When I am angry with my children, English bursts out of my body like an electric charge and I catch myself saying something involuntarily I regret a few minutes later. My disciplining in