Free Bilingual Being by Kathleen Saint-Onge Page A

innocence. I found genuine healing in this reinvention as I watched my children become what I understood to be English-Canadian youngsters – children who knew nothing of French other than the fact that their mother occasionally talked on the phone in a strange tongue.
    As they grew, I chose to home-school them, their education becoming another personal act of resistance. I was determined that they’d learn to read before I sent them to school so that they could be critically distant, reflective, independent. I was living out an instinct that the odds are much better in this life if you can stay alert and keep a mindful eye on what and who’s around you. And I wanted them, above all, to hold foremost the values of home. I was unwilling to let the language and visions of school get between me and my children, or between each of them. I’d seen the damage in my own life, in the abyss between my family and me.
    Of course, home-schooling was a radical move that infuriated my family in Quebec: children first being denied their heritage and thenschooled like hippies! But we were, thankfully, in a community of likeminded souls, wounded Easterners reacting to our separate histories, all gathered on the edge of the country living out alternatives, grounded in a kind of neo-Pagan-Buddhist worldview. Across this expanse of geography, in an English-only context, I felt strangely safe – far from all that was French, «mon enfance» [my childhood], and everyone familiar. It would take fifteen years of this deep healing, nursed by the smell of the ocean and the Douglas firs, before I had the courage to come back East in 2001.
    That’s how I came to be lost along the timeline that is my curious bilingual life, and I remain so. All of my life I’ve run from my mother tongue and from my heritage, seeking shelter in English. I’m able to teach other people’s children in French these days because the French I work in at school is a pleasant, neutered, decultured French spoken only on some days, with some students, for some purposes – and shared with colleagues whose fluency is not always assured and who are distant from its heritage. A tongue stripped of emotional saliency and discharged of affective ties, like a stale image of a poignant scene that can be observed safely, detachedly.
    But on that Saturday in May, while I tried to hide in the safest place I know, a room full of books, my deepest fears found me. Rattled me to my depths, laid bare my linguistic wounds. So how does someone who loves libraries and learning so much take half her known linguistic knowledge and deliberately put it on a shelf high out of reach for thirty years? And how does a girl who finds so much comfort in words and texts become a linguistic runaway?
    __________
    * The SRA box was a “reading lab” produced by Science Research Associates.
    * Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada, a federally funded, countrywide initiative administered by Citizenship and Immigration Canada that provides free English (or in Quebec, French) language instruction.

Mouse House
    We’re the victims of
    forgotten birthdays, you and I:
    Cousine A, Cousine B, Cousine C,
    Cousine D, Cousine E, and how many
    others among us? We were there, they
    tell us, these mums of ours, these
    ones who passed through their
    own forgotten birthdays too.
    Apparently, we played “pin
    the tail on the donkey,” where we
    stumbled blind in the dark, and other
    pleasant games – like “musical chairs,”
    moving our butts from place to place,
    never knowing when things would
    ever stop, and “pass the parcel,”
    shifting prizes hand to hand.
    We ate cake and candy in
    profusion, accompanied by pop
    and handmade sandwiches stuffed
    with eggs and ham, pickled onions,
    radishes shaped like roses, and countless
    visions for every oral desire – our bellies
    always filled up to the brim, packed
    tight like Cousin