Raising a Bilingual Kid: One Generation at a Time – Progress

Every once in a while, if we’re lucky, and it doesn’t happen all that often at all, we kind of get a glimpse at ourselves that we normally wouldn’t otherwise see.  I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true.  It happened to me just the other day.  A local university student was interviewing me for a class assignment about something that somehow had something to do with my background and my being a blogger now.  Don’t ask me why or how, I really don’t know.  Anyhow, I was running my mouth and blabbering about a million things all at once – come to think of it, I wonder if she was able to pull anything useful from her notes? – when it happened!

As I was saying what I was saying I realized just exactly what I was saying.

I started to choke up, but managed to play it off like it was just a cough or something in my throat.  We were talking on the phone so she couldn’t see that actually my eyes were in fact a little watery.

I think the question had started off with her asking me something about how I became a writer.  I told her how growing up my parents had always worked either outside (my dad) or cleaning houses (my mom), how for me gaining an office job like the ones my sisters had at the time was the ultimate level of success because it meant I didn’t have to clean houses or work outside, how I had always enjoyed writing since I was a kid but had long ago then told myself I would not be a starving artist trying to sell my words, and that in the irony of life that was precisely what I ended up doing after college.

I told her about how lucky I have been along the way to meet such compassionate and giving mentors.  How my entrepreneurial spirit is the product of my mother, and my love of words the product of my father.  Who despite both only having an elementary level education have taught me so much more about life than I could have ever learned in any classroom.

Then I started talking about Edgar.  It hit me in that moment that the plans he has for himself are so much more sophisticated than mine were at his age.  That the doors of opportunity – excuse my being corny for a bit – available to him are so much wider than they were for me.  That perhaps for him the limit is not an office job away from the sun, a broom or a mop… and here is where I kind of lost it for a bit.  I know.  Soy bien chillón.  It’s true.  I guess I had just never processed this truth, about him, about me, about our family.  It made me wonder what my own parents must have thought when they made this realization about us.  And in a very rare and honest way it kind of gave me an “aha” moment I hadn’t experienced before.

There will be brighter days ahead for him, for me, and for us!

There will be for you as well.

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