Day 32

In the short 32 days here in a new country with a language I was barely familiar with, I found that listening and trying to understand Spanish is exhausting. Literally. I discovered I have a shut off point of 3 hours. I am 100% surrounded by Spanish. I am reading (trying to read) and I am listening and barely putting two words together to get my point across. I think the only difference is that I have always wanted to be bi-lingual. I cannot wait to be able to speak and understand Spanish like a local. I depend on my bi-lingual husband begrudgingly.

We went to a school meeting for parents last week. It was entirely in Spanish. It is an international school with Canadian Accreditation and yet, no one spoke English. I sat there for over 2 hours listening to angry parents interrupt each other, raise their voices and question school officials. All I had was my keen ability to feel emotions in others and depend on body language and tone to know something was terribly wrong. It turned out that the parents were upset that the promise the school made to ensure their Spanish speaking kids would be fluent in English by 6^th grade was not even close to happening. The school was also losing its Canadian Accreditation that the parents were paying a premium for. That meeting put me in sensory overload since I could not understand the words, my system went into overdrive to attempt to decipher what was going on in every other possible way.

André, our soon to be 12-year-old boy, is my daily inspiration. He doesn’t know this, but I watch him roll into his new life here with ease and confidence. There is no anger, resentment and depression that we took him away from everything and everyone he knows to move to a foreign country. He is just doing what he’s told and moving forward. He is the same boy that lived in MD. He cares about all the same things. He has found things that are familiar with ease and doesn’t seem to feel that the differences are roadblocks. When I feel like crawling back into bed and hiding, I just think of him and his ability to get up and start a new day without hesitation. Today is one of those days for me. I have a cold, and I am feeling lazy but what I need to do is put on my running sneakers and get out on the road.