Hi,
A laundromat may not be your ideal location to spend a Saturday afternoon. Even less so if you are out and about with a small child. But I have to admit that my Saturday afternoon doing laundry was actually quite pleasant.
My family and I are currently staying in a mountain cabin in the Italian Alps, in Val di Sella, a remote valley an hour east of the city of Trento. Lorenzo, my 8-month-old son, wears reusable cloth diapers and washing machines are my best friends. We have an internet connection in our cabin – but no washing machine.
So we drove down 15 minutes to the closest town, Borgo Valsugana, and found a laundromat.
When I went there for the first time last week, as Lorenzo slept, I was happy to see a corner for children with games and books.
So when we returned on Saturday, I brought Lorenzo along, sure that he would enjoy the experience. And he did. First we sat on the small chairs around the low table and played with the wooden house and the small furniture inside. Then we pulled all the books off the shelf and I tried to read something to him. But Lorenzo just took off on his own, stamping on the floor and crawling all around the place. He then noticed the low wheelie bins for the clean linen, and was determined to climb into one of them (we managed to persuade him not to.) And we also just spent some time watching how the clothes turned and spun in the drier.
I’m glad that the owners of this laundromat put together a children’s corner. After all, who goes to laundromats? The question reminded me of A Manual for Cleaning Women, a collection of short stories by Lucia Berlin. The first story in the book, Angel’s Laundromat, features a fictionalised version of Berlin herself and her encounters in different laundromats – one of which she went to as a young mother to wash diapers, she writes. From Berlin’s experience, and my own, parents go to laundromats, and older people too.
Depending on where you are geographically, laundromats may be more or less common. In Italy, washing machines are more affordable than in Latin America, so laundromats are not so common among the middle classes who generally have a washing machine at home. Through my first-hand observation, I noticed a lot of foreigners and elderly people, who in Italy have a lower income, coming in and out to wash and dry their clothes in Borgo Valsugana. And there was a fair share of children too. So, if you can make the trip more pleasant for families, I will give you a five-star review for thoughtfulness. (Or wait: maybe we should stop being surprised by things that are well thought out?)
It was getting late, and we were still waiting for the drier. A man came in with his son, who must have been six or seven years old and was already wearing his pyjamas. The boy was desperate for his father’s attention and ran around, jumped in the wheelie bins, and whined every time the father told him off. He provided some great amusement for Lorenzo for ten minutes. But what stood out for me was that the father was speaking in Spanish to the boy except when he told him loudly to stop jumping in the bins; that was when he resorted to Italian.
An elderly lady was sitting there, watching disapprovingly.
My reading was: the father was from Peru, or maybe Ecuador – my guess from the accent. When he was ashamed of his son he raised his voice in Italian to avoid being singled out. But I do hope that he spoke in Spanish to his son the rest of the time.
I have come across several situations when parents decide not to speak to their children in their native language(s) to shelter themselves from criticism or in an attempt to become more integrated. It was the case of a friend who was raised in Australia by his Kurdish-Iranian mother and a father of Czech German ancestry. Neither spoke to their son in their native languages because it was Australia in the 1970s, and integration was of utmost importance.
Just recently, a Hungarian woman who was in my pre-birth class in Italy told me that her mother-in-law would not approve of her speaking to her daughter in Hungarian. I wholeheartedly encouraged her to do so, and so did the paediatrician at the class.
But things won’t be easy for her – as they weren’t easy for my friend raised in Australia. Language is, after all, also a matter of power. Even speaking your native language(s) to your child is something that you can do only when you feel you can. And in certain contexts, you simply can’t.
Can you think of any contexts where that was the case? Or perhaps of some exceptions to this? I would love to hear from you.
Until next week,
Irene
P.S. Last week I wrote about the words we choose when we talk about children, starting from an older woman’s question: is this a girl? Last weekend I was asked the same question and answered: it’s a boy. It seems that thinking about these things and writing about them is not enough to let go of old habits. The upside is that thanks to Mark, a member, I found out that only 30% of the world’s languages makes a gender distinction in pronouns. OluTimehin, our Othering correspondent, told us how that works in Yoruba. Do you speak a language that doesn’t distinguish between genders? I would love to hear from you.
Correction: In a previous version of this newsletter I spoke of "native language". As member John Chew pointed out in an email, there are plenty of people out there that have more than one native language, and to be more inclusive I have now fixed the expression to "native language(s)".
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