Earlier this evening Miss E and I were eating dinner. The tv was off, and I had put away my smartphone. All was silent except for our chewing. Miss E was sipping apple juice from a juice box, and from the corner of my eye I caught her taking the thin straw out, putting the box to her mouth, and tipping it so that she could drink the little bit of juice left.
“You figured it out, huh” I said.
I said it in English. I sometimes surprise myself when I use English so naturally around her.
Spanglish is the language I speak in my head. It’s the language of my innermost thoughts. It’s the language I use to speak to my parents and my siblings. Spanglish reminds me of making jokes with my siblings that no one else in the room gets because we code switch so much few others can follow us. Spanish is what I used in school, or what I use around my Puerto Rican family. Spanish reminds me of growing up in the country, of living on my own in San Juan. English, on the other hand, is the language I live in. It’s the language I work in. It’s the language I use to communicate with other academics. Cultural criticism is hard for me to understand in Spanish, even though I consider myself fully bilingual. I used to be a telephone interpreter, handling sensitive medical terminology in Spanish and English. However, academia speaks to me in English. I speak to it in English.
Out of all of these languages, Spanglish is the one closest to my heart. If I had my way, I’d code-switch all the time. I do it with the people I know who will understand me, the ones closest to me. It used to frustrate me that I couldn’t talk to my grad school friends or my fiancé in Spanglish, but now I embrace that it is a language that I only share with a few.
I hope one day to be able to communicate with my daughter in Spanglish, but to get Spanglish she’d have to hear Spanish. And she doesn’t hear it a lot. I know a lot of parents who speak two or several languages at home. Other parents speak one language at home and let the child learn English outside of the home. I planned on speaking to Miss E in both languages, and in fact I did so when she was in my belly. But once she was out, I stuck to English.
I don’t know how or why, but I just stuck to English. We read books in English, we say the alphabet in English, we count in English, we talk about her favorite shows in English. It comes naturally around her now, even though it comes naturally to me to talk to myself in Spanish, like if I’m driving or in the kitchen. When I speak Spanish to her I usually do it because I remind myself to use Spanish around her. I actually remind myself. And at times I feel a little guilty, like this afternoon when I responded in English without even wincing.
My own relationship to English and Spanish is confusing, and I’m sure some of that confusion is also cultural–me growing up in a U.S. colony and all. I used to say when I was a teenager that English was my first language, and in a way it was: there were and are things that only make sense to me in English. I became an English major, eventually. Most of the books I read are in English anyway. But when I moved back to the United States for graduate school, I had a hard time getting used to speaking and thinking in English all the time. I remember sitting in a doctor’s waiting room and rehearsing my symptoms in English. I couldn’t figure out how to say I had a sore throat. I said my throat hurts, which makes sense in English, right? But at the time I was translating directly from Spanish and it just didn’t feel right.
Me duele la gargantua. ¿Cómo digo eso? My throat hurts? Eso como que no hace sentido.
My first class as a TA caused me stress, particularly because I sometimes had trouble remembering phrases in English. At the time I had been living in Binghamton for not even two years. I hadn’t realized how deeply ingrained Spanish was in my brain until I had to talk to a group of students for long periods of time. I felt my authority was connected to being able to express myself correctly at all times. I remember telling my first class I spoke English as a second language. That wasn’t 100% true, but it sure felt like it when I had to translate phrases in my head or when certain sentence constructions didn’t come naturally to me in English. I felt I had to explain myself, and that was as close to an explanation as I could get. Later I stopped telling people that; honestly, I’m not sure which one is my first language. Toward the end of my career I would just tell students, as a way of breaking the ice, that I sometimes think in English and sometimes in Spanish and sometimes in both, and the result is it comes out all funky. It’s as close as I get to the truth in English or Spanish.
I eventually became accustomed to thinking in English, specially when I met my fiancé. He knows Spanish, but is not fluent enough to keep up with me when I speak to my parents in my fast-paced Puerto Rican-slang-laden Spanish. I had thought about what it would be like to make a whole life with someone who doesn’t speak Spanish, but here it was happening. I don’t think about it much nowadays. It feels natural to talk to him in English, as natural as it does to speak to my grandmother in Spanish.
Even though my fiancé and I have been almost six years together, I still have moments when I am at a loss for words in English. He sometimes pokes fun at me because I say something that sounds so weird it has to be a direct translation of Spanish. And sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s just a mash up of Spanish and English, and when I hear his reaction I realize how weird that sentence sounded. Sometimes I laugh. Sometimes I get annoyed.
But sometimes, things just make sense to me in English. Instructions make sense to me in English. Saying “I love you” to my fiancé makes sense in English. Talking about my dissertation makes sense in English. My blog posts come to me in English. Let’s face it, I live in English. Days like today, I ponder what that means.
There’s still time for Miss E to learn Spanglish though. I hope it happens before I forget what it feels like to code switch. For now, I’ll keep repeating that red is rojo and blue is azul and five is cinco, even if she giggles after she repeats it.
