The Mother Tongue

Remember when you were in grade school and your parents used to take you to the Saturday night "charismatic mass" at St. James cathedral, and there was that part where people began to pray their repeated chant-type prayers of humming adoration of our Lord, and before long all the people around you including your parents were speaking in tongues, or kind of singing in tongues, and you tried to get there, you invited the Holy Spirit in, but the Holy Spirit was otherwise occupied or just didn't feel like you were in quite the right place, Spiritually, and no matter how bad you wanted it, you never quite managed to hear whatever that was come out of your own self? And all you could do was stand there and sway quietly, with your hands raised like everyone else, trying not to feel disappointed?

Wait, you don't remember that? Hmm.

I bring it up because I am reminded of it all the time now, thanks to a little habit of Naomi's I like to call "Faux Hindi." I have maybe referred to this before, but a lot of kids at Naomi's school speak Hindi. It is a regular UN preschool- we are trying to coordinate a play date or whatever with another classmate of hers, and the girl's dad just texted me to say no can do, this weekend is Ethiopian Easter. Neat. Anyway, lots of real Hindi is spoken. So Naomi comes home, speaks a bunch of Hindi-ish gibberish, and tells us that it is Hindi. She does so with conviction, she does so with aplomb, but most of all, she does so constantly.

I was going to say half the time, I mean, half the time she talks she is speaking Faux Hindi (Fauxndi?), but I must acknowledge that is an exaggeration. It's more like a quarter or a third of the time, when she is playing, talking to us, talking to herself, talking to Muriel, singing, it is happening in Fauxndi. We are pretty blah about it- what do we care? Not like we don't know whether or not she has mastered English (mastered on a four-year-old scale, that is).

Muriel is a good sport too, although I feel a little bad for her as she is really learning to talk now, and always trying to understand what we say and clearly communicate what she's thinking. Must be a drag to hear her sister bend down and peer kindly in her face and say a bunch of sounds that she cannot possibly make any sense out of. She does love to repeat whatever Naomi says, which is great if Naomi is in the right mood, and which is tell-on-able "copying" if Naomi is in the wrong mood.

So, yeah, no evangelical church camp for Naomi- she will be hotdogging it all over the praying in tongues sessions.

On a completely different note- Naomi has been telling me ALL THE TIME lately how fantastic a mom I am. She has similar praise for Jim (except, you know, dad-praise). Don't get me wrong, it is gratifying to hear how great I am, how I make the best dinners in the whole world, and so on. But I sometimes get the feeling of being in an awkward, lopsided dating relationship, where one side effusively proclaims her love while the other side tries to keep up. Not that my love is not as effusive as hers, it is effusive beyond my own ideas of love. But I am a little more restrained than to tell her every moment how spectacularly amazing I find her. Since you asked, yes, all her love proclamations are in English.

But how swiftly opinion turns! This morning I was changing Muriel, and Naomi came in, holding the pair of socks I had taken out for her last night. She said, "It turns out you are not the greatest Mommy in the world- Look, these socks are actually Muriel's." Yep, best not to pay too close attention to the poll numbers at any given point.