MY MOTHER’S LANGUAGE

L. ANNETTE BINDER

When I was a child growing up in Colorado, my mother spoke to me in German and I answered only in English. She’d scold me then. You’ll forget your mother language, she’d tell me, and you’ll be sorry when you’re grown, but I ignored her. Speaking English—being American and not German—that was what I wanted. I wanted feathered hair and dinners of macaroni and cheese and not rouladen and liver dumpling soup. I wanted peanut butter sandwiches in my lunchbox, but I ate Milka chocolate bars with German rye bread instead, and everything was strange about us. Everything was a little off.

Where are you from, people would ask me when I was seven and ten and twelve and sixteen, and they’d shake their heads when I said I was from Colorado. Where did you come from before, they’d say then. Where were you born?

We’d come to the U.S. when I was five and a half years old. My parents spoke only German to each other, but it was my mother who insisted that I learn the language. She read me German fairy tales and when I resisted her efforts to brush my mass of curls, she’d call me Struwwelpeter, the sloppy boy who lets his hair grow wild, but her efforts took on a new level of seriousness when I started seventh grade. You’re going to the high school, she announced with great satisfaction. Every day you’ll study German there, and so there I was—twelve years old and surrounded by high school seniors taking German because they needed one more language credit to graduate. I tried escaping only once; we were stopped at a red light, and I opened the door, but she yanked me back into the car by one of my pigtails. You’ll be grateful when you’re older, she said. If you forget your German, you’ll lose part of yourself and you’ll never get it back. For three years she took me to that high school every morning, and I was grateful only when it was over.

My relationship to my own Germanness has always been uneasy. It was my first language, but it’s also frozen in time. And so, what I’m left with is a laundryroom German, fluent, to be sure, but with strange lacunae. I don’t know how to say “cell phone” or “tablet” or “social media”; I can’t talk politics or philosophy or economics, and I’ve made no real efforts to improve my skills. My husband doesn’t speak the language and my daughter doesn’t either. And when people ask me where I’m from now, I’ll say I’m from Colorado, and they don’t question it anymore. And still there are moments when I realize the hold the language has on me. Lacing up my skates at my local ice rink not so long ago, I overheard a toddler speaking to her father in the Franconian dialect of my parents. The sweetness of her voice stopped me still, and I saw myself on that bench and my mother there beside me.

My mother has dementia now. The disease has been relentless, stripping away one by one the things that made her who she was. I miss all the voicemails she used to leave me, Lisalein, she’d say (the nickname she alone used for me), it’s your mother, as if it could be anyone else. I miss her eccentricities, too—her pride in finding a sterling silver nutmeg grater at the Goodwill, her calls asking me how to spell twelve (“a v, mom, not an f”), her tendency to talk about death and disease at holiday parties—all these things embarrassed me at the time and now I want only to have them back, but that’s not how the disease works, of course. It goes in only one direction.

I’ve visited my mother at her memory care unit almost every day this past year. The Covid lockdown prevented me from coming inside the building so I came to her window instead. I’d park in the same spot and walk to her window and knock on the pane, and after a few weeks, she began to wait for me in her chair, sitting behind her lace sheers and watching for my car. In winter, I shoveled a path through the snow to her window as if I could somehow find a path back to her, to the way she was and the way I was, too, when she was young and I was a clueless kid who didn’t understand all the things she was giving me.

My mother still speaks to me in German. She speaks to almost everyone in German, even those who don’t know the language. Lisalein, she says when she sees me, I’m so happy to see you, and I feel a rush of gratitude that she still knows me and calls me by my name. I speak to her in German now, too. I’ve spoken more German in the last year than I have in the last four decades, and I wonder now why I resisted so much. As terrible as it is, dementia also brings clarity to those who must watch its course.

My relationship to my own Germanness has always been uneasy. It was my first language, but it’s also frozen in time. And so, what I’m left with is a laundryroom German, fluent, to be sure, but with strange lacunae. I don’t know how to say “cell phone” or “tablet” or “social media”; I can’t talk politics or philosophy or economics, and I’ve made no real efforts to improve my skills. My husband doesn’t speak the language and my daughter doesn’t either. And when people ask me where I’m from now, I’ll say I’m from Colorado, and they don’t question it anymore.

My greatest fear is that my mother is lonely where she is. Her world has shifted, and she lacks the tools to get her bearings, but for now my face is a beacon to her and my language is, too.

And those days when she sits in silence, I speak for both of us. I speak in the dialect of my parents and how easily it comes back to me, the words and endearments and curses I heard every day as a child and took for granted until now. The day will come when she won’t know me anymore. I won’t be her Lisalein then, but I’ll still be with her. I’ll be the woman with the curly hair who sits beside her and speaks to her in German.