This video has nothing to do with the post. (Patreon)

Once a week, my French Mother-in-Law (Ma belle-mere) helps me practice my second language over a video call. She's offered for years- the entire 19 years I've been with her son!- but I was always too embarrassed of my caveman-level language skills.

I love French. I love the way it sounds. I love the way it feels in my mouth. I love putting together the puzzle pieces that is French grammar. I love how the grammar has formal rules except for when it doesn't and you just have to know that the rules don't apply anymore and who on earth approved of these so-called "rules" in the first place because I would like to file a complaint.

My Mother-in-Law is patient, she talks slowly for me, with genuine kindness. She congratulates me when I navigate a sentence that uses the conditional or irregular verbs or, really, anything that's more complex than the present or past tenses. I'll say the correct word in the correct tense, but my pronunciation turns it into something incomprehensible. She'll repeat the word correctly for me and I'll say it back, exactly the same as she did, I swear, and then she'll repeat it again, slower, breaking down each syllable, and I'll repeat it back to her, again, beat-for-beat, exactly the same as she said it, and I'll watch as her expression subtly flutters while she does the mental calculations of trying to figure out how to break these sounds down even more so I can actually recreate them correctly.

Speaking a second language is surprisingly exhausting.

When I studied abroad in France as a college student, I'd feel my brain shut down, just completely run out of juice. After my body had adjusted to the jet lag, I would still experience these energy crashes from the exhaustion of my brain running overtime to understand and communicate in a foreign language with grammar rules that work except for when they don't and the speed with which the locals spoke so that they no longer spoke individual words but one long string of impossible, beautiful sound.

My French is slow and deliberate and frequently not-quite-right. But, it's close enough, so you generally can get what I mean (as long as you can parse my accent).

Yesterday I started my morning stumbling through French and then I finished my day on the other side, stumbling through English.

Last night, I volunteered to sew at another RepairPDX event. Once a month, people bring their busted clothing and electronics and bikes to a community space (Last time was a church basement, this time the lunch hall in an elementary school) where volunteers patch up their belongings.

This time around I stitched up:

1) The blown out crotch-seam in a pair of jeans for a 31-year-old man who's just gone back to school to study food science. His mom sat with us after one of the electronics people repaired her chair massage pad.

2) The belt-loop on a herringbone jacket that belongs to young woman who works with under-privileged girls in Portland and asked if I'd be interested in teaching a class to them about basic sewing (um, YES?)

3) Two slightly-ripped crotches in the work pants of a 60-year-old woman who works as a janitor at an elementary school. These are her perfect pants for work, she told me, because they have so many pockets. She wants to buy more, but she's gotta wait till she goes back to visit her 91-year-old dad in Taiwan, because these pants are cheaper over there.

She apologized several times for her English. She's lived here since 1996, but in her community everyone speaks Chinese so she never became "good" (her words) at English. "It's better than my French!" I reassured her. We talked the whole time while I stitched up her pants. We talked about menopause ("But you're too young!" She told me. "I know!" I said). We talked about immigration, both hers and my husband's. We talked about her husband passing and her two kids who are recent college graduates. We talked about sewing tools (I taught her the words for "Seam ripper" and "thimble"). She called me "he" and then quickly corrected herself and then corrected herself again before explaining that in Chinese they use the same word for both so she always gets them mixed up in English. I told her how in French every word is masculine or feminine and I'm always mixing up which gender goes where, too.

She would take pauses to mentally translate what she wanted to say. Sometimes I wouldn't understand how she pronounced some words. Some sentences came out a bit jumbled, but we figured them out together.

The main thing that needed to be fixed was the torn seams, but, she sheepishly asked near the end, if there's enough time, would I also be able to fix her one pocket? She showed me how it already had a big hole and the material was basically disintegrating where it attached to the pants. She had sewn one edge of a piece of fabric to it, intending to make, like, a reinforcement pocket around it. I had just finished pinning the rest of the fabric in place when the organizers announced that it was time to wrap things up and they'd see us next month.

When I offered to work on them at home, returning them to her later in the week, at first she said she didn't want me to use up my free time on work. "No, no," I told her. "This is fun for me! I enjoy this. This is my hobby!" Fortunately her friend had joined us by this point and she vouched for me, reassuring her to trust me that I was telling the truth and not just being polite.

I felt honored to be trusted as I rolled her pants up so the pins wouldn't prick me by accident.

What an honor to have a stranger trust you with their belongings- even more intimately, to trust you with their clothing. She's trusting that I will do what I said I would and she's trusting that I'll return them to her.

She doesn't know me! I'm a stranger! A stranger who's taking the pants she needs for work!

But she knows we both have menopause. She knows we've both navigated US immigration. She knows we both mix up the genders in our second languages. She knows we both can figure out what the other is saying, even when we don't have all the right words.

Thank you for trusting me.

I'll have your pants done this week.

 (All the photos are of the same potato plant growing over the last month+. Not to be confused with the potato in the video, which is brand new and coming up in its very own dedicated Potato Patch!)