Sleep and Identity

Like Madar, one mother is good for every
problem. One size fits all.

Never one to turn down an opportunity for some shut-eye, I've become a marathon sleeper in Dakar. I no longer sleep twelve hour nights—it took me a while to drift out of jet lag. Now I just sleep very deeply for nine or ten hour every night and pull myself out of bed because I know the morning's complicated routines can't wait forever. Lucy and Yves have the baby to attend to, so for me, there's oatmeal and coffee to make, water to start heating for the several baths. I do what dishes are in the sink. And I attend to baby laundry early enough that it will line-dry during the day. In short, there's too much to allow lying about in good conscience.

But I don't apologize about my extended nights. I fall asleep instantly and profoundly. I'm exhausted by the end of day. Is it because of the Little Orphan Annie routines, the scrubbing and hearth-tending? Hardly: I think it's more related to little Phillipe's work than to any adult work I'm doing. It's trying to figure out who I am and where I am. Formation of identity is a monumental task.

This is my first time as a grandmother. There's no doubt that it is a surprise to my sense of time—chronological time has oddly dissipated. I'm just in the flow, as if I'd been in a pirogue on the indefinite sea of time forever. I find, too, the being thrust into the grandmother role has evoked instincts and emotions I'm surprised to find recurring fully formed after over 25 years. Again, my sense of chronological time has been twisted, like the receiving blankets I wring out for the line.

Before this trip, I'd met Yves only once, the week of his wedding to Lucy. A man's wedding week is not the time to get to know him. Now we speak on Skype, and Lucy sounds happy in the extreme. But I spent some time at his parents' house in St. Louis during wedding week, and so I have some idea of the mores and the family he grew up with. His parents—wonderful people—have cultural practices and attitudes very different than the ones Lucy knew. How, I've worried, would Yves feel about his mother in law's extended visit? I'm a very different sort of woman—and his own mother had six children, after all!

Some of my readers may remember the great blues song that was part of my childhood, the Ernie K-Doe hit, Mother in Law . The lyrics express the stereotypical American man's attitude toward his wife's interfering mother, who refuses to yield ascendency over her daughter to the husband: 

The worst person I know...

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A she worries me, so                  Satan is her name:
If she'd leave us alone
A we would have a happy home
Sent from down below

Mother in law, mother in law

Satan should be her name
To me they're bout the same
Every time I open my mouth
She steps in, tries to put me out...
 
She thinks her advice is a contribution
But if she would leave that would be the solution
And don't come back no more 

I am haunted by those lyrics! In my heart of hearts, I know that I have to win Yves away from the horror of that primal assessment. My greatest terror is that I will place a wedge between husband and wife during so crucial a time in their marriage; that my presence will mean less time for him and his baby; that Yves will come to resent me and make it difficult for me ever to come back; that I won't give him enough to eat…Oh No!!

Well, none of this seems to be occurring. He is, though, a man of few words, with great respect for elders, who is very concerned that I not do too much work. According to Yves, I am here on vacation. Much that I don't think twice about doing—going to buy 10 liters of water at the boutique; carrying the tub of laundry water into the house to the toilet to dump it—Lucy has asked me to stop doing. I should ask Yves because those are his jobs. It's not a question of ability, but of gender and family rank.

It is also customary for him not to express emotion around me, to be formal and polite. We have got to the place where we do joke some and it is incontrovertible that we like each other; but every time we meet, it feels to me like a new beginning. Living in the same house, encountering each other in multiples circumstances every day, our elaborate, ambiguous cultural dance of age, rank, gender and generation tires me out. To tell the truth I long in general for a more formal day-to-day culture. But one in which I know the rules and don't feel that my identity drifts between cultures. As it is, I neither fulfill the expectations of either, nor successfully make up my own.

When I was in Germany in December I suffered a milder case of this, but now I'm having a harder time with linguistic identity displacement. Here in the household both English and French are used. Although I have addressed Lucy in French when we're all together in a room, she once asked me to speak in English, since it's our language. With Yves, whose English is good but not yet fluent, we address each other in bumpy versions of one another's language. When people come calling, I just do my best. I try to keep my Collins Gem bi-lingual dictionary at hand and to compose my utterances before I make them. But it's hard for me to say anything spontaneously.

I've made a few taxi excursions by myself. I know how to say where I'm going, how to describe where I wish to return, and how to be sure I'm getting my price. If anything unexpected occurs, however, I have to improvise because the drivers know as much French as they need for opening and closing statements, but otherwise they all speak Wolof. I can mistake Wolof for French spoken at top speed: OK, I can't even tell the difference.

So, I even think now in a stew of English and French, losing simple English words as I acquire slippery bits of French. My French is improving daily, but not enough to make me truly competent, just enough to make me doltish in two languages. Knowledge of language forms the way you think. Having only partial or intermittent proficiency in a language is for me a frustrating loss—confusion at best—of my identity.