Mother Tongue

by Christine Gilbert

  Slowly, I got to know our little bella. She was very strong, and even quieter than Cole, who had been a very quiet baby. She didn’t cry, she loved to be held, and she nursed every few hours. I had forgotten how truly little babies are, and how utterly divine they smell, especially the crown of their head.

  Bliss.

  When Cole came to visit, he smiled so much I swear he instantly fell in love with his sister, too. He asked if he could touch her and I said yes, to which he jabbed a big fat toddler finger right into her forehead. Then he licked her. Because why not?

  The pain from my C-section was unrelenting, and when Dr. Laura came to visit us on our last day, I cried again. She made me walk around the room, half hunched over and in searing pain, then hugged me and told me I was strong. I asked for more pain meds. She wrote a prescription, but we found out that in Mexico that was just a note to remind us what to buy at the pharmacy. We didn’t need a prescription at all, we just had to know what to buy.

  As Dr. Laura took out her credit card machine so we could pay her portion of the bill (it felt strange to put a birth on a credit card, but there you go), she talked about the surgery.

  “There was a lot of scar tissue, so I cleaned that up. Also the previous doctors folded all the layers of skin together, but I stitched each layer separately, so now you won’t have that little bump; it will lie flatter.”

  Drew handed over his credit card and she charged us the remaining $1,650, which covered all her care, the surgery, the anesthesiologist, and the induction.

  “And this one,” she said to Stella as she picked her up and cradled her in her arms. “She had the cord wrapped around her neck so many times that I had to flip her and untangle her to get her out. There wasn’t even enough cord to get her out the natural way. There was no way she was ever going to descend.”

  I hadn’t even felt her flip the baby. That’s how out of it I was during the surgery.

  “Did you name her?” she asked.

  “Yes, Stella Lucia.”

  “Oh, that’s a beautiful name for a beautiful little girl.”

  Then so quickly, we went home. The four of us.

  On the ride home, Drew and I kept saying to each other, “Whoa, we have kids. Kids. With an s. Kidsssss.” Then we laughed and laughed.

  • • •

  THANK GOD FOR PAM, who had dropped everything to come stay with us for a month. We didn’t have our families there, but it was so nice having my friend with us. She took care of Cole while we were in the hospital, and they bonded right away. While I was still in the hospital, she called me and said, “Cole wants me to sleep with him, in his bed, is that okay?”

  “Yes, of course, he probably just misses sleeping next to me.”

  “Okay, good, I wanted to check.”

  Stella loved Pam, too, falling asleep on her chest, so impossibly tiny and lovely. Through travel and persistence, I had built us a family, a patchwork of Drew, our kids, and our friends and community.

  Around this time Drew and I started seriously talking about staying in Mexico. It was perfect in so many ways. There was a six-month tourist visa that could be renewed by leaving the country for one day—or if we wanted to apply for permanent residency, Stella’s birth in Mexico streamlined the process for the rest of the family. Because Drew and I were freelancers, working on writing, photography, and film projects, we had a long-documented history of income without a direct employer (exactly what the immigration officials in any country want to see—you can support yourself and will not take a local job).

  I didn’t know how we’d fit Arabic and Mandarin into our lives here (because I was still set on studying them), but Drew was happy here, and Cole was fitting in so well and learning new Spanish words every day. It was unbelievably beautiful and the food was fantastic. We could live here on $2,000 a month and have a three-bedroom house next to the beach, put our children in private schools and eat like kings (kings who loved tacos). The people were family-oriented, the community was welcoming, and the neighborhood we were in, while extremely noisy, was also full of fun and music. My kids could learn how to ride horses here, they could be surfers, they could sail boats. We could open a business or continue to work online. We’d be able to spend most of our time with our kids while they were little, instead of constantly working.

  Was this the new-baby honeymoon period or had we found a home?

  Twenty-six

  Pam left. My heart ached as I watched her walk away at the airport, her messy bun bouncing gently as she dragged her suitcase behind her. Cole asked on the ride home, “Where is Pam?” He had gotten so used to her living with us—we all had—that it had been easy to forget that she was only staying for the month. She did leave a small bag of clothes and shoes behind with the promise that she’d return soon enough.

  I started my Spanish lessons again. The kids were well on their way to learning the language. Stella had been learning all along, of course, although she didn’t speak yet and wouldn’t for a while. Babies are born understanding the cadence and melody of their mother’s tongue, and so she must have heard months of English and Spanish while renting out my womb.

  Stella, like all babies, was born a “universal listener” with the ability to learn any language. Her newborn brain was equally receptive to the sounds of Mandarin or Arabic or Spanish. Janet Werker at the University of British Columbia famously studied this when she tested Japanese infants. In Japanese the l and r sounds are indistinguishable. They sound exactly alike. If you played the l and r sounds for a native Japanese speaker who did not know English, he or she would not be able to hear the difference—just like I couldn’t hear the difference in tones in Mandarin; my brain just ignored it as unneeded information, unless I seriously trained myself to listen. But for babies it’s completely different. In Werker’s experiment, Japanese babies could identify the difference between l and r at six months. But by age twelve months they started to ignore the difference, just like all Japanese speakers do.

