Bonjour.
It has been seven years since my last French lesson, the culmination of 18 months of daily studying to prepare for our trip to France in 2017. Two children born in the interim. Now comes the desire to speak French again, crawling out of the chaos and saying, “I’m important.” But is it? It feels important, because I want to do it, probably, and because, probably, studying something is a refuge from childcare and work and unfinished projects and everything else. Learning a language can be as consuming as you want it to be, and I love to be consumed.
Digging out my old workbooks and notebooks, I see how much of the language I have lost, and how much I still remember. Reading the notes and sentences and journal entries from that time is also an unearthing of who I was seven years ago. Before COVID. Before parenthood. My neatly written little French paragraphs were about
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