Nightlight: Finding my mamá voice
From the December 2022 newsletter:
When my first daughter was in utero I would speak with her, sometimes out loud and sometimes telepathically as if my thoughts could travel to her through our shared blood. I would tell her about the weather, how beautiful the sunlight was in the early morning on my way to work. I would tell her how I couldn’t wait to hold her; ask her what she thought of different names. I told her about my fears and doubts, why I was sad or angry and how it had nothing to do with her. She seemed preternaturally able to understand these conversations, responding with an understanding kick or shifting her entire body under the weight of what I was sharing. “I know,” I’d answer, both of us in on the big secret of my internal life.
Many conversations were shared in this bathroom at work.
The conversations with my imagined baby all took place in English. When she was born, fast and wet and looking just like her dad, they continued. The baby in my arms still seemed to know me better than anyone, but it was clear to me that I shouldn’t burden her with my story. She had her own to tell. Our conversations turned to her and how she was feeling. Did she need to sleep? Was she hungry? Was she cold? The subjects were lighter, even mundane, but more essential as they touched on core experiences and survival.
English is not my first language, but it is the language I am most comfortable in. It is also the language in which I learned to teach and the language I spoke while nannying. English is the language in which I knew how to be with a baby.
But Spanish is my home. I speak it with my parents, though not my brother. It is the language of my childhood. I could not imagine a world in which my own children didn’t speak it. The people around me certainly insist that they must. But there is the imagined baby and the real baby. My imagined baby held me within her, languages and all. She did not need me to speak Spanish to her to know it. My real baby, on the other hand, did. If she was going to speak it, I needed to lead by example.
My first attempts at speaking Spanish with my baby were clunky and rehearsed, whispered attempts at greeting her forced from lips smiling awkwardly between flushed cheeks. My face would warm as I found my way clumsily along words and phrases I had never uttered before. It was in the middle of narrating a diaper change that I realized I didn’t know the real word for vulva. I was sitting in the backseat of my parents’ car next to my hysterical baby when I discovered the phrase, “Puedes llorar.” You can cry.
To be the parent I wanted to be en Español I had to dust off words found in the recesses of my brain and create a whole new library of phrases. Most of us do this as we grow into parenthood and choose to do some things differently than our parents. We try on scripts until they feel right. “We don’t hit.” We pick words up on the playground and bring them home, offering up new structures at the altars of these tiny Gods. “Hitting hurts.” We mimic our children’s teachers and hope the words have the same effect coming from a different source. “It’s okay to be angry, it’s not okay to hit.” Some of these phrases become part of the lexicon of our parent communities. “I won’t let you hit.” I see this now, the universality of the experience.
But as I held my infant daughter and found my voice as her mamá, the journey felt all mine. It was my discomfort to sit with and work through. My shame to unpack as I began to speak it; to unpack again as I began to use it in public, and yet again as I try to hold onto Spanish while she begins to find comfort in English. Videos of our first few months together show me slowly transitioning from speaking almost exclusively English with my daughter, to exclusively Spanish. My goal was for her to speak it fluently. It worked.
Her first word was “buho” (owl) on her first birthday. Videos of her at 18 months, 2 years, even 3 years show her speaking fluidly in Spanish as if that is all she’s ever heard. It is only around 3 and a half that we start to hear English from her more regularly, and really not until closer to 5 that I can tell she is no longer always translating.
With my first baby in front of a tapestry that has inspired many conversations.
Finding my comfort with speaking Spanish as a parent is at best awkward, and, in the hardest moments, painful. In the beginning it was often lonely. At times, I felt like it put distance between me and my husband, me and my friends. But as my husband and then daughter began to speak it, my words flowed more easily, too. Spanish became our love language. Our home.
It has also brought unexpected gifts. In speaking Spanish again, I uncovered parts of myself I had hidden, parts I had assimilated to the point of erasure. Except they weren’t erased, just buried and waiting for me to feel safe to express them. I built a community around my daughters and my little family, so that the responsibility for passing down this language is not just shared but enjoyed by many. I have made close friends. I have made virtual friends. I have found that there are many ways to be bilingual, many ways to be Latina, many ways to navigate this all with a family, all of them valid. A salve for years of feeling like my way was less than.
My eldest has been in a school where English is the dominant language for two years now. Every day she speaks it more comfortably. She now responds to my Spanish with English, pulling me back towards the language that comes easiest to us both. As my conversations with her develop, my ability to communicate with nuance and specificity in Spanish is once again being stretched. I find myself resorting to English more often. I find myself once again feeling shame. My youngest still speaks primarily Spanish, but English is around the corner. There is a glint in her eye when she speaks it that belies the pleasure English brings her. It pierces me and I feel my pain leak into my gut. I have more work to do.
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