The taste of initiation

At my women-only gym, the middle-aged Turkish women I do crunches with talk about pastries. It reminds me of my first summer in Turkey, where instead of crunches, my neighbors would knit or crochet in our garden while talking about baked goods.

Is there no bad time or place to talk about pastries?

My vocabulary has become peppered with the Turkish versions of pastry dough (börek), cake (pasta), and salty or sweet cookies (tuzlu and tatlı, respectively). Baked sesame seed rings (sımıt) are a daily part of our life.

Sımıt, for Pukka Living

Eat, and then work it off. Bonding in the form of locker-room chat. On the aerobic floor, commiseration over leg lifts and latent stomach muscles. Chats about tattoos, taboos, and domestic routines.

Food was my initiation into Turkey - hours in my mother-in-law's kitchen taught me the aromas and textures that filled the Turkish table - but my gym in Turkey is a social sphere of my own choosing. 

What's one surprising place you go that makes you feel at home?

Which language says 'Mother' best?

At school, my son gives me a hurried, "Bye, Rose!" Not mommy, not 'Anne', the Turkish word for mother, but Rose.

My two-year-old called everyone 'Baba', father or daddy in Turkish, until recently, and now she's learned Anne.  I hear 'mommy' when I ask my son to say, "Can I please have x-y-x, Mommy?" and he repeats.

Is this some kind of permissive parenting style? Some sort of confluence of culture where anything goes?

Not really, but being raised in Turkey has made my kids acquire language differently than I expected. My mother-in-law has hybridized English and Turkish, calling me 'Rose Anne' in front of the kids. As a result of American movies, my in-laws still think everyone (rudely) addresses their parents by their first name in America, even though I correct them. It gets confusing.

English at home, Turkish outside of the house, my husband and I agreed. But when I'm with the kids outside of the house, I hesitate.

If I speak Turkish in public, everyone will understand what I am saying, and with some regret that I care, it means they will be more likely to think I am a good mother.

Four years of raising children in Turkey, though, and some phrases in Turkish come more quickly than in English. Networks of expat women raising kids abroad help soothe my worries, while some articles remind me of the difficulty of being disciplined and consistent.  It feels like every day I choose my language.

Has your native language been shaped by a change of location?

Path finder

The path from there to here involved some stops along the way, but I'm a Midwesterner through and through. This illustration is a visual trajectory of the direction I took. On any given day, the things that affect my perception change. It can be something as immediate as noisy construction, the call to prayer, or school children out my window, or as reflective as considering each step I took to get on the plane to come here. This is not exclusive to the expat. This is inclusive to everybody.

What language do you use to describe your trajectory?