Some of my young girlfriends had been talking about when they first learned to walk instead of crawl, and I was curious about my own history, so I asked my mother.
She said that I never did crawl because I never needed to. She said I would stand up in my playpen and say to the nearest adult, “Would you please hand me my toy?” when I had thrown one out of my reach. I asked her how old I was when I could speak like that, and she said, with some pride, that I could speak in complete sentences before I was a year old.
My own recollection is that I never had an opportunity to crawl, being confined to a playpen, stroller, or crib for all of my young life until I was taken to my grandparent’s home when I was a year and a half. By that time, I could easily walk.
But the part about speaking in complete sentences feels absolutely true. I feel as if words are a part of my core self, inextricably bound up in my soul over so many centuries that they can never be forgotten, even if all else is lost from one lifetime to the next.
From the very beginning, my mother spoke to me as if I were an adult and forbade any other adult to use baby talk in my presence. “Mama” was an unacceptable title for her. I was to address her as “Mother.”
My grandmother was to be called by that full title. Only my grandfather rebelled and insisted on being called “Pop,” as his little nieces and many of the adults in the family, including my mother, already called him.
Mother corrected every phrase out of my mouth from the very beginning, so much so that until I was in my forties and caught myself doing it and realized where it had come from, I corrected every word out of everyone else’s mouth (silently and to myself, thankfully) and every misspelled word or ungrammatical phrase I read. It was as ingrained into my consciousness as saying “please” and “thank you.”
I loved my mother. I loved her because she taught me. And when she said a word I didn’t understand, she welcomed my questions. If she didn’t have a definition ready in mind, she stopped and looked it up in a dictionary for me. And she always read me not only the word but the source of the word and its roots and expounded to me other words from the same roots.
When she gave me a definition of a word, it seemed to me as if the entire history and use of the word would spring whole into my memory as if I had always known it but merely forgotten for a time.
And from that moment, I owned the word and could use it properly.