The benefits of being bilingual

The thing that I am most proud of accomplishing in my life is learning a second language very well.  As anyone who speaks another language knows, your fluency is exactly that- fluid.  My English is somewhat steady, but not completely.  My Spanish gets better or worse depending on how much I’m using it and who I am speaking with.  Speaking Spanish has opened up so much for me and for my world.  I get to know new cultures, new people, new stories and authors.  New music in Spanish make my life much better.  And most importantly, I get to connect and to know the man that I love better every year because I speak his language and he speaks mine.

I love speaking Spanish, but there are a few reasons why sometimes it makes me laugh and feel just a little resentful.  At my job, there aren’t too many nurses that speak enough Spanish to really get to know the patients who just speak Spanish too.  I consider it a real privilege to be one of the few who can chat, joke, listen, and get to know these diverse and amazing patients who are often left alone with their illness in the silence of a monolingual world.  I met a man who unionized with Cesar Chavez,  a privileged South American who was tough as nails, a beautiful grandmother who sang herself to sleep every night, a campesina who could laugh at the doctors when they tried to scare her into eating hospital food.  The list goes on.  Being a part of these patients’ days is the best part of my job.

But sometimes, just sometimes, I am reminded that if I didn’t speak Spanish I wouldn’t have to deal with some particular jabs.  The most common gasp of horror is that I have no children.  More than once I have been asked what, exactly, is wrong with me? Have I been to the doctor? Is there something wrong with me? Is there something wrong with my womb? Questions just a little too personal.  Luckily, I consider almost nothing too personal.  My favorite story about my broken womb and womanhood came from a hilarious grandmother with a glass eye.  I kid you not.  She would sit in the morning saying her prayers, smiling her big beautiful smile, with her glass eye not dilating and not moving.  She loved boleros and we would sing “Sabor a Mi” together.  She got into it with me one day.  ”Pero Rebeca, pero porquuuueeeee??”  Why didn’t I have children? Why? I gave her my little answer…I wasn’t ready…hadn’t done it yet…we’ll see.  She hmmppffed and hawed and smiled at me.  When I went to say goodbye at the end of a few days of work together, she said to me: Rebeca, I think you need to let me pray for you so you will have children.  I figured, what the hell, I could use some divine intervention on a lot of levels.  She held my hand and prayed to the Virgen de Guadalupe, asking her to help me get pregnant as soon as possible and to feel the pain of all the sick people in the world during the labor so I would understand sickness! What? What a hilarious and horrifying prayer.  I hope it doesn’t come true.

Recently, I was reminded of this double-edged bilingual sword when a patient looked at me and said gently, “Rebeca, I wonder if I can ask you a question I have been thinking about since yesterday”.  I said, of course.  He then asked me why on earth I had to wear glasses when I had such “ojos bonitos”.  He told me that wearing glasses made me look very old.  Indeed! When I told him I couldn’t wear contacts, he said: Get the surgery! Go to the eye doctor! Come on! Stop wearing your glasses.  Best of all, el señor wouldn’t let it go.  I’m surprised he didn’t start calling me vieja for the rest of the day.  I was a little offended and taken by surprise.  No almost 35 year-old woman wants to be told that they look old.  But what are you going to do?

Speaking another language is a gift and one that I love so much in my life.  I am lucky on many levels.  But when you get told that you are an old, dried up, childless, glasses-wearing lady, it can make me wish I couldn’t understand any of it.  But just sometimes.  In the end, I will deal with a few bossy comments if it means that I get to sing boleros and salsa with my patients.  It is in these rooms that I feel the most authentic and the most at ease in my job.  Being a nurse is a very weird job.  And it is the first time in my entire life that I consistently feel that I don’t fit in.  But cantando, hablando, y bromeando with patients reminds me that there is a place for me here.  So I’ll take the comments and criticism.  It’s worth it.

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