School Gate French

Sometimes I dread the school pick-up. I'm sure you might sometimes too.

My dread comes from having to put on my French speaking clothes, metaphorically of course. There's not a magic dress that I can put on and, voila!, my French improves. Oh, that there was...

No, it's less of a dress some days and more like armor. Or maybe the armor is my English speaking outfit, when I just can't make my brain work in French and so sit in the car until the very last minute, keep my head down while waiting for the gate to open and get by with just a few bisous and 'Bonjours! and ca vas?'.

All around me, all of the time, people speak French. My kids even do it.

{Clementine, just because}

I can do it too.
Just.
But it can be exhausting.

Bestie K told me that when she talks to some of the immigrant moms at her daughters' school in Texas, she always thinks of me.
She imagines me at the school gate in the role of the ESL mom, struggling and butchering the language just to say a few quick sentences, make some jokes, be human. And it's not far off. I do feel that way at times.

More and more I feel like the mom who would let her children speak for her, the mom I never wanted to be.

But maybe I'm being a bit hard on myself. I do talk all the time. I do try a bit every day. It's just that sometimes it's so dad-gum hard that I feel like giving up, giving in, relinquishing my struggle to be understood as me, rather than just a few sparse, frugally constructed sentences.

The isolation of this does creep in. The trick is not to let the isolation turn into a happy place. By this I mean, not to let the isolation make you pad yourself further until you give up needing to be a part of your new community and language. We have a happy, little English-speaking American embassy of sorts here Chez Larson. The important thing, and the challenge, is to break out of it every day. To leave it at home and to speak and listen and engage out there in the French world.

The longer you live somewhere the less brave you become. Why is that?

Do any of you struggle with life in a new language?
How do you keep from feeling pleasantly isolated from it?

{American Zone, Chez Larson}

For now, I'm off to put on all my French speaking clothes and just get on with it.
I'll especially need them today. I'm spending it at the lake with Ma Fille's class for sports day. She told me that when her teacher said I was one of the parents coming today, several of her friends shouted a little 'ouais!!' and said they wanted to be in my group.
Maybe it doesn't matter that I'm sitting firmly on a French plateau. Maybe they do 'get' me, after all.

I need a little, bon courage!