Song bibi!

Vince and I were driving home from a play on Friday night. A voice mail message was left on my phone while we were in the theater, "Hi, Linsey. It's Mom. We are getting on the boat early tomorrow and so I just wanted to call and tell you I love you. It was nice even to hear your voice on the voice mail. I am sorry I missed you. We'll be thinking about you and we'll let you know when we get there."

Vince's mom called while I was listening to the message. I know when it's his mom because he speaks to her in Chinese and uses a lot of "Yes, of course"s. To date I have only successfully learned the following words in Chinese:

1-Older brother
2- Younger brother
3- Dad
4- Yes, of course

I sat and listened to Vince speak with his mother. "This language is so foreign," I thought. "I can't pick out anything! No word, no phrase stands out to me. They could be talking about anything. And it just sounds so strange. I will never learn this." This is dramatically different from how I feel when I hear someone speaking Spanish, Italian, French, Dutch, German, Swedish, Arabic, or Russian. I think, "if they'd just slow down, I'm sure I'd catch something. I could learn this language; just a few months and I'd easily be communicating."

Vince put the phone on speaker and I heard his mom say, "Song bibi! Song bibi! Song bibi!" The repetition was lovely! It allowed me to pick out and remember a phrase.

"What is 'song bibi'" I asked, carefully rolling the words around my mouth as I asked.

"I thought you'd get a kick out of that. It means, 'Have a baby'."

"What! NO. Your mother just called you at 11:00 pm on a Friday night to tell you to have a baby? That's why she called?"

"Yup. She figured I am out on a date, so she wanted to remind me that I was just wasting all my time and resources dating when I need to focus on girls who want to have a baby. She doesn't even care if I get married first anymore. She just wants the baby."

"No! How can you handle that?"

"I love her. She's my mother. She's insane."

So words 5 and 6 I learned in Chinese: song bibi.

My mother would never, ever even think of pressuring me to have a baby. In fact, my mother is sailing the open sea to the Galapagos islands with a boyscout compass and a satellite phone that doesn't work. Our mothers are living two very different lives.