Not Even Not Zen 436: Biomythography - Note 143, Parenting Languages

Briefly, Foreign Languages 

I have a clear memory of my father in the living room of our apartment in a German town (either Hamburg or Bitburg) saying to me, "Vo ist du momma?"

The interesting part of this, now, after years of this memory cropping up, is that I have taken a little formal German. Now I've learned that apparently, my father should have been saying, "Wo ist diene Mutter?" for 'Where is your mother?' I think I'm remembering the impromptu lessons from my father pretty clearly, at least in a fragmented way, but either his German was wrong (surely possible, as I imagine my foreign language skills would have been suspect in a similar situation) or he was speaking the way his Hamburg, Frankfurt, or Bitburg neighbors spoke (also possible, given what people tell me about the highly regional characteristics of German). I don't know which, whether he was generally wrong or regionally correct. And it doesn't matter, I suppose, except as a reflection on how crystalline some memories can be and yet, contrarily, how hazy or wrong they might prove to be about the facts. 

You can remember something correctly about what you were told. And yet the facts you learned can be wrong. 

As a third, reasonable alternative, my parents could have compromised their German language skills as they tried to teach me. Maybe they sprechened more Deutch than I understood at the time. After all, I was a toddler. They might have been happy enough that I'd learned a few German phrases.