The Nonexistence of Filial Osmosis

When I was in high school, one of my English teachers had this absolutely fantastic poster hanging up to the left of her classroom door.

I used to stare longingly at Garfield, praying, wishing, hoping, that if I did indeed lay my head down and take a snooze on top of Death of a Salesman, that I'd wake up that much wiser and ready for my test the next day.
Alas, it was never the case. Turns out sleeping on books only gives you a creased face.

None the less, this osmosis thing that Garfield's got going on still seems to be stuck in my brain.

Story #2:
A couple months ago when I was plagued with a never-ending cold, there was a particular evening when I was really feeling out of it. Ok maybe that's really just an excuse for what I'm about to tell you.

In the middle of the night I heard Caleb crying. Being lazy so-incredibly-sick-with-the-never-ending-cold, I rolled over and tapped Brandon who, amazingly enough sleeps through any sound that the kids make between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., and asked him to go get Caleb.
Only, when I asked him it came out as, "Caleb zai ku. Keyi qu Caleb ma?"

At 2 a.m. I was barely coherently speaking (probably grammatically incorrect) Chinese to my husband about my child crying in the other room.
Loooovely.

At 8 a.m. when Brandon and I had had our coffee and I was hoping he'd forgotten the whole incident, I innocently asked, "so.......last night...."  And his immediate response was, "Yeah...you spoke to me in Chinese...what was that about?!"

And that's when I realized that my brain has gotten so overloaded with Chinese, even to the point that during sleep-awake moments I'm mumbling in Chinglish. Chinglish has become so engrained in me that I'm now dreaming in it.

So this is where I'm in trouble. I'm entirely too used to dropping words like "mafan" "bu shufu" and "dongxi" into my everyday sentences. Someday when I'm back in America and dropping Chinglish like it's totally normal for every American to know what the heck "mafan" is, it's going to astound me when they don't. When my mom and my dad don't automatically know what "dongxi" I'm talking about when I'm speaking to them, it's going to throw me for a loop.

Because somewhere back in the day when I was so caught up on Garfield and his osmosis idea, it just somehow made sense to me that whatever I picked up along the way, my parents automatically inherited through Filial Osmosis. However, back in May when they were here and they didn't understand my conversations with locals, it was so strange to me to realize the flawed idea of Filial Osmosis.

Although, I will say that I think I know my dad well enough to say that I'm fairly certain he'd probably try my sleep-method of studying Death of a Salesman via Osmosis as well. At least we've got that filial bond in common.