Speaking in two tongues

I grew up with two languages, with my mind shifting back and forth. We spoke English at home because my parents wanted my sister and me to be proficient in the dominant idiom of this new country. However, every day my mom would drop me off with my Costa Rican grandparents while she went to work. While my grandfather had learned enough English to run his bicycle shop, my grandmother spoke only Spanish. Her idioma tica became my other home. I’d spend my day in her world.

To grow up in two worlds, to feel one push into the other, to feel at home in both and in neither, to belong somewhere in between in a linguistic borderland—that was my experience as a child of immigrants. Those early years set up the patterns of my thinking. We always think in a language—and in my amalgamated mind, one thought world jostles with another and neither feels exactly right. I blame my slowness as a writer on this jostling in my head. Which is also to blame, at least I tell myself, for a looming fear of grammatical mistakes, of embarrassing myself. ¡Que vergüenza, que pena! I had to take a remedial writing class my first semester of college.

Occasionally, when speaking English, I get stuck as my mind scrabbles along the edges of my memory, insisting that only a particular Spanish word will communicate exactly what I’m trying to communicate. The other day, while talking in English with a friend, I couldn’t shut off the voice in my head maintaining that ganas was the only word that would say what I needed to say. I still can’t think of a good way to translate ganas. Visceral willpower? A guttural drive? A fire in the belly?