Learning a New Language

So, the thing is… it’s possible to be fluent in languages you don’t actually speak.

I think the way we learn languages is fascinating. Smiley Jane (just turned two) is learning English. She discovers new words every day and it is such a funny and interesting process. I wish I had kept a record of new words like some moms do — where they can look at a calendar and see the evolution of their infants into English speakers. I can’t remember exactly how Ana (now four-and-a-half) began to talk, except for a few nuggets. I remember that she thought the microwave was called “It’s coming!” because that’s what I would say as she waited impatiently for her milk. And I remember that during her very first stomach virus, when I walked into the room to find her sitting up in her crib, she didn’t have words to tell me she’d thrown up. She looked at me, big eyes full of tears. “Spilling,” she said. “I spilling.”

Smiley Jane, rather appropriately, said, “Hi!” for her first word and she hasn’t stopped talking since. Jane was hilarious anyway, because before she actually started speaking real words, she carried on full conversations in gibberish. There’s no doubt in my mind that she was asking questions and telling jokes and I continued to disappoint her in my responses so she HAD to learn English!

Of course, oral expression is just one part of learning a language. Within the last month or so, Ana has begun writing. She learned to read very early but was never interested in being shown how to write her letters (by me, anyway.) Now that her teacher has started the process, it’s a different story. All of sudden, she wants to write EVERYTHING! She’s typing e-mail and leaving me little notes and writing letters to her grandmothers. It’s really remarkable. And the process is so fascinating, because although she’s a flawless reader, she doesn’t speak the language of writing yet. Her emergent writing is mostly phonetic (“terfic” for “terrific”) and some of the ways in which she writes her letters are so adorable, I kind of hate that she’ll outgrow that. She will, though, because she practices writing at least two hours out of every day. She insists on doing it alone --she won’t let me help her. I am not a credible authority in written language (or in anything else these days. Sigh.)

I was thinking about all this when some friends brought their new baby to visit for the weekend. The parents tried so long to have her and are SO proud and working SO hard at doing everything just right that they seemed completely stressed out. I just felt so much for them - - I remember traveling with Ana when she was about the same age and how hard it was. Those first few months of motherhood are hard anyway. There’s no way to prepare for the reality of becoming a mom, no matter how much you want the baby. You dream of what your life will be like and you see yourself mothering your infant but there’s no way to prepare for painful breastfeeding or how strange you feel in your own skin or that tiny part of you that feels like maybe you’re not up to the job. Or that almost incapacitating love, for that matter.

See, I am fluent in “New Mom.” But I couldn’t tell my friend anything because even when you understand “New Mom” you can’t SPEAK it. All you can do is understand and hold your tongue, because as an experienced mom, anything you say will make the new mom feel incompetent. I couldn’t tell my friend that I understood and remembered so clearly being almost frantic with love for Ana and feeling so anxious to do everything right. I couldn’t tell her that I learned there is no ONE right way. That she’d find her own way of doing things and that she and her baby would survive this time and that she’d actually look back at it and laugh at herself a little and just maybe, be proud of herself a LOT. I couldn’t tell her any of that. I lacked the language to say it. Maybe “New Mom” is like Latin – a language you can understand but can’t speak. A language that doesn’t translate exactly.

On Sunday, my husband’s grandmother died at the age of 91. By the time I met Grandma Cooper, she was already in her mid-eighties and she’d long ago stopped trying to give advice to new moms. And that’s really sad, you know, because she’d raised four children. When I think about what she had seen and experienced in her lifetime – - the industrial revolution, cars, phones, television, space travel, the beginning and end of the cold war, the tragic loss of one of her children and her husband – - I think she could have told me so much. But despite the amazing modernization she’d witnessed, I think she knew that some things never really change.

So she did what grandmothers and great grandmothers have been doing through the ages: she expressed her very genuine delight in my beautiful children and she asked for pictures and updates and she seemed full of admiration for us for having produced these spectacular girls. Maybe she waited for me to ask her advice. But I couldn’t yet, you see. I just didn’t speak the language.

It’s an odd world that we live in. We are more in touch than ever. We have cell phones and pagers and e-mail and voice mail. We have support groups and running clubs and church homes and play groups. We’re connected around the clock. And yet, it seems to me that somehow we don’t really COMMUNICATE with each other – - especially we moms. We erect these false barriers and we get so invested in presenting the best possible front to the world that we’ve lost the gift of honest connection. Maybe we never had it, I don’t know. For the most part, I feel like I stay silent rather than offering or asking for help. Maybe because to reach out is to risk rejection or ridicule or judgment or exposure.

Our language development is a process that lasts a lifetime. We put so much effort into it and then we don’t quite know what to do. We spend our whole lives acquiring meaningful experiences and then it seems like we all come to the conclusion that we might step on someone’s toes if we share them. But the thing is, I don’t want to continue to reinvent the wheel myself.

These days, I’m trying to present myself in an unadorned fashion, to be authentic and honest and to admit that I haven’t a clue what I’m doing most of the time. Maybe you’ll scorn me for that; that’s the risk I take. But if I figure something out that maybe YOU don’t know, I’ll try to tell you about it. I guess it might make you defensive; that’s also a risk I take. But if I can check my ego and meet other moms as I truly am, I might also develop the communication device that leads to real connection: honesty. It’s been a rather humbling experiment so far and I have had to eat some of my own words.

But surely anything is better than becoming fluent in a language and then finding that there isn’t anyone with whom to hold a conversation?

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Barbara Cooper is the mother of Ana (4.5) and Smiley Jane (2). She lives in Austin, Texas and she is rarely at a loss for words.