I am deep in doing interviews with mothers from around the world for my PhD research on the emotions and negotiation of identities of mothers raising multilingual children. For context, they are all mothers raising children in a heritage language or, a non-societal language. For example, I am raising my children in Polish but as we live in the UK, their societal language is English. The societal language, especially when children start school and peer groups become very important, often becomes the dominant language and parents may struggle to keep the heritage language going.
This is slightly tangential, but I’ve been pondering this: a family member went to Ecuador to teach English, learned Spanish, and then raised her child to be fluent in Spanish (while living here in the States). It seems to me that this is a slightly unusual situation, to raise a bilingual child without any substantial amount of the culture that comes with it. I wonder if it matters? I think the ability to speak more than one language is a great skill to have. I am not bilingual, to my immigrant mother’s eternal shame (how much I would love to unpack that with her, but she died so long ago), but we always had Japanese culture surrounding us, though not in the way we would have had we lived in Japan. Anyway, morning musings.
I really appreciate how you called out your initial usage of “mothering got in the way” instead of just editing it out off screen. That’s such an important reframe and I know I often find myself thinking that way when I’m frustrated by the like of time in a day.
This is slightly tangential, but I’ve been pondering this: a family member went to Ecuador to teach English, learned Spanish, and then raised her child to be fluent in Spanish (while living here in the States). It seems to me that this is a slightly unusual situation, to raise a bilingual child without any substantial amount of the culture that comes with it. I wonder if it matters? I think the ability to speak more than one language is a great skill to have. I am not bilingual, to my immigrant mother’s eternal shame (how much I would love to unpack that with her, but she died so long ago), but we always had Japanese culture surrounding us, though not in the way we would have had we lived in Japan. Anyway, morning musings.
I really appreciate how you called out your initial usage of “mothering got in the way” instead of just editing it out off screen. That’s such an important reframe and I know I often find myself thinking that way when I’m frustrated by the like of time in a day.