Bayn al-lughatayn...Between Two Languages

The more comfortable I become as a bilingual speaker of both Arabic and English, the more difficult it is for me to express myself. My experience is comparable to that of small children who are raised in two-language households, an upbringing that often delays their linguistic development so that when their monolingual peers are already stringing together words to make complete sentences, they are still struggling to combine nouns and adjectives.

I had a teacher in high school who was Swedish and married to an American-Israeli man, and when they had a baby boy they decided that she would speak to him in Swedish and her husband would speak to him in English with occasional dashes of Hebrew thrown in. Their son was every bit as bright as any baby, but he spoke later and with more errors than is considered average for children his age. Of course, multilingual babies catch up to the norm eventually, and when they get older they have the advantage of being natively comfortable with more than one language--a useful skill to have.

As I imagine was the case for my teacher's son, I often feel caught between two languages. My grasp of Arabic is not quite comprehensive enough to convey everything I want to say without difficulty or hesitation, but English is limited by its inability to give voice to the fact of being in Egypt that informs every action, thought, and desire of my day-to-day existence. I am so wholly, totally, obsessively focused on language here that I've become hypersensitive to every word that comes out of my mouth: Is the language I've chosen to speak appropriate to my audience? Is what I'm saying accurately conveying the meaning I want it to? If I am being misunderstood, is it for reasons of vocabulary (English vocabulary that's too complicated for my Egyptian conversation partner; Arabic vocabulary that's incorrect or lacking), cultural or situational reasons (saying the wrong thing at the wrong time), or reasons of pronunciation and/or diction (saying the right thing but mispronouncing it)?

What it comes down to is that the only way I can talk comfortably these days is in a mixture of both languages, and so anyone I talk to must have an acceptable grasp of not just one language but two. I've met Americans here who I never would've thought were Americans if they hadn't told me so--that's how much their accent when speaking English has been changed and distorted by the Arabic-based linguistic environment they live in. So if you can't understand my English next time you run into me in the States, my apologies...I couldn't help it.