Mother Tongue

I have lived twice as many weeks
as my son has days in this world.
He has more bones than me
but I have grown a whole new skeleton
since I moved to the country of his birth.

Abuela grew eight, at least, in her lifetime,
not counting the three she grew in her womb.
Six decades before me, she was the last
of our line of women to bear her children
in the country of her birth.

In Spanish, to give birth is dar a luz,
to bring to the light.
To mother is to spend
half your life stoking their flame,
and the rest captivated by their glow.

Twelve years I have lived an ocean away
from my mother, longer than she lived
in the country of her birth.
The first words I ever heard were most likely
in my mom's Dominican accent—

the one I'd never noticed until
the first time someone asked me about it.
Confused, defiant, I told my parents,
who laughed and told me
that the voice I’d always known

sounded different to everyone else:
my friends, our neighbours, my teachers;
probably even to my father,
the first time he heard it. Back then,
Mom was still dreaming in Spanish.

Whoever coined the term
mother tongue wasn’t thinking
of us, generations of families
scattered across borders
by choice or circumstance.

My mother’s tongue is not mine.
Raising us in a country not her own,
she had seen the shadows,
and feared marking our difference;
she wanted to protect our light.

Still we found it, my brothers and I,
all in our own time. Through the songs
she sang and the jokes her Papi told,
it infused our lives. De tal palo tal astilla:
from such a stick comes such a splinter.

And now, I am mothering in Spanish,
part-time, scattering it across our days.
How do I teach my child
that a language can be his,
when I’m not even sure it’s mine?

Sing “Estrellita”, he says, always chiming in for
quiero verte a ti brillar.
Unburdened by questions of belonging,
how easily he distills the truth of love:
“I want to see you shine.”