Leslie Gould

Lessons in French

What am I learning by taking French? Lots of things. For starters, how frustrating it is not to be able to understand what's going on. It makes me much more empathetic. It makes me regret not being more understanding when my kids didn't get algebra. So this is what it was like for them, I think. Like another language. (Because for some reason, I did get algebra and advanced algebra and physics. Not that it helps me help my kids. I can sometimes get the right answer, now, but when I show them how to do it, it's all wrong. The methods have changed.)

I'm also learning that I can't always be in control. It's hard to be in control when you don't know what's going on! (And besides, I'm not the professor... I'm not supposed to be in control.)

It's also teaching me how hard it is to be accurate when one has a limited vocabulary. When I say what I did over the weekend, I always say the easiest thing. (J'ai regarde le match de football! I refer to my youngest daughter as "ma cadette" because that's easier to say than my youngest daughter--and because she plays a lot of football, um, soccer.) When Madame asks more questions, I find myself omitting important information because I don't have the right words.

I'm also learning to have patience and to even pronounce "patience" in French thanks to the nice, nice TA in our class. Il faut que me aie un peu de patience! It is necessary for me to have a little patience--with myself, with what I don't know, and with what I'm trying to learn.

Having a little patience, to me, dovetails with living by faith. If I'm patient with myself and others, I'm willing to see how things will turn out, how God will intervene. If I don't have patience, I'm pushing and shoving, trying to make things happen and hurting others along the way.

By studying French, I'm also learning to be more understanding of people from other cultures who come to the United States, and I admire them even more. I also encourage my kids to get as far as they can now with a foreign language--while they're young, before the auditory parts of their brains begins to freeze!

Honestly, though, French was hard for me when I was 18, too. So, looking on the bright side, I'm thankful that I was brave enough to tackle it again in middle age and, this time, see it through. I start FR 203 after spring break. One more term to go.

Il faut que me aie un peu de patience!

C'est la vie.

Everything...

"Don't believe everything you think."

I've seen this on a bumper sticker over the past few years, most recently on a black Toyota station wagon over in Southeast Portland. I think that the mom who drives it and I are on the same "schlepping route." Several mornings during the last month, the bumper sticker has appeared in front of me, a gentle reminder to not be dogmatic with my thoughts, especially when it comes to my kids...and my writing...and what I think I know about other people...and what I think that God wants other people to do.

Happy Monday!

Leslie

Bewildered

I was never lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.

--Daniel Boone

Okay, I haven't really been bewildered, but I have been overwhelmed. And I just realized that I haven't blogged in nearly a month.

This is what happens when you mix one deadline, one MA fiction program, four kids, three cats, one dog, French, grocery shopping, laundry, dishes, housework (ha!), dinner (double ha!), soccer, lacrosse, basketball, and a husband that had an Army class in Atlanta for ten days and then another trip to Madison with work. I picked him up at the airport this afternoon and came home and fell asleep on the couch, finally able to relax, while he met our youngest at the school bus stop and then took her to buy ingredients for strawberry shortcake.

Speaking of Daniel Boone, in my editing class we recently had a fact checking assignment on a five paragraph bio on Lewis Wetzel, who lived during the late 1700s and was a contemporary of Daniel Boone's. I majored in history. The fact-checking assignment--and the five hours I spent on it--reminded me why I write fiction. History is so hard to pin down.

And sometimes the present is too. A month can slip by, just like that.

Au revoir!

Leslie