Raising a Bilingual Kid: ‘One Doesn’t Last Forever’

My mother used to say uno no va durar para siempre all the time when we were kids.  It was one of those signature lines that we all knew by heart and all rolled our eyes at every time it slipped out of her mouth.  We were young and as time often does in one’s youth it never seemed to move fast enough.  We couldn’t wait to be old enough to drive.  We couldn’t wait to be old enough to start high school.  We couldn’t wait to be old enough to start our own lives and do things the way we wanted to.  Better than my parents!

Of course we were going to do things better than them.

For one thing our kids weren’t going to have as many rules.  They weren’t just going to have to do things “because we said so!”  They would have a voice, an opinion… a say in their own lives.  And we certainly weren’t going to let them ever feel like they were powerless to our commands.  That was the plan anyway.

As life does, however, once the responsibility of parenting was introduced into each of our lives my mother’s wild ramblings about time going by too quickly all of a sudden began making perfect sense.  Time became the enemy and we were helpless against her ticking torture.  Nothing we could do could stop seconds from turning into minutes, minutes into hours, hours into days, days into years, and even worse there really was no such thing as a how to on being good parents.  Like mamá and papá we’d have to figure it out along the way.  For me, it really made me recognize and appreciate all of the wisdom in those words: uno no va durar para siempre.

I don’t even feel guilty about telling Edgar the same thing anymore.  Inside though, I still kind of wish we could freeze time forever in certain places.  The good thing is we can, in our hearts and minds.

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