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I used to be a purist when it came to teaching my children Polish. Even when I was younger, I was adamant that my future kids would speak, read, and write in my native language. We would speak only Polish at home. None of this parents-speak-Polish-kids-reply-in-English nonsense. Nope. That wouldn’t be our family.
Have you ever noticed that when you become too self-assured and smug about something, the universe has a way of keeping you in check?
Here’s what happened.
We started out according to plan. And with an advantage, too, since both my husband and I speak Polish. That is all we ever spoke in the house. When our oldest son was a baby, it felt strange to me to try to say anything to him in English. I was never really good at baby talk to begin with, and when I was with my American friends, trying to coo to my baby in my second language, it felt awkward and unnatural—even though I’d been speaking English for the better part of three decades.
In Polish I read books to my son and sang him lullabies. My mother—his Babcia—taught him the animal sounds. (Which actually wasn’t the greatest idea, as I found out one afternoon at the park, when he saw ducks in a pond and started joyfully shouting, “Kfukfukfukfukfuk!”)
Proudly we observed the results of our labors. Our son spoke beautiful Polish, learning to roll his r’s by the time he was five and acquiring quite the vocabulary. People were always surprised at his command of the language, and we—his parents—would beam upon hearing their compliments.
Then he started school.
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That’s when it got real, how hard this would actually be. It wasn’t so obvious in the beginning, but by first, maybe second grade, he was coming home and sneaking into our conversations more and more English phrases each day. It made sense, of course. He was spending six hours immersed in English on a daily basis, and when he’d try to explain to me things that had happened at school, often he simply lacked the Polish words for it. So anytime he said something in English, even one word, I repeated it back to him in Polish and asked him to say it again. And admittedly, a few times I lost my temper and yelled at him for speaking English to me. This, I realize now, was frustration with my own self, of course.
Still, the purist in me pressed on.
I refused to use the Polish versions of certain English words which other immigrants commonly say, like “macroway” (microwave), “orenjoos” (orange juice), “dryway” (driveway), or “highway” (pretty self-explanatory). I wanted my children to learn Polish in all its rightful glory.
I still do.
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But, because of certain things that happened this year, something in my thinking has shifted.
My son is now eight, and starting to ask some serious questions. For instance, last spring, when we were playing in the backyard, he wanted to know what the word “sexy” means. After picking my jaw up off the ground, I calmly asked him where he’d heard it. “At school. We have a sexy club.” (Thankfully, not as nefarious as it sounds! The main activity of the club members, apparently, was strutting around the playground at recess, announcing that they were sexy.)
Now, here I have to admit that before I dived into any explanations of the nature of this word, I pretended I heard his baby brother crying in the house, ran inside, and googled “how to explain the word sexy to your child.” Thank God for the internet! How on earth did parents deal with these kinds of conversations before?! Oh, wait. Never mind.
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Anyway, when I finally returned outside with my fully prepared and child-appropriate explanation, and when I sat down in the swing next to his and started speaking, something strange happened. I felt like I was stumbling over my words—but not because I was embarrassed about the topic. The thing was, I instinctively wanted to have this conversation in English. Doing so in Polish was awkward, like trying to maneuver a bicycle through thick mud. Uphill. I had to think twice about certain phrases, and search my mind for the right words. There were things I wanted to express but felt like I had no language for them in Polish.
A similar incident occurred right around that time. We had some out-of-town guests (or, rather, out-of-country guests), the energy in the house was different, and for a few nights in a row, my eight-year-old had gone to bed late. The night before everyone left, he had a meltdown when I asked him to put on pajamas. And by meltdown, I mean that he went full out existential on me, talking about how time passes so quickly and the hours turn to days and the days turn to months and it’s all so fast and he doesn’t want to die and he’s afraid it’ll hurt when he does. To say that he was having complicated feelings is an understatement. As I tried to comfort him and allay his fears, my heart aching, again I felt like I was stumbling.
In that moment, I felt constrained by my native language.
I simply didn’t have the words I needed. And I realized then—as well as I speak Polish (no one in Poland would ever suspect me of being an American, except maybe if they saw me eating pizza with my bare hands)—for me, it is not the language of emotions and complicated thoughts. I cannot fully express myself if I limit myself to Polish.
A few days after that happened we were at a family party, and I was talking with my cousins (who’d also moved here from Poland when they were kids) about the challenges of teaching our children Polish. And in a moment of synchronicity, it was my cousin Marcin’s comment that suddenly made something click for me.
His children are young adults now. “If I’d spoken only Polish to them,” he said, “then I’d have limited myself to surface conversations about cleaning their rooms or passing the potatoes. But if I wanted to talk with them about the important stuff, the deeper stuff, if I wanted to develop those deeper relationships with them, then I had to speak their language.”
It made so much sense.
Still, though, my first instinct was to think, “Well, whose job is it to teach children how to talk about those deeper things in Polish?” But as I started pondering this more, and remembering the difficult conversations I’d recently had with my own son, the purist in me wavered.
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Maybe there could be a little wiggle room for English in our household, after all.
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Does this mean I’ll abandon my goal? Of course not. Never have I met an adult who’s said, “Ugh. I hate that my parents taught me a second language. What an utter waste of time.” So for all intents and purposes, we will still insist on speaking Polish always, and I will still ask my son to repeat himself if English does enter our conversation. (Well, 90-95% of the time, let’s be real here!) I will still call a microwave “mikrofalówka” and a highway “autostrada.” When there is time, I will still sit down with him and have him practice reading exercises from an old Elementarz.
He will always know Polish. I will see to that. But for those deeper, more important conversations—especially as he gets older—if English feels more natural, then I will not get angry at him for expressing himself in a language that is, after all, his. And maybe, for those deeper conversations, the purist in me will graciously step aside and allow me to connect with my son.