Pond Skaters
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Three evenings a week, my daughter appears in the kitchen, with a laptop under her arm, an exercise book, and her reading glasses.
Some nights, I am a reluctant student, as we clear the dinner things from the table to make space for our classroom.
Come on, Mum, she says, it’s only 20 minutes, and then we’ll stop. We’ll just watch the video and try a little bit of the worksheet.
We are learning French.
Or rather, we are skating on the frozen pond of a new language.
It looked so pretty, that first day, as we ran down the hill towards it, with all the trees dusted with snow, and the pale grey sky blushing pink like our cold cheeks.
A chateau rose up in the far misty distance, like a magical French daydream.
This is going to be so great! I grinned, untangling the laces on my ice skates. I can’t wait!
The boots felt unfamiliar on our feet, sort of constricting round the ankles. Here we go, lesson 1. We held onto each other, wobbling.
Ooof. I can’t even stand up in this language, I thought.
Nervous, we shuffled down to the frozen pond of French, determined to skate on it, breath puffing in and out in the cold air.
I gazed out over the ice to the trees on the other side. Would I ever get across there? Over-ambitious, I was already imagining myself figure skating with words I hadn’t yet learnt.
My daughter is a good student. She approaches things methodically, and her notes are neat and ordered. She smoothed open a new page, and simply took one tiny step onto the pond.
Bonjour!
The ice held. She stood there, beaming.
Impatient to get going, I tried too - Bonjour-comment-ça-va? - whizzing on to join her too fast. I lost my footing, and fell. How we laughed, as I struggled to get up again.
We soon discovered that learning a language is all about the falling over. And we have fallen over a lot. Breathing on fingers, numb from the ice, and just trying to stay upright for a few sentences more – that’s the way.
Vocab vanishes, grammar falters, accents jangle. Down we go again!
No matter. Every day we take a tiny step further onto the frozen pond of French, hand in hand, and we see something new. Fish schooling deep at the bottom. A leaf, trapped in time, just under the surface. The tracks our skates make. The sky wide and cold above us.
And then we come back to the bank, take off our skates, and I put the kettle on. My daughter closes the laptop. Usually, we have laughed a lot, and we are tired, and sometimes I am discouraged.
I’ll never do it!
You will, Mum.
Last week, we got out way past the middle of the frozen pond of our beginner’s course, within just a short distance of the trees on the far side. We can’t ice-dance with words yet, but we can push off and glide a bit now, one, two, three, our hands just touching at the fingertips for moral support.
It’s so fun, learning French with my beautiful daughter. I know already I will miss her when she ventures out onto bigger, frozen lakes without me.
But in the process, she has taught me how to start anything. Open the book, smooth down a page. Take a tiny step onto the ice.
It will hold.
Have you started learning anything recently? How did it go? Or, what would you like to learn? Why not comment on this blog post and let me know!
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Thank you for reading my first newsletter! I hope you enjoyed it.
Love, Trudi
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