So I Skip Verbs Sometimes...

When you move to another country, personal interactions become much more important because so often you are clinging to the 70 percent of a situation which you actually understand through reading visual clues, gesturing, or other things in the context of a situation.  I don’t think I ever realized how much of communication truly is beyond the words before living abroad (especially with a baby).

Now, I fear I rely on these other signals too much.  Sometimes without realizing it I just stop using important things when talking – like verbs or sentences.  The brain is truly an amazing thing and the more I live with myself the more I realize I’ll never fully understand my wiring.  But two things related to language have appeared while living abroad. 

First, is the verb skipping habit. There are days where I just feel like I can’t communicate at all with people; then I’ll realize its because I am skipping all verb usage.  Just trying to act out my verbs or imply them doesn’t seem to work well.  This usually gets Eric rolling as I am sure it really is quite entertaining, although at the time I am thoroughly embarrassed and will deny I am doing anything out of the ordinary.  

The second thing I have learned is that my mind can handle learning another language but nimble it is not. It’s like the handle on that part of my brain is really heavy and takes a long time and effort to toggle back and forth.  Case in point, on a recent trip for work to Italy for 2 days, rather than just speaking English (or staying silent) I would instinctually respond in Spanish (or French – I don’t know where that came from!) but there was nothing in my brain which was inclined to use the few words of Italian I knew.  This brain is rusty!

But even for the all the weirdness of interacting with others with this brain in a foreign language I remain remarkably not good in, it’s possible to get about anything done, with enough time, frustration, and insanity.  Sometimes the little things like working through an internet connectivity issue over the phone or that the dishwasher is electrocuting you (yes, this was actually happening) become the small miracles of the day.  The victories over yourself and your inabilities.  The victories of feeling a bit more at home.  Who needs verbs...not me...well, except in writing this.  

A Spanish Wedding

Iglesia de San Manuel y San Benito

Five minutes until the wedding was to begin, we stood on a busy sidewalk across from Retiro Park, groom a few feet away checking his iPhone for a just-arrived text.  Up the few steps that separated us from the cathedral entrance a parade of exiting people flooded out.  They went left; we were on the right.  Slowly it became apparent that one wedding needed to end before ours could begin.  Our first Spanish wedding but apparently the third or fourth wedding in that cathedral that evening (ours was set to begin at 7).  It's hard to imagine a U.S. bride putting up with this scenario but for the Spaniards this all seemed normal.  The ceremony is only the beginning of the process, and they were all out for the long haul.  Unfortunately, we weren't.  We only had childcare coverage for the ceremony, not for the hour and a half bus ride, the dinner, the dancing or the 6 am bus ride home that would follow.

So, we enjoyed the curiousities of the ceremony and look forward to attending a full wedding in the future.  We were late additions to the invite list (one of Eric's colleagues) since we’d only met a few weeks earlier.  It was quick for a Catholic ceremony, about 35 minutes, but very beautiful.  We were on time as we only had to walk over but many of the guests were late, we think for lack of parking.  One particular guest made her way down the isle ten minutes into the ceremony and proceeded to have the first pew of attendees all scoot over so she could squeeze in.  I'd love to know who she was!  No attendants here.  No ring bearer.  Only the bride, groom, mother and father.  The bride and groom sat in the middle with the priest and the parents on either side, to help arrange the long train and provide the rings are the appropriate time.  I understood very little of the wedding as the grand setting and somewhat muffled acoustics made it simpler just to enjoy the ambience rather than to focus on any details.  The only major sections I picked up were the Lord's prayer and obviously the vows.

Street greetings

I should note one other Spanish wedding tradition that I am sure our American friends would wince at.  With the invitation the bride and groom provide their bank account details.  No wedding gifts from Crate and Barrel here.  Just send the money from your home computer in advance.  This is one of the few areas of Spanish life where they are oddly efficient and non-emotional.  We spent more time kissing in greeting and on exit than in looking for the wedding gift.

Baby + Ruth

We have been blessed with a wonderful nanny in Dorothy’s life these past six or so months – Kate.  She’s probably ruined all other nannies for us as she’s very caring, independent, and smart and has great intuition and instincts.  But happily for Kate, she has a life to live in Chicago…

So enter Ruth.  Ruth is Dorothy’s new nanny.  She started on the 20th of September.  She is Honduran and has lived in Spain for about 5 years.  She’s in her late 20s and seems a very curious, gentle, and hard-working woman.  She is trying very hard to improve her English and to help us with our Spanish as we navigate the new terrain of caring for Dorothy and finishing settling in here in Madrid.

Different from our situation in the U.S., Ruth is living in our home.  She has a separate apartment with a quasi-separate entrance and everything.  It’s good for us as we get some additional flexibility and good for Ruth that she doesn’t need to maintain another place (although she does, at least temporarily).  But I have to say Ruth’s living with us has been more of a stress than I expected during this adjustment period.  Like any new arrangement there is some stress, and we don’t always get along.  I think we are seeing how much harder it is to get past some of that when you are staying in the same household.  But, I think we might be getting past the worst of that as the last week has been improving.

As for the language barriers, there is no doubt that Ruth is helping me with my Spanish, if for no other reason than the fact that she forces me to use Spanish more frequently than I would otherwise.  I have basically lost all my hesitancy in speaking and will now blabber on, very incorrectly, to store clerks, doctors, etc.  Ruth’s English also seems to be improving some but she still reports understanding me better in English than in Spanish (sad).  She’s making attempts to read Dorothy’s English kid books, if with a bit of a struggle.  I’d say she’s using English about a quarter of the time and exposing Dorothy to Spanish the rest of the time.  This was part of what we hoped for Dorothy so we’ll see how her language continues to develop.  So far Dorothy isn’t using many other words besides dada, but she’s very verbal and trying out many sounds and mimics often.

It’s funny to have someone in our lives named Ruth because that was the name of one of my great aunts.  Dorothy actually gets her middle name, May, from one of my other great aunts.  Eric said that the Ruth is about as foreign sounding a name as you can get in Spanish, as the language doesn’t really contain the right sounds to make it.  That’s somehow appropriate, as Ruth still has no idea what my name is.  She thinks of me as Eric 1 and Eric as Eric 2.  We have gone over and over “E.J.” but to her it just doesn’t work.  For a while she was calling me Ethan, which seemed about as close in pronunciation as she could get.  I’d like for her to eventually be able to say my desired name but for now it’s not much of a stress.  One of Dorothy’s younger “adoption cousins” (group of six families who adopted through our agency at the same time) is Ethan so I like thinking about Jill, Ross, and Ethan when incorrectly referenced.