Country With My Mother, I

¶ … country with my mother, I was under the arguably naive sense that I would be able to adapt to life here, despite my complete lack of English language skills. I had no idea, at the time, the challenge that this would be for me and the degree to which I would have to rely on my family to overcome it.

A quickly developed my own personal language workaround; it wasn't flawless, but by considering the context I was in and relying on as many pictures as I could find, I was able to roughly navigate my way through my new home. But I always felt as if there was a wall between me and everyone else. I quickly became isolated and shy, ashamed of the fact that I could not easily or openly communicate with the people around. Even answering simple questions or finding the right products in the grocery store became Herculean tasks. If it hadn't been for my family, my mother in particular, I probably would have just turned in on myself and walled myself up away from the rest of the world.

My mother, though, wasn't about to let this happen. She noticed that I was struggling with our new home and was beginning to distance myself from the rest of the world. To counter this, she took me jogging in the local park. She made sure I kept up with my ESL lessons. She even encouraged me to assert a place for myself amongst my peers, no matter how afraid I was that they would discover I wasn't just shy but instead had a very limited command of the English language. For instance, my mother applied her particular brand of motherly pressure to make sure I tried out for a role in my school's production of Romeo and Juliet. By that time, I was more proficient with English, though I was still exceptionally self-conscious. My mother recognized that my lack of self-confidence was holding me back more than my inability to memorize lines from a Shakespearean play.

A certainly didn't expect to get a part in the play when I tried out, and was more than a little surprised to be given the role of Friar Lawrence (my mother, interestingly, seemed proud but not at all surprised). it's a relatively small part in the play in terms of lines, though the Friar plays a pivotal role in the arc of the narrative. In order to avoid appearing foolish on stage in front of scores of my classmates and their parents, I worked on my lines as hard as I could muster, bringing to the surface reserves of linguistic strength that I didn't even know I'd had. The play finally came and went and was produced without any major problems -- aside from the fact that it was a high school production of Romeo and Juliet. Certainly, I managed to muster up my lines and fill my role in the play better than I thought possible.