Bilingual Being by Kathleen Saint-Onge Read Free Book Online

shelves were full of my mother’s stored purses and bags in boxes, and fancy lacy things between sheets of white tissue paper. When I got older and needed to use encyclopedias for research, I had to visit my mother’s friend who’d married a Protestant and was raising her children in an anglo style, speaking English to them and pushing their education. She had a set of World Book encyclopedias in her home in the same place in the living room where my father kept his collection of hunting guns (locks deemed unnecessary in those years) and my mother displayed family photographs and souvenirs from various trips. Knick-knacks on display, books in closets: it was a proper French-Canadian home in the 1950s.
    But true to that first book, The Cat in the Hat , the two languages in my life were about to become Thing One and Thing Two – bizarre creatures that would make an even bigger mess of our home and of our lives, and certainly threatened to, and did, completely upset my mother. And whereas the cat let Thing One and Thing Two in by the front door, it was my mother herself who took me to the front door by which these creatures would come to deal their chaos, upsetting the pretty plans of mothers everywhere: that a daughter will be closeto her mother, follow her mother, love her mother expressly. I would disappoint grievously.
    MAMIE AND DADDY
    The front door in our case was that of my new school, Marymount College, a private English Catholic school for girls in Sainte-Foy, run by an order of sisters from upper New York State. It was located across the back fence from my house, through a tiny stretch of wooded bliss, but accessed by a mother and daughter walking hand in hand by road that cool September morning in 1961. At the ripe age of four, I was delivered for the first day of kindergarten in pulled-up hair ringed by pink and white fabric daisies, tiny patent leather oxfords, ankle socks, a tidy white shirt, and the pleated blue tartan skirt and navy blazer of the school.
    The clothing was handed down from the encyclopedia friend, who was two years ahead in this ritual with her own daughter and would always be, ensuring that I lived in hand-me-downs from start to finish, from shirts to books. Nothing would be the same for us from that day forward. But unlike Seuss, we lacked the all-purpose contraptions to tidy up the works. Our mess would be much harder, nearly impossible, to clean, to fix. And it would take a lifetime for us to even have the opportunity to try.
    I don’t remember feeling different from anyone else that first day of school. I only recall the beautifully clean kindergarten classroom with the ballet barre and the big mirror in the back corner along the south wall, where I’d begin my efforts to be a dancer. It would be a fantasy I’d hold until about age twelve, when my feet would not form into points and my jetés became obviously hopeless, even by my own estimation.
    In terms of academics, I was apparently a star pupil from the beginning, perhaps because I’d been playing schoolteacher on a card table in my front yard – literally feet away from my kindergarten desk – for the entire summer. In any event, I was spared the hardship of being a second language learner in school. I was, instead, simply an over-ready four year old with an early love of school. It was an eagerness that my mother, to her demise, initially admired – and that my father, true tohis opinions on books, schooling, and authoritarian systems in general, completely ignored.
    I was, after all, the child of a one-parent-one-language mentality, though no one called it that then. The difference was felt in their names: one English, “Daddy,” and one French, «Mamie.» Day-to-day life involved “talking English with Daddy,” and «on parle français a’ec Mamie» [we speak French with Mum]. That was how my brother and I were raised and then sent to school in English, so