The other day Theo chided me gently on not making enough effort to improve my Spanish. With complete justification. I'm making virtually no effort at all. Oh yes, I half-listen to Spanish talk radio when I'm in the kitchen and I chat with our Hispanic friends and neighbours, but my understanding of the language is intermittent at best and my speech is akin to a toddler-age child.
My reply was that I was busy learning another new language and Spanish had been squeezed out by my beleaguered brain - or at least, severely relegated. That other new language is called Motherhood.
Then I thought about it some more. Yes, as a metaphor it's not bad, but it doesn't go far enough. I'm not just learning a new language. I'm learning to find my way through a new foreign country.
It's challenging, stimulating, constantly changing, exhausting, stressful, hilarious and highly rewarding. I get lost and take wrong turnings all the time. I try and consult a map, only to find I'm holding it upside down. New vocabulary like "sleep regression" and "snotsucker" have to be learned and I spend many hours scouring text-books for clues to the grammatical rules. Only to find there aren't any.
Suddenly, the myriad Spanish verb endings seem like a walk in the park.
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