he’s got this. 
Be still,my heart.

Spoken English

It suddenly occurred to me that I have been doing it all wrong all along. For years, I used to catch myself when I spoke English wrong or mispronounced  an English word. I even sought to learn the correct American pronunciation lest someone would correct it for me and then I’d feel all embarrassed.

I was very proud of myself when I finally began to speak English confidently. My grammar was decent, my spelling was topnotch and I spoke English the American way(most of the time)-with the right emphasis in the right letter and rolling my t’s as d’s and sharpening up on my the puns and idioms. 

One day it occurred to me that my feat in English language is nothing short of an epic achievement-despite its flaws and shortcomings and awful pronunciations. English to me and million of other immigrants is indeed a second language. We speak our mother tongue and we know its alphabet, its grammar and its literature and we speak it so fluently and easily. It was out of our own will, that we chose to start learning to speak English as adults when we moved to a country that required us to speak English. Schools in our country taught us to read and write in English, but we chose to learn to speak it because we needed it as immigrants along with our passports and visas.

When we first started to speak with English speakers, we stumbled and we fell and finally got up just enough to hold a conversation in English. And when we did speak with fear and hesitation, there were times when we heard ourselves search for that english word so desperately in our brains to have  that word pop up a day late or never at all. We struggled with past and present tense, the correct gender, using the articles at the right place, prepositions and many a times we just wanted to give up. On top of mustering the courage to learn this new language, we were also expected to be familiar with the American slang and cuss words, the innuendos and racial slurs. Last but not least, we were expected to speak with an American accent! If we didn’t, we were corrected or worse, laughed at.

You see, when a foreign national comes to my country, we do not expect them to speak in our native tongue overnight or ever. We show them grace or at the most, waive off their attempts and move on. 

English might be the most spoken language of the world, but when you compete against China and India, the most and 2^ndmost populated countries, with their own dialects and innumerable different languages………well, you do the math. I almost want to say our attempts at speaking English is more of doing a favor to make lives easier for those that cannot speak our language.

So, I would like to express, it is OK to speak wrong or broken English, it is OK to make mistakes but it is NOT OK for immigrants to be embarrassed about it and it is NOT OK for English speakers to expect all of us with our own native tongue to speak in impeccable English.

We totally get monolingualism and its limitations and we hope you get bilingualism and its limitations, as well.