  What this tells us about language is that as babies we are open and able to learn anything, but as our young brain develops we map those patterns we see in our environment as hard rules. Our brains are changed forever by the languages we hear as an infant.

  At six months old, Stella spoke her first words. Mama. Dada. Agua. (What can I say, we really like water in our house.) But Drew and I knew we weren’t going to be able to keep up Cole and Stella’s Spanish study on our own. Already I was slipping on my Spanish with the kids. It happened slowly, without deliberate thought; at first it felt strange to speak to Stella and Cole in Spanish when we had English-speaking guests (because unlike China and Beirut, where no one visited us, now that we lived on the beach in Mexico, we had a nearly constant stream of friends coming by for a visit). I was self-conscious about my Spanish because I knew it wasn’t perfect, but even more so when hosting English-speaking guests, who no doubt felt left out when I would switch to Spanish with my kids. Was I being obnoxious? Did they think I was showing off? I wondered.

  It was a bit of a cultural identity crisis. If I had married a Mexican man, then I might feel differently about it. Or if I were Latina, even if I didn’t grow up speaking Spanish, then coming home to Mexico to learn the language would feel more natural. However, I didn’t have a cultural link to Spanish culture, and I hadn’t lived in the country long enough to feel I had staked a claim in it. So speaking Spanish still felt like a mask I was putting on. In my worst moments of doubt I wondered if it was a kind of cultural appropriation. I worried about how my speaking accented Spanish to my kids would be perceived by a Mexican insider.

  I knew that parents teaching their children English as a second language probably didn’t feel this same way, that the benefits of kids learning English were plain enough to see, and there was nothing cultural about it. And after all, it’s not like I was playing the tourist while learning the language. I wasn’t adopting just the roman
tic bits and ignoring the rest. I was living among Mexicans, not secluded in my American bubble. But it didn’t feel like enough, at least not yet. I felt like I still needed to earn my place in this culture.

  This internal debate bubbled away in the background, but I still continued to speak Spanish to the kids, while Drew spoke to them in English. We reasoned that that way they’d progress equally quickly in each language. But two things in particular happened that ultimately ended my experiment in “one parent, one language” (OPOL). The first was having Cole slowly begin to speak Spanish in public and hearing people laugh at him. I’m sure that part of it was that, yes, of course it’s adorable that my blond-haired, blue-eyed American little boy was saying “Gracias.” But I heard something else. He was speaking with my American accent. His “gracias” didn’t sound like the Mexican kids on our block; it sounded like an exaggeration of my accent. I knew that the more he spoke Spanish in public and the more native Spanish speakers conversed with him, the more natural his accent would become, but for now, he was embarrassed every time he used Spanish in public, and my heart broke to see him feeling like that.

  Then a second thing happened. I was reading Cole a bedtime story in Spanish and he curled up in a ball and withdrew. He didn’t want me to speak in Spanish to him. It became worse over the next few days. He would laugh or shy away if I spoke in Spanish. Eventually he started telling me to stop. Quite plainly, in fact. He just said: “Stop.”

  I had traveled all the way around the world to learn languages to teach them to my son, and now, at a bold three and a half years old, he had asked me to knock it off.

  You know what? I did.

  I stopped. I wasn’t sure if it was forever, but I started speaking English again. He still understood Spanish, but I wasn’t going to force it on him. I didn’t think about it, but I stopped speaking to Stella in Spanish, too. I let it go. Drew and I sat down and talked about it.

  “It doesn’t matter if I speak Spanish to the kids,” I said as we ate dinner beneath the canopy of our favorite taco stand in downtown Bucerías. Stella was curled up on my lap and Cole was sitting next to Drew, poking at his quesadilla, which he prounounced “kiss-a-dilla.”

  “You don’t think? I thought it was working,” he said, chewing. “The whole I-speak-English, you-speak-Spanish thing.”

  “Sí, pero no es importante porque they are getting plenty of exposure, plus we should just send them to school in Spanish,” I said, picking at my chorizo with my fork.

  The waitress came over and asked, “¿Está todo bien? ¿Nada más?” Everything okay? Anything else?

  Drew reflexively said, “Nada más. Gracias.” Nothing more. Thanks. He turned back to his taco, dumping more hot sauce on it than seemed advisable. “So we’ll send the kids to school in Spanish and speak English at home?”

  “Well, here’s my thinking. Cole will learn English because it’s our language, but also it’s a world language. And he will grow up in our culture. But we can’t give him Spanish culture at home. And without Spanish school he’s not going to learn enough about the history, culture, and language to ever be fully bilingual. I think sending them to school in Spanish is our best shot at them being both bilingual and bicultural,” I said.

  Drew looked over at Cole, who was munching away happily on his kiss-a-dilla and asked him, “Cole, do you want to go to school?”

  “Yes!” he said without hesitating. Drew and I looked at each other.

  “You know it won’t be just like playing, right?” I asked Cole.

