My mother’s recipes are written in a language I never learned

Dear Delyara, My mother died last year and left me three notebooks filled with recipes in Armenian. I can speak the language badly, enough for greetings and family jokes, but I never learned to read it. She tried to teach me when I was young. I complained that Saturday classes were boring and asked why I needed an alphabet none of my friends used. She stopped insisting. Tonight, I wanted to make the walnut cake she baked every Easter. I opened the notebook and recognised only numbers, stains, and the shape of her handwriting. I used a translation app, but the camera confused measurements and turned one ingredient into “angry milk.” I laughed, then cried so hard I had to sit on the kitchen floor. My mother spent years worried that I would forget where we came from. I always told her food was enough, that I could taste culture without reading it. Now the recipes are in front of me, and I am locked outside them by the language I refused as a child. Tomorrow, I am meeting an elderly woman from our church who offered to translate the first notebook with me. Tonight, I keep tracing my mother’s letters as if touch might teach me what pride prevented me from learning.