The Good, The Bad & The In Between

On the duality of mothering, in one, or multiple languages

Image from the NYPL Digital Collection

This past month, I have been interviewing mothers raising bilingual children around the world for my PhD research on emotion, identity, motherhood, and multilingualism. I usually spend an hour online with each mom, discussing her experiences, her feelings and how mothering and multilingualism have affected her identity and her motherhood. The interviews have been moving, exhilarating, relatable and often leave me with goosebumps.

When I first approached my supervisor with my original dissertation proposal and we were working through some specifics, he cautioned against only focusing on the negative emotions of raising multilingual children. At that point, I was only thinking about the negative stuff: the frustration, the guilt, the fear, around trying, and potentially failing, to pass on my heritage language, Polish, to my children. My kids were very young at the time, and I was worried how I would do it all alone (my partner, although very supportive, does not speak Polish so can’t actively participate in the day-to-day language input).

I remember being sceptical about asking my research participants, in the first part of my research, an online questionnaire, about the good stuff. Would people want to talk about the positive feelings? Did it really matter when all I could think about was the bad stuff? Didn’t I want to focus on the real “problem”: how hard (multilingual) mothering is? I did end up asking some questions about positive experiences on the questionnaire, but even while analyzing the data, the answers about the negative emotions and experiences felt more important.

And then, I began interviewing some of the mothers, face-to-face (via screen) for the second part of my data collection. There are other factors in how my perception has changed: my children are a bit older; I can discuss things with them more, I have changed since first becoming a mom in a myriad of ways, and my research has expanded and shifted. I will eventually share my academic findings in a more professional way because you know, academia, but the past month has been an important reminder how complicated and ever-changing (multilingual) mothering can be. There is guilt, frustration, shame, and fear but also, immense pride, joy, and relief.

The work of Barbara Fredrickson came up a few times in my academic reading on emotions and language. A social psychologist, Fredrickson is known for her Broaden-and-Build Theory (1998) and suggests that positive emotions lead to expansive and exploratory behaviour. Long-term, this leads to meaningful knowledge, connection, and the building of personal resources. It is not just about positive thinking however, or that good thoughts will erase the bad ones, but much more about building up a foundation to not be consumed by the negative stuff.  

We all know about the pain and joy of mothering, the bittersweet moments (I mean, it is ONE word made up of opposing spectrums) and the highs and lows. We know it goes so fast but at the same time, so slow. We know we are so tired but somehow have the energy to raise humans. But all this knowing doesn’t mean it is also not worth pausing and really considering how maddening and insane the coinciding and often opposing feelings can be.

This reminds me of Jessica Grose’s New York Times piece, “Why the Joys of Parenting Can Be So Difficult to Express”. As Grose notes, it is never just about “positive thinking” because there is always so much more to every story. Bottom line, parents and mothers are not supported, quality childcare is often impossible to find, paid leave is non-existent, there is a climate crisis and there are no safety nets, so it is really hard to stay positive.

Grose quotes Barbara Ehrenreich’s, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America:  

“To be unduly positive in the face of injustice is reaffirming the status quo, ‘with all its inequalities and abuses of power.’ You can’t extol the blessings of parenthood without addressing the serious challenges that caregivers will face throughout their lifetimes.”

For multilingual families, especially immigrant families, there is often very little support, heritage languages are rarely valued in schools and society, linguistic and racial discrimination is everywhere, and in places like the U.S. and UK, monolingual ideologies and mindsets still rule. It is no wonder remembering the positive stuff is so hard.

As Grose also writes in her opinion piece, “And yet…”

I had this incredible moment a couple of weeks ago with my kids. Before I go on, especially for the bilingual parents here, I want to add that although my children are active bilinguals, proficient in both English and Polish, English is dominant, especially for one child. Therefore, I must remind them to speak their non-dominant language, Polish, approximately 5,678 times a day. I am telling you this for context, so you get a sense of how frustrated I often get, even knowing all the linguistics research I know, and how common this is.

Now, back to the good stuff:

My daughter asked me a couple of weeks ago how to translate something from Polish to English. This rarely happens but it was because she was watching a cartoon in Polish and heard a word, she wasn’t familiar with. Instead of asking what it means, she asked for the English translation so it would make more sense for her. The word was “zasady” and I could not remember how to say it in English. My mind was blank. In response, my son, who was not part of the conversation and doing something else nearby, yelled “it means rules”. The kid was translating for both of us, and I held on to that moment for a long time, or at least until I asked him to speak Polish for the 5,679^th time that day.

I would love to hear both your bad and good stories, your victories and losses, big ones or tiny ones, mothering in one, or multiple languages. Please share in the comments if you feel like it.

And, thank you for reading.

On the Tip of My Tongue (a.k.a. a few more related/recommended things )

Last week, I was listening to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross interview Mary Louise Kelly, host of NPR’s All Things Considered and former national security correspondent about juggling motherhood and career. Kelly’s new memoir It.Goes.So.Fast. is about her last year before her eldest child went off to college, the death of her father, and the endless choices she has had to make as a mother and a journalist, often reporting from all around the world including war zones. In one part of the interview, she reflects about those choices:

“It is possible to hold these two seemingly contradictory, competing ideas at the same time. And in my case, am I glad I went and carried on with my job and carried on reporting from all over the world? Yes. Do I regret leaving my babies every single time I did? Yes.

And those things both can be true and they remain true today.”

The interview made me feel all sorts of things for a variety of reasons and I am not sure where to even begin except to focus on Kelly’s quote about the “contradictory, competing ideas at the same time” and how there will always be regret.

On the topic of duality, I love this newsletter, fittingly called

TWO TRUTHS

by Kelsey Lucas and Cassie Shortsleeve. It always has so much great stuff, really important information and resources, especially about maternal mental health. As the authors note: "In motherhood, things are rarely either/or. They’re often both/and."

And finally, ahead of North American (and probably other places but not UK, where I reside) Mother’s Day, for my American (mom) friends, I wish you more than anything, this: