“Mommy?” I ventured. “How do you… do you know Italian?”

My mother laughed. “Oh no, no, not at all. I probably went through a phase where I learned it as a girl, I honestly don’t remember!”

I was in awe. I was also one hundred percent certain that I was NOT going through a phase (spoiler alert: I was. No, I don’t speak Italian at all anymore).

A year or two later, it was Russian that captured my imagination. My dear 96-year- old grandmother had been reading Dostoevsky’s War and Peace ever since I’d known her. I was determined to read it in the original Russian. The good news was there was a Russian couple who’d moved into the community, and the wife was looking for work. I became her student. It was wonderful, and I was telling my mother all about it, when my mother said, “It’s sh, not sh.”

“What?”

“There are two different sh sounds in Russian. You’re saying them both the same way. One is said through the front of your teeth, and one from the back of your tongue. Sh and sh.”

I glared at my mother, who was standing in the half-lit kitchen, gently mixing a meat stew on the stovetop.

“Don’t tell me you speak Russian,” I said accusingly.

“Oh, no, no, no, of course not. I probably learned it at some point, I must have — as a girl.”

I just looked at her in awe.

The Russian didn’t last, although I did visit Russia and use my Russian that summer. It didn’t last because one day I came home from school to find my father sitting with the male half of the Russian couple, who was drinking a bottle of vodka in between taking bites of raw onion; the proper way to drink vodka, apparently.

I was told that my Russian lessons would be stopping, and no more was seen or heard of my teacher, though we seemed to go through an inordinate amount of vodka and onions over the next few weeks as her ex-husband came round to drown his sorrows.

I won’t even mention French, another language that my mother doesn’t speak. Except to correct me in the use of the phrase vous-meme.

I decided, fully grown up and finally out of my childhood home, to learn Arabic. The opportunity came during my second maternity leave. I struggled over the scrawled letters, listened carefully to the Arabic bus drivers shouting into their phones, and only when I was fairly confident did I start dropping a word or two in my mother’s presence.

My mother, mixing a mustard-tomato soup on her stove in the darkening twilit kitchen, laughed. “The letter I love best is their ende kuf,” she said. “It’s so funny the way they put that squiggle inside it! And of course, it’s so similar to Aramaic. Samak is fish, bint is daughter, bayt is house….”

I stopped her there.

The only language at which I have an advantage over her is Dutch; having grown up in Holland, it comes more fluently to me than it does to her. Although she speaks and reads it perfectly well; just saying.

Recently, I read a notice in Arabic at a bus stop, and my daughter stared at me in amazement. “Mommy!” she said. “Do you know Arabic?”

I blushed. “No, no, no,” I protested. “I just… I once went through a phase, where I learned it a bit… y’know.”

She stared at me in awe and then said, “That’s so funny, Mommy, ’cuz I was just thinking a few days ago that I really wished I knew Arabic.”

Like I said, there’s nothing new under the sun.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 937)