My daughter spoke only a few words until she was three years old. It worried me endlessly, but more concerning was the exhaustion that came with the futile attempts to talk with my toddler. My father used to say, “The children who speak later are conserving their speech to focus on their intellect. They are the great thinkers and observers of the world.” My father with his own command over language and storytelling was little comfort to my heart.
This poem is about the time we started speech therapy for my daughter, which catalyzed her ability to speak. She could always communicate with me — she spoke volumes with her eyes and each cry was different — but when she spoke in her sweet, musical voice, many doors opened between us, many walls were demolished. There were only open fields and fertile river beds and our words bubbling into brooks and streams of our combined imagination.
It was a kind of magic. It was also a small heartbreak. In those early years, we were instructed to focus on one language, and we chose English because she was already in school. We had to let go of the little Urdu we spoke with her. Of course, now that she is 8, she understands and speaks Urdu, but at that time I felt conflicted because it was like packing away a big part of my identity and roots into a trunk and locking it. I imagined giving her that trunk one day, telling her, “Here, this is our language and it holds my childhood and that of my parents before me. It holds the essence of our past. Take it, learn it, save it.” Of course it didn’t happen so dramatically. She just picked it up over time. But this poem is about that struggle — about the conscious decision to let a part of your identity go.
Thanks to Santa Clara Review for publishing it.
