It happens occasionally, most often on the telephone, that Lydia and I will have a conversation entirely in Swedish.\u00a0 I don’t much notice it while we’re actually talking;\u00a0 if someone speaks Swedish to me, I’ll speak Swedish back without even thinking.\u00a0 After we hang up, though, I always feel a little disoriented.\u00a0 It’s just weird, somehow, for the two of us, immigrants both–me, American to the core, and my American-born, native-English-speaking daughter–to connect in a foreign language.\u00a0 It’s interesting, too, the small differences in our relationship that switching between languages makes.\u00a0 Though we’re both fluent in both languages, my English is obviously stronger than hers while her Swedish beats the pants off mine.\u00a0 Those differences in ability effect some subtle changes in our mother-daughter dynamic, and that throws me off kilter sometimes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It happens occasionally, most often on the telephone, that Lydia and I will have a conversation entirely in Swedish.\u00a0 I don’t much notice it while we’re actually talking;\u00a0 if someone speaks Swedish to me, I’ll speak Swedish back without even thinking.\u00a0 After we hang up, though, I always feel a little disoriented.\u00a0 It’s just weird,… Read More Say what?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}