  He nodded yes, but of course he had no idea. I had never planned to put him in school so early. After all, Drew and I worked from home; we had the golden ticket—careers that allowed us to work from anywhere in the world. All we had to do was upload our work and communicate via e-mail. We were two stay-at-home parents and we wanted to enjoy our children and take care of them ourselves.

  But Cole was desperate to spend more time with other kids. He wanted to go to school. He had his heart set on it.

  “Okay,” Drew said, and finished off the rest of his taco, then wiped his mouth with a napkin and tossed it onto his plate, “Looks like we’re sending the kids to school in Spanish.”

  “Yay!” Cole and I sang out in unison.

  Later, Drew and I looked into public schools, but the enrollment period had already passed. There was a private bilingual school in our neighborhood, though, and they had open admissions. We took a tour of the facility, and they had a big playground, daily snack time, and lots of play-based learning. The teachers spoke English, but barely. It was bilingual enough that Cole could communicate in English, but he’d mostly be learning in Spanish.

  We signed him up. The first day of school he filled his Spider-Man backpack with a spare set of clothes, a toothbrush, and a toy for show-and-tell. He picked his Woody doll from Toy Story, and we dropped him off at school. Drew walked him to the gate because I was afraid I would cry. Cole walked in and never looked back. Drew returned to the car and I asked him, “Are we doing the right thing?”

  “Did you see him? He practically skipped into the school. He will be fine. This is only hard for us.” Drew took my hand.

  He was right. Cole didn’t just like school, he loved it. In the following weeks his Spanish took off. For all the time I spent speaking in Spanish to him, suddenly being in school meant he had to use the language and he was busting out vocabulary I had no idea he knew.

  “I have a novia,” Cole confided in me one evening.

  “You have a girlfriend?” I asked.

  “Two.” He held up two fingers.

  “Really.”

  “Valentina and Sophia.” He looked smug.

  “How do you know they are your girlfriends?”

  He shrugged.

  Each day the teacher left a note in Cole’s backpack for me about how school had gone. One day there was a reminder to parents about Mexican Independence Day the next day. Cole was supposed to dress up. I searched online for clues as to what he should wear, and found a bunch of photos of little kids in sombreros, fake mustaches, and checkered shirts with handkerchiefs around their necks.

  I bit my lip. “Drew, do you think . . .”

  “What?” Drew said, looking at the photos.

  “I mean is this maybe . . .”

  “What?” He looked at me uncomprehendingly.

  “I don’t know, if we send him to school with a sombrero and a fake mustache, is that like a parody of Mexican culture?”

  “Like he shows up and the teachers are mortified because we’ve just misinterpreted the whole thing?”

  “Exactly. I mean, this seems like if I did this in the States it would be pretty racist.” I looked again at the giant sombreros.

  “Right, in the States it would be weird,” Drew agreed. “But here it’s Pancho Villa; he’s a national hero.”

  “Okay, I don’t know.” I thought about where to find a good costume. “Let’s go to Walmart.”

  So we headed to Walmart and—surprise!—there was an entire section dedicated to children’s costumes for the holiday. Just in case, I e-mailed my friend who had lived in Mexico City for years and she confirmed, “Yup, that’s what they do.”

  So I dressed Cole up with his fake mustache and giant sombrero, and tied a colorful handkerchief around his neck, then sent him off. We found out later, as kids dressed as famous Mexican heroes streamed into the school gates, that we’d picked the exact right outfit. At this moment I realized what we were really doing was raising a bicultural child. From my childhood growing up in the United States, I had a certain frame of reference for new experiences. Cole’s frame of reference would be completely different. I could read textbooks and studies all day about raising bilingual children, but it was little things like this, sending our toddler off to preschool dressed as Pancho Villa, that made me realize what we’d signed up for. And while Cole wouldn’
t necessarily appreciate the difference, it felt like a gift to me to understand a culture enough to know that Mexican Independence Day comes in September, not on Cinco de Mayo.

  • • •

  EVERY NIGHT AFTER DUSK, we’d take Cole and Stella and walk over to the little park next to our house. I’d drag Cole’s bike for him over the dirt road. There was one little boy there he really loved, named Alejandro—but the kids didn’t know each other’s names. When they saw each other, they ran toward each other.

  “Boy!” Cole yelled.

  “Niño,” Alejandro yelled.

  Then they smashed into each other, arms outstretched like they were about to hug but couldn’t figure out how to put on the brakes. They fell to the ground and embraced.

  They’d spend the next few hours riding their tricycles as fast as they could around and around the park until Alejandro’s mom waved to him and gestured for him to go home. At ten p.m. sharp the park cleared out, the invisible tug of mothers and curfews.

  “Where did the kids go?” Cole asked me.

  “Home. They have to go to school tomorrow.”

  “Oh.”

  “¿Listo?” Ready?

  He nodded and we walked back to the house. In the courtyard, Cole pointed up at the sky.

  “Look, Mama! It’s the moon! La luna!”

  “Sí, muy bien. Y las estrellas también.” Very good. And the stars, too.

  “Las estrellas,” he repeated reverently. We smiled at each other.

  Twenty-seven