Doing laundry in my own language, and Finnish vignettes
Our washing machine broke just after New Year’s, out of warranty and not worth fixing. We put our laundry baskets on meager rations for 3.5 weeks and hand-washed everything while we waited for our new machine to come. When I got home from work on the day it was installed, I saw that the delivery guys had put the control panel sticker on in ENGLISH. Which makes this the first time in ten years that I get to do my laundry in my own language! In Sharjah we muddled through in Italian and in Finland up until now I had been managing increasingly fine in Finnish. But WHAT a treat it is to do laundry in English!
In Finnish news:
I continue to be That Mom when it comes to speaking Finnish with my kids’ friends. My kids mock me/are embarrassed by my pronunciation or grammar errors; my kids’ friends give me weird looks sometimes. Sterling explained once to his BFF that “my mom doesn’t speak Finnish very well” and I protested, in Finnish, “yes, I do!” And Sterling’s BFF, who is all of FIVE years old, looked me right in the eye and said, “no, you don’t!” It was especially cutting since in Finnish “no, you don’t” is just one word: et. Imagine being cut to the quick by a five-year-old saying “et” to your face! In his defense, I HAD just asked him, “are you hate?” when I meant to say “are you mad?”, so he might not be wrong. But it still stings! I am trying! And talking to kids requires saying all kinds of weird sentences that you’ve never had to say before; forgive me if I struggle with doing it in Finnish.
There are some Finnish words I had to memorize before I really learned Finnish and I find that I still parse them incorrectly in my mind even though I now understand what they mean. Yliopisto (university) is still ylio-pisto in my brain even though it should be yli-opisto. Littoistentie (a street name) is still Littoi-stentie in my brain even though it should be Littoisten-tie. It’s funny sometimes to be speaking and then all of a sudden a relic of the Before Times comes up.
The other day at the library we had a ton of books to check out and with so many…helpers…it was a bit unwieldy and we took a long time as well as up a lot of space. When we were done, I said to the person behind us in line, in English, “oh, sorry that took so long!” As we walked away, Magdalena asked why I said it in English instead of Finnish. And I could only think, well, sometimes you have to just BE the awkward foreigner! There must have been a corner of my brain that sat down in that moment and did the calculation that this person behind us in line would, if I spoke Finnish, think “what is this lady’s deal, she needs to get her act together.” But if I spoke English, she might decide “oh ok she’s a foreigner, got it, right, makes perfect sense. Carry on.” And I think my brain was right! We are awkward, loud Americans who do things wrong and fumble social situations and take up too much social space! Sometimes it feels good to embrace that.
