Do You Talk To Your Mother With That Mouth?

Courtesy of Postsecret.com

I really get a kick out of being judged and underestimated.  I mean, I get a kick out of it because I like to prove people wrong.  Example:  The other day two men were walking behind me and they were speaking in Spanish and my ears perked up and I listened to what they were saying.  As it turned out, they were talking about my ass and what they would like to do to it.  Now, of course secretely I love knowing that, but I also love that moment when I turn around and say, “¿Hablan con sus madres con esas bocas?” which translates roughly into, “Do you speak to your mothers with those mouths?”  Oh, you weren’t expecting a little redhead with freckles to know what you were saying, did you?  Tsk tsk.  Judge thee not.

So when I last left you I was going to do a radio show and enjoy the evening.  In fact, that’s exactly what happened.  You can read about the radio show on Catalina Loves.  It was a good time.  One thing that never fails to surprise me is that people are surprised that I am bilingual.  I guess it’s the red hair and the freckles, but nobody really expects me to speak Spanish, and nobody really expects me to speak Spanish well.  So one of the first questions people ask me, when I do open my mouth and let the romance language flow, is “¿De dónde eres?” (Where are you from?)  When I tell them that I am from Oregon, the next question is always, “¿Son de EEUU tus padres y tu familia?” (Are your parents and family from the US?)  And I answer, no.  None of them speak another language.   It is baffling to people.  The highest compliment that someone can pay to me in this respect is, “But you sound like a native speaker.”  So the question is:  How did you become bilingual if you grew up in a little hick, logger town in Oregon in a English-only house?  It’s very odd, as am I.

I went to a very small, public school where foreign language was not offered.  There were no AP classes, no honors program, just 20 kids graduating (3 of them pregnant) without a clue about the world.  My freshman year of high school was the first year a foreign language was offered, and it was Spanish, and the kindergarten teacher, who had taken Spanish in college was going to teach it.  I took two years of Spanish and went on my first class trip to Mazatlán, México.  It was amazing.  I continued on in Spanish, taking independent study with the kindergarten teacher because there was no Spanish IV or AP Spanish class for me to take and took the AP test at a school half an hour away my senior year.

My Mother, for all of her faults (and she has many), is also a saint.  She worked as a waitress 20 hours a day 7 days a week to send me to Costa Rica on a student exchange when I was 16 after hosting a Costa Rican student in our home for six months.  I didn’t understand the enormity of it at the time, but now as a parent, I understand how much more she had to work to support another child for six months and send me.  Simply applying for a passport was an ordeal - nobody in my family had ever applied for one before.  She got me out.  Out of the little town that would have suffocated me, out of the little world I would have otherwise known as the world.

My experiences in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, and El Salvador will never be forgotten.  It’s been 20 years now since my first trip to Costa Rica.   I lived with two different families.  One was very, very wealthy - the father worked for the government - which is how I managed to meet Óscar Arias.  That’s right, the president of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Oscar Arias.  I ate dinner at his house!  I’m sure he wouldn’t remember me, but I will never forget him.  The other family lived much more modestly.  I still remember living in La Urbana José María Zeledón in Curridabat.  A good post for another day.  I’ll have to find the album and scan some pictures, somehow.

Fast forward to 1990 - I quit college (Oregon State University) despite being in Spanish 318 my freshman year.  I was so overwhelmed and underprepared for college that I just quit.  When I wised up years later and returned to finish my undergraduate degree (University of Oregon), I had my mind set on making money!  I went into the computer science program, and really, I was quite good at it.  It was a discussion I had with my adviser one day, however, that changed my path.  He discouraged me from pursuing a degree in CIS because I was a single mom and he didn’t see how I could possibly work the hours that programmers work under deadlines as a single mom.  He discouraged me from it. Fuck him, what did he know?  I was a girl with a goal and he wasn’t about to discourage me.

All along I took Spanish classes as my “fun class” while taking C++ and OOP courses.  Even W remembers attending the summer school class I took where she sat on the floor and colored while learning about algorithms and if-then-else loops.  Then I hit a big concrete wall called discrete math (side note: I hate it when people spell discreet, as in secretive, discrete).  I couldn’t do discrete math to save my life and it was a requirement.  I loved the professor.  Dr. Koch.  I still remember him to this day because he was the epitome of the crazy math professor, wacky combover and all, and on the first day of class he clarified that his name was not Dr. Cock, but Dr. Cook (phonetically).  I digress…

I jumped ship.  I was so happy in Spanish classes and so miserable in my major.  As it turned out, I had pretty much already completed my major in Spanish from taking them for fun and kicked ass without effort.   Getting my undergrad degree was a big deal to me, but I wanted more.  I had been a big student government geek - I lobbied at the campus, state, and federal levels for Pell grant funding and the Oregon Health Plan - and I was even President Frohnmayer’s intern for a summer, so getting into grad school was pretty easy.  I asked for a letter from the President of the University and Governor Kitzhaber* and I was in.  Oh, and I had to take the GRE, but I didn’t study for it.  The chair of the romance languages department told me that it really didn’t matter how well I spoke English or could do math, since I was in grad school to study Spanish literature.

Jump forward to today, well Friday.  I did an hour and a half radio show in Spanish about sexuality, BDSM, fetish, and taboo.

I think it’s safe to say that this tremendous sacrifice that my mother made for me is what started me on this amazing journey of passion, sadness, love, gratitude, and joy.  I learned to be an adventurer because of the callouses on my mother’s feet.  Thanks, Mom!  I don’t know if it makes up for putting my braces through my lip with your fist, but makes it more difficult to hate you.

*I’ll have to tell you some day the story of how W sold Gov. Kitzhaber a raffle ticket for her daycare center while we were at Willamette University for a big new day care center opening PR thing and how I fell *up* the stairs of the White House, tearing my stockings and scraping my knee, on my way *in* to lobby VP Gore on Pell Grant funding