Bi-Ligual Kiddos

Well, the election is over. What a whirlwind ride is was, I´m beyond happy with the choice Americans made. Obama´s election speech was pure beauty and McCain conceeded with graciousness. Let´s move foward. I learned yesterday that Obama speaks Spanish, wow. For me, President Elect Obama just keeps becoming the total package. (This is not to say he will fail, all presidents do, let´s be realists.) When I watched Obama´s ad for Puerto Rico where he spoke Spanish, I felt proud of him. So his accent is mas ó menos, he actually knows another language.

Let´s face it, this world is shrinking. One of the reasons we felt compelled to live in Mexico is for our children. Our children are rapidly becoming native speakers of another language, and it doesn´t stop there...Sebastian wants to speak 5 languages like his maestro. Do it kid, speak, learn to communicate with people from all over the globe, this world needs you to do just that. I watch my children as they chatter away in Spanish with their compañeros and I have no idea what they are saying. My heart glows when I see their ease in communicating with others, laughing with joy, arguing in their second language, explaining what their mother cannot. I am not embarassed of my ignorance, I am proud of my children in their ability to go into the world and be comfortable.

Lately, I´ve been trying to imagine what it must have been like for my great-grandparents to immigrate to the United States and be unable to communicate. I know all to well what it is like, to be frustrated when you don´t have the words in a different language to express yourself. I have placed an enormous task in front of my children to perform and be a citizen of this world. They have adapted and embraced a new language and it is becoming theirs. This is not an easy task, live in abroad for a year where English is not the first language, you´ll find you´ve only touched the tip of the iceberg in that year´s time, it´s very humbling. My great-grandparents must have relied heavily on their children to help them with the nuances of the language, as I do.

Where my ancestors failed though was denuciation of their Sicilian culture and language. After awhile, no one in my Father´s family spoke Italian anymore, because the United States of America required English to be spoken, especially if you were an entreprenuer, which my great-grandparents were. The culture I have lost, the inability to communicate with people that make up 50% of my gene pool (that´s a great portion of the person I am in the "Great American Melting Pot"), makes me throughly irritated. If the United States is so great and such a melting pot, why don´t the majority citizens speak more than one language? Why is it intrinsic that when you become "American " you shed the person you used to be? That seems homogenous and lazy to me.

Well, we can only be the change we seek in the world, my hero Gandhi said it, he was right. I am doing that. I realize I am projecting my fondest wishes on my children, to know many languages, that was my obsession from the age of 12. In my quest for grappling the nuances of more than just English, I hope to serve my children well...that reads, I hope I don´t cause them to have too much therapy later in life. However, if they do have to enter therapy and hash out anger with their mother, currently they will be able to do it in two languages. And that is my Gratitude point for the day, my bi-ligual kiddos.