It was spring break, and my thighs were sticking to the plastic-covered swivel chair that wobbled with every shift of my hips. I remember sitting at the kitchen counter and watching my mother go from one end of the kitchen to the other, her Apple watch in workout mode, counting the calories she burned as she went the two feet from the stove to the sink and back. She was making her infamous eggplant parmesan, a dish I loved ever since I was a kid.
It was spring break, and I was asking her what it was like to grow up in the Dominican Republic, what it was like to come to America, to learn English in school. She told me how she used to live on a farm, and how she would walk three miles to get water. How, when she was four years old, she fell from a donkey and still has the scar on her back. How, when she was flying over New York City, she thought she was in heaven, it was so beautiful. How, when she landed and had eaten for the first time in America, she thought it was disgusting. She learned English by playing Monopoly in school.
My mother answered my questions as I spun from side to side on my chair, almost going in a full circle but not quite.
And then, I asked her why she didn’t speak to me and my brothers in Spanish while growing up. At first, she told me the usual things she said when I would ask this question– that she didn’t want us to fall behind in school, that my siblings and I didn’t like speaking in Spanish when we were kids, that she was just used to speaking to us in English.
But then, she told me a story I’d never heard before, a story of when my oldest brother, John, was in kindergarten, so maybe 2002, 2003. She told me how one day his teacher had a meeting with my mother and told her, “John is speaking too much Spanish in the classroom. This is America, and we only speak English here.”
Immediately, I told my mother, “That’s horrible.”
But it was like she didn’t hear me as she continued, “And you know, I thought to myself, ‘okay, yeah. Maybe you’re right. This is America. Maybe I should just only speak to him in English.’”
And then, suddenly, I was crying, because I knew, I knew that this was the real reason why my mother didn’t speak to me in Spanish. It was why I always felt like an outsider at family parties, and why I was embarrassed every time someone spoke to me in Spanish and I had to work, really work, to understand what they were saying. It was why I never spoke to my father, why, when we pass each other in the hallways, we are like two passing ships in the night; we know that the other is there but do not engage.
And my mother, my sweet mother, didn’t understand why I was crying. And that made me cry even more, not then but months later, when I was telling this story to someone else and suddenly found that I could not. Instead, I found myself locked in a bathroom, sobbing, my arm in my mouth to stop me from wailing.
Keanna Peña '25 is the Editor-in-Chief of the Muhlenberg Weekly. She is an English and Creative Writing major with a minor in Dance. She is passionate about informing the student body and sharing her creative writing.
