The Stranger in My Mother's Eyes

I was chatting enthusiastically with my classmate from Germany when Mom suddenly chimed in:

"What are you talking about?"

I froze.

Mom was indeed a housewife.

But in her youth, she had spent five years in Germany. Her German was even more fluent than mine.

Yet she couldn't recognize that I had just called her name.

Was she really my mother?

1.

No one knew that Mom had lived in Germany—no one except me.

When I decided to study abroad in Germany, I started learning German in advance.

There was one word I kept mispronouncing no matter how many times I tried.