Guest Post: Lost in Translation
When I met Colleen, we were at a reading for Reality Bites Back with Jenn Pozner. After the reading, she pulled me aside and said “I don’t know you at all, but I hear you’re a teacher and I want to pick your brain.” And that was the start of a beautiful friendship. Colleen is a whirlwind of energy in the best possible way. When you meet her for the first time, it’s like you’ve known her forever. She’s clear-headed, hilarious, and has the kind of positive outlook on life that I envy. She truly is the kind of person that looks at her life experiences – good and bad – and both learns from them and turns them into a funny story. I’ve been bugging her to submit a guest post to me forever because I knew you all would enjoy it, so when she sent this to me, I was practically jumping for joy. I think Colleen hits the nail on the head here with her post – sometimes in a relationship, things get lost in translation, no matter what language you’re speaking.
I always order for my husband in restaurants. It has nothing to do with gender equality, reversing gender stereotypes, or anything of that sort. Waiters simply cannot understand him. He mumbles, which doesn’t help, but he also brought his accent with him from the UK where he was born and lived until he was twenty five years old.
What is the first thing you usually ask a waiter for? Water. It’s taken him awhile to get used to even asking for this, as it’s not complimentary or readily offered across the pond, but it’s also an earful for someone not prepared for a British accent. I tend to shout out, “WA-TERRRRR” before he can even open his mouth. A few nights ago he beat me to the punch and the waitress stared at me baffled until I translated English into English.
The most common reaction I get when people find out I’m married to a Brit is this question: Does he have an accent?? I can see ladies’ faces perk up as visions of Hugh Grant circa 1998 dance through their heads. When I answer yes, the smiles that spread on their face are truly Mr. Darcy worthy. I quickly explain to them that the accent sometimes causes more trouble than it’s worth.
When we first started dating, we had a fun time swapping new vocab words (ice lollies for popsicles is probably my favorite.) With our first argument, however, I remember being particularly stung by the haughty sound of his insults. Once I even yelled at him, “Stop being so snarky!” to which he replied, “I’m not being snarky! This is just how I talk!” In the middle of a New York City move in the dead of summer (surely the downfall of many a relationship) I cut a corner with something heavy and scraped the wall. “Stop being so brutish!” he yelled, only to be even more annoyed by my laughter at his grandpa speak.
One night recently, we had a good hour-long conversation about why he told friends “I’ll check,” when they asked if he was available to hang out. I talked on and on about his need to be autonomous and not “report” to his wife if he wanted to do something with his friends. Increasingly frustrated at my failure to grasp that he was not, in fact, reporting to me, he finally blurted out, “I think it’s an American thing! I would never say ‘I’ll get back to you!’” Stopped in my tracks, I realized that our whole conversation had occurred because, after five years together, things were still getting lost in translation.
I know that other couples misunderstand each other. I know that the first year of marriage is often about figuring out how exactly two people fit their lives together neatly. Added to this dynamic in my life, however, is a strange penchant for using different words to mean almost the same thing. Most of the time I don’t hear his accent anymore, but in my house we empty the bin, not the trash can, clean up using kitchen roll, not paper towels, and go to the loo, not the bathroom. Turns out marriage has taught me how to speak another language.
Colleen Cavanagh is a friend of Ashley’s and a teacher in Chicago.
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