You know how there are a some words you've only ever actually read and not heard so you pronounce them differently in your head then they're actually pronounced?
There are So. Many. Words. That I have this with, but not because I learned them by reading. I learned them because my mother read to us every afternoon for one hour and that's how SHE pronounced them because SHE had only ever read them.
She came from a family full of trauma and ghosts and heartbreak and alcoholism and was the first (and nearly only) one to go to college. She loved to read as a child and her family made fun of her for it and it was a working class neighborhood in the 1950s so who exactly was she gonna ask?
I like my mispronounciations because they are my mother's. An artifact of one of the aspects of her I love and admire. Not just her curiosity and love of stories, or her stubborn refusal to be anyone but herself, but her deep compulsion to share that with others, especially her children.
She fucked me up a lot but she also gave me some amazing tools for unfucking myself.







