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begging you. Tonight, not a word. Not one. For me.] Seems that trusty weapon, silence, is still the only one we’ve got. And there are timely kicks under the table to remind me to ignore the aggressive taunts he aims across the busy ashtray that separates us. He keeps a cigarette lit through the meal, inhales between courses. What demons of his own is he fighting? What do I embody for him? This’ll be my other difficult thinking project.
    I’ll learn to fear his footsteps and the sound of the front door. And to be especially vigilant about quick pitch changes in his voice. There’s no immunity to be had here. But in recent months, I’ve begun to wonder about his crisis of 1969. Had he learned something about what happened to me? Seen a photo? Heard some dirty story during a disagreement with someone? Or did it, like most things with my father, have nothing to do with me at all?
    My first year at McGill, he’d mail me pipe cleaners and feathers – as if he woke up one day and noticed his loss. And I’d hurry to throw them all out. My father, with whom I remember collecting hazelnuts by the roadside in Saint-Férréol-les-Neiges when I was ten, and «des agathes» on the beach in Kamouraska the following year – two hours of my life that stick out from the rest. Then, the record stops. My father, for whom I felt something good and real once upon a time , before I took a last breath of him on a day I can’t recall at all and then let go forever.
    UNE CANADIENNE ERRANTE
    â€œYou always speak of your language as being French, and English as being other – this thing from outside that you migrated to. But you always had a choice. You had two languages in your home, French and English – your mother’s and your father’s. It’s just that your preference for English was motivated by the trauma, by your need to escape.”
    My friend and colleague is an insightful listener, and I’m left to ponder her comment for days, locked in an inability to articulate howFrench has always been on the inside and English on the outside. And why I never considered it a choice at all – at least, not until I began to deconstruct my personal history from my professional perspective as a linguist and educator.
    My mother was French and my homeland was French – and that just seems to say it all. And my father’s tongue? His English was my doorway out. Perhaps this was because he was so psychologically absent from our home and so far from me in particular – pointing to the exit, one might say. Perhaps it was because he skewed his own language ways over time until he was, on his deathbed, a French-dominant bilingual, knee-deep in patois as much as the next «bon bonhomme,» speaking English to only his “mum” and brothers, his mother tongue now become his holiday tongue. Most likely, it was because I so badly needed his language, this other language, any other language I could grab onto from the dirt around me to feel like the language of outsiders – a language that could take me beyond my context, far and away. Up the narrow rope ladder out of my crater.
    The funny thing, though, is that in all the opportunities I had to learn other languages over the years, especially Turkish and Arabic, I never wanted to – refused to. It always seemed like English was enough of a separation between my inner and outer worlds, a sufficiently hard journey to travel, relentlessly carrying and hiding my secret self, this tiny bundle, dark and fragile. I could go no further. Not unlike the good-enough mother, English became a good-enough stepmother.
    But as for choices, the only one I ever had was to leave. The mother’s tongue is the language of home. And to be a stranger in your own home is a sorrow far harder to bear than the pain of departure. Migration often begins with a language choice – a necessary escape. And this choice sets off dominoes in