Where are you from, lady?

      I turned into my mother, although I'm sure my brother would disagree. But don't listen to him, he's crazy. Seriously. Like lunatic crazy. In all sincerity I'm not 100% like my mom, I'm just 100% the part of her I never wanted to be like when I was a kid. The high pitched shrieking, for one. The total loss of sanity when she thought one of us were hurt or in danger, for another. Yes, she called the cops looking for me when I was 24 and gone for like 3 hours longer than she thought I should have been IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON! Yes, she was the mom standing behind the bushes to make sure I got on the school bus but didn't want me to see that she was checking up on me (the bus driver saw her and asked me if I knew her) WHEN I WAS IN FREAKIN' HIGH SCHOOL. Her excuse is that it wasn't she didn't trust me, she just didn't trust the rest of the world.
     But there was more to it than that. Growing up in the 70's in the US, a child of immigrants from India, I was American, southern almost. I didn't speak Hindi, I didn't know nothin' about Hindus, I didn't wear salwar kameezes (they made me hot and I kept losing the scarf). My mother came to the US when she was 23, learned English along with a Korean woman she befriended (I'd love to know how they communicated) after she arrived there, and somehow managed to raise 3 children in a completely foreign culture in a foreign language (I was the youngest child and refused to speak anything but English after the age of 3). Of course I turned out crazy. Half of the things we said to each other got lost in translation. I'm pretty sure she never actually heard the words I said, she just reacted to the tone in which I said them. And considering I'm usually depressed or pissed off, I'm guessing she had no idea what I was talking about.
     So what do I do with my three kids? Move to Germany! Not as completely foreign as a move from India to the US, but foreign enough (what's up with the three hours of school per day, or the rule against running your engine for more than 3 minutes if you aren't in motion, and don't even get me started about the no noise on Sunday law). At least I learned the language before I got here, and only now, three years later, is my almost 5 year old's vocabulary surpassing mine. And I kind of get the culture, too. I mean, I totally get the significance of drinking a liter of beer and standing on a table, arm in arm with a bunch of drunks singing John Denver songs.
     I wear a dirndl about as easily as a salwar now. But the difference is that when I wear Indian clothes, I actually look Indian. It's only when I open my mouth to say something that people realize I'm not really like the other billion people who look like me. I got really confused looks from people when I traveled to Bangladesh and people start talking to me in Bengali, and I'm like, dude, sorry, no Bengali, only English, and yea, no Hindi either. And I get equally strange expressions from Germans when I speak to them in German and they actually understand what I am saying (do all Asian-looking people in Germany really speak that much worse than me?). When I was in Mexico City people asked me why I didn't speak Spanish, that's something different all together, but at least I learned how to say no comprende from Dora the Explorer.
     Whether or not my kids understand me or not is another story. Apparently the words "brush your teeth" "turn off the tv" "you're old enough to wipe your own butt" are not understandable by youths under 10 in any language, unless you you repeat them a minimum of 10 times and threaten them with the loss of chocolate in their diet.


Were you raised by people from another planet, I mean, culture? Love to hear your stories.