My mother was from Scotland and I couldn’t hear it because I heard her voice every day, but she had an accent. So when I was little and I’d bring people home, you know, they’d say, “Why does your mom talk so funny?” You know, there was all this sort of like general
My mother would open her mouth and they’d all look at each other and then they’d say, “Why? Why? What is that?” You know, no one had heard a Scottish accent. And, of course, I would get really infuriated and embarrassed and say, “It’s an accent,” and, “No, she doesn’t have an accent.”
Because like I said, we couldn’t
I couldn’t quite hear it. That was the thing that was interesting about it. That was just how my mother spoke. And then later on when I was in speech class when I was in college, I have a pretty flat neutral accent except for some of my — there were a few sounds that the teacher was trying to figure out. And she was like, “I don’t understand why you’re making these sounds,” and, “Where are you from?” And I told her. And then I said, “My mother was from Scotland, but she had lost her accent.” And she said, “That’s what it is. You’ve based your speech on someone who had an accent — ” As she got older, she lost the accent — “had an accent and lost it.”
So we’re so, you know
Even though we’re sort of we try — we model ourselves apart from another culture, we’re so heavily influenced by that culture simply because we’re living with it. And, you know, in the case that I was actually modeled on my mother’s changed speech, that was what was really kind of complicated about it.
I actually have a book with Chronicle right now called My Mom Is a Foreigner basically about, you know, I grew up with a mother who’s from Scotland, who came to this country when she was ten years old. And one of the things that
I mean I know lots of other women too who have mothers from Poland or Russia or, you know, Puerto Rico or, you know, somewhere that was considered different. And that idea of like, what’s it like to be first generation in a country that’s all about that?
And when we think it’s our past, but in the United States, it’s always evolving. There are people coming all the time. So sometimes I’ll even talk to an adult woman now and I think, “There’s something about her. I can’t put my finger on it.” And she’ll say, “Oh, here’s my
” And she introduces me to her mother who’s Hungarian. I’m like, “Oh. Your mom’s a foreigner. That’s what it is.” So it’s really about children talking about what it is to have a parent from another country and all of the things that you grow up with and things that you like and the things that are difficult for you and language differences. And so that idea of your mom being somehow strange to everybody else, but to you, she’s just your mother. So that’s the next thing I’m working on.
