The consequences of being bilingual

It’s been 18 years since my mom dropped me off on my very first day of preschool. I was 4 years old and had spent my 1460-ish days on Earth in a household of people that only spoke Spanish. My limited knowledge of English had been obtained from reruns of “Dora the Explorer” and whatever my older cousins taught me — which were mostly profanities.

“You’re a beach!” I echoed back at them while they erupted in laughter. My mom was not equally as amused.

I looked around at the colorful walls of the classroom while my mom packed my cubby. I couldn’t read any of the words but I recognized familiar shapes and colors. A poster listed the colors of the rainbow starting with red; the same color as the shoes belonging to Dora’s monkey sidekick, Boots.

I picked up English pretty quickly. I knew all the colors of the rainbow now and I realized my cousins were not trying to get me to say beach, but a much more colorful word. Over the summer when I wasn’t in school, my mom bought me grade-school workbooks that I would work on while she was at work. She bought spiral notebooks and wrote my full name at the top of a fresh page, she then instructed me to rewrite my name over and over under her writing. She wrote simple sentences and instructed me to repeat writing those, too.

When I was 8 I was pulled out of my second-grade class and directed into an empty classroom lit with fluorescent lights. I sat at a desk across from a woman with a polite face that tried to explain to me what an ELPAC test was. She handed me a paper with a short passage on it and instructed me to read it aloud while she timed me. When we were finished I craned my neck at her notes and saw that she had marked her own paper. She had circled the words I had hesitated on and deducted points wherever I had made a mistake. As I walked back to my class I wanted to tug on her sleeve and ask her to let me redo the test. I wanted to explain that I had the reading level of a fourth grader and that I had the Nancy Drew books to prove it.

When I moved school districts in the sixth grade I found myself in another fluorescent classroom across from another woman with a polite face. I was confused as to why I was being tested again. Had I done something wrong? My grades were exceptional and I had several reading awards. The woman before me pointed to a picture with her pencil.

“Can you tell me what this is?” I looked up at her and almost laughed, “it’s a carrot.”

I’m a senior in college now and in a few months, I’ll have a Bachelor’s degree. Now and then I’ll pronounce a word incorrectly and I’ll realize that I’ve never actually said that word aloud. I’ll stumble over the word and whoever I’m talking to will furrow their brows in confusion, laugh and say, “what did you say?”

I’ll repeat myself and feel my face heat up. Later when I’m alone I’ll look the word up and listen to the pronunciation over and over to avoid mispronouncing it ever again. I’ll search for its part of speech and doublecheck how to use it in a sentence. I find myself doing the same repetition exercises my mom used to make me do over the summer all those years ago.

I think about the lady with the polite face very often. When I use a word incorrectly I picture her scribbling in her margins, deducting points for every word I mess up.