I stood there with lost eyes looking at my dad. I had forgotten how to say carrot in Spanish. He looked so disappointed in me, and I was disappointed in myself. The word didn’t come to me, and I couldn’t take the embarrassment of making a quick internet search to look up how to say the word.
Since I was a little girl I have always been so fluent in Spanish that I really didn’t care to speak any English. Both of my parents spoke fluent Spanish and everyone around me only knew Spanish, so I didn’t see any point. Pre-K came around and my environment drastically changed with so many different people all with one thing in common–they all spoke English.
The fact that everyone spoke a language I wasn’t familiar with frightened me. Everyone engaged in activities by communicating, and I didn’t understand a single thing that they said, or they didn’t understand a single word I said.
Looks were shared by my peers when I tried to speak in English, almost as if I was a creature spouting pure gibberish.
They didn’t care that the way they looked at me affected me. They went on with their day as I just sat there and went over the English words in my head. I was determined to only speak English and to forget everything Spanish-related.
Everything was a blur until I got to first grade, but I was fluent in English and in Spanish. The only thing that held me back was my very Hispanic accent. My peers would still give me those stares that I dreaded all my life.
All that hard work and for nothing.
I started growing up and realized I shouldn’t care what people say about me, but I also did not care that my Spanish was fading away. I mixed Spanish and English (Spanglish) when I talked to my parents, more specifically my dad. This made me sad, but I told myself I had “other” things to worry about. I told myself I had friends, people stopped looking at me weirdly, and I spoke fluent English. It was everything I wanted.
Everything came crashing down when I couldn’t say a simple word in my native language. I let it get so bad that I didn’t know how to communicate with my family anymore. It was Pre-K happening all over again but from my own family because I didn’t know how to speak Spanish anymore.
I had no self-discipline, and it had led to destroying what made me, me.
Because of that, I regained some of the Spanish that I had lost. I remembered how to say zanahoria in Spanish, but I also remembered not to forget where I come from.
