Reliving my (Canadian) Childhood

My head and heart are full of childhood memories. These include places I loved visiting, my school and daycare teachers, favourite food, but most of all, books, songs and TV shows. Not YouTube videos, cause I'm old.

I grew up mostly on Israeli kids books that every Israeli kid/adult knows: "A tale of five balloons", "Hot corn", "A flat for rent" and more. The authors were all Israeli and so were the characters in the books. They had names like Ofir, Ron and Yael.

They used to teach them at kindergartens and schools and there are theatre plays based on them. They are an integral part of every Israeli kid's life, and if you ask someone about them and he doesn't know what you're talking about, he either didn't grow up in Israel, or just woke up from a very long coma. Poor thing.

When Eve was born, the first thing I asked my mother in law to buy was a collection of all the top-rated Israeli kids books. To me, they were must-haves that I needed to have in my house, ready for the day when my daughter is old enough to sit and listen to me read to her in Hebrew, beautiful stories that I mostly knew by heart. The same happened with Israeli songs. I was singing them to her as a baby, thinking that she must know them when she's older.

But then I realized that my child is Canadian, and as much as I wanted her to familiarize with the Israeli content that I love, her childhood will most likely be more Canadian than Israeli, inevitably. It became ever more clear to me when I first took her to circle-time. You can only imagine how shocked I was (not really) to find out that I know NOTHING about Canadian kids books and songs. I was that mom who set in that circle and pretended to know the words. Rolly polly, Old Macdonald and their friends were all new to me, and so I found myself learning a whole new repertoire.

And I enjoyed it!

As an older me, I now paid attention to the details, I enjoyed learning all the new songs and felt proud when I actually remembered them! but more than anything, I felt happy. It was like reliving my childhood, but this time as a Canadian.

You don't get to enjoy a lot of kids stuff as an adult, and even then, you look at them from an adult point of view. But this was different. I was a child again, enjoying the lyrics, the melody and the moves that came with both.

Eve had just recently turned 4.5 and Tom just turned one, there is so much more to come. My Canadian childhood is not coming to its end any time soon, and I honestly don't want it to.

There's just one thing though...

As fun as it is to learn a bunch of 'kids stuff', I mostly learn them from Eve. The tables have turned, and I often times find her teaching me things. She is now the teacher and I'm the student (and this happens in many things, not just songs and books, but this is for another post).

I keep wondering if she finds it strange or frustrating to present me with songs and stories that I'm not familiar with. Does she look at me and think "how come my mommy doesn't know it? is something wrong?".

I struggle with this thought of being an immigrating mom with non-immigrant kids. There will always be this missing piece / gap: stuff that they grow up knowing, and I'm just learning now, our different accents, them growing up in a cold country while I came from a (extra) warm one. And many more.

This all disappears as soon as we find a common ground, like a book that I know in Hebrew but was originally published in English, like "The lion who loved strawberries" or "The giving tree". Then we're both happy again. No gaps, no frustration. Just 2 kids (one is just slightly older) enjoying a bedtime story about a super annoying lion that didn't really love strawberries after all.