Inspiring Women Magazine Spring 2017

Home and Away: Everyone Here Speaks English
Home & Away columnist Robin
Meloy Goldsby reinvents herself,
one umlaut at a time.
When my husband and I arrived in Germany,
we spoke only a few words of German,
taught to us by a chain-smoking
Manhattanite named Brünhilde. She had
instructed us to say “Hier kommt Otto! Otto
Schmidt!” and insisted we learn to count to
100. For weeks I wandered city streets,
pushing Curtis in his baby buggy, counting
my steps in German, counting the days until
we could, at last, meet Otto Schmidt. A new
life, a new culture, a new me.
“Don’t worry about the language,” our
friends and relatives told us. “Everyone there
speaks English.” I needed to believe them.
“Moving to a foreign country is like falling
in love,” said my therapist. “It’s a chance to
reinvent yourself, a chance to see the world
with new eyes, a chance to feel like a kid
again.”
She didn’t mention the ö. Nor did she say
anything about spending the first five years
feeling like an idiot.
At the post office in our old New York City
neighborhood, I used to wait in line behind
foreigners—Mexican mothers, old men from
Serbia, beautiful Korean women—and listen,
impatiently, as they struggled to buy a
stamp. Why don’t they learn English? I would
think. It would make their lives so much
easier.
Well. I arrived in Germany and turned into
the foreigner at the post office, my ears
growing warm with shame, sensing the
annoyance of the people behind me as I
attempted to buy airmail stickers by
stretching my arms out to the side and
making airplane noises.
“Oh,” said the postal clerk. “You mean
Luftpost.”
“Danke,” I said, grateful to the clerk for
not laughing. Maybe this was like falling in
love, but I didn’t think so at the time.
Brigitte Schweiger, a warmhearted
woman I met at a supermarket while trying
to decipher the ingredients on a box of
cereal, invited me to join a Krabbelgruppe, a
playgroup for toddlers and their mothers.
Twice a week I wheeled Curtis to a
neighborhood church where he played and
fought with five little boys. The mothers
chattered, the boys yelled, and the
avalanche of unfamiliar words nearly
smothered me. But I kept attending and
listening and, eventually, started to identify
phrases and understand simple
conversations.
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