mother tongue

feeling real good after a beach day. it is the beginning of another heat wave and i am free from an office. i am free! i am tan and i am free. i was playing with the niece in the water all afternoon. i have a great image of her laying back in my arms in the water, we're spinning and she's smiling and floating, new freckles in the sun. i handled her well today overall. she can make a toy of anyone but you can fight back by laying there lifeless like a toy too. she has infected me with a cheesy pop song from latin america, something she heard with her cousin on vacation, staying with her mom in the motherland. it's enrique iglesias, dimelo, and i usually can't take that dude but because it gets her to sing in spanish i entertain her and cue up the youtube video. but now it's in my head, dimelo, dimelo, dimelo. reminds me of being in honduras with my brother's girl cousins, singing chayanne when we were fifteen. tu pirata soy yo, y mi mar es tu corazon, mi bandera tu libertad, mi tesoro poderte amar. gay. i am your pirate, my sea is your heart, my flag your freedom, my treasure being able to love you. gay.

those cheesy spanish pop songs can getcha when you're over there. the good trick of it is you reclaim the language which this little girl needs to do right now. my theory is the language and her mama are one in the same. the more of it she loses, the more she loses her connection to her mother. she has to deal with being the child of fake divorce, what is it when babymamas and daddys break up? babymama/daddy divorce, that is too long, a better term has to be devised. anyway she deals with that and then on top of that, immigration, the daddy in the us, the mama in honduras. huge separation. and all we can do here is notice when she recalls a memory and help her explore it. she is so little and has dealt with this is such crazy ways. denying spanish and her mother at the same time, not wanting to speak to her on the phone and then not wanting to speak in spanish, saying she can't do it any more. but that's all she spoke when she got here a year ago. and that crazy honduran spanish too. i can't even imitate it. just a lot stuff i need immersion to reacquaint myself with. now that she's seen her mother again, there is a reconnection, so we have to pounce on it, make her remember. we is me, my mother (abuela), my brother (her daddy), my father (abuelo). we talk to her in the language and fake her out, get her to sing in the tongue she claims to have forgotten. she's talking like honduras, as she used to call spanish, and doesn't even know it. if we don't harass about it, the words will return.

when we were in the water i was trying to make her forget her fear by focusing on our beach umbrella in the distance. i told her see we weren't that far, there was our um-ber-rel-la, eh-eh-eh, ella, eh. there is our um-ber-rel-la, ella, ella, eh eh eh. so there the cheesy english pop songs helped out. she was all, you know that song and i was all, yeah, i know things. she said that she was waiting for abuela to come join us at the beach and when she finally did, i told her, there is your ah-bu-eh-la, eh-eh-eh, there is your ah-bu-eh-la, ella, ella, ella, eh-eh-eh. the wordplay, the pop songs, always such an excellent distraction from what's really going on underneath, soothing like that big water that held us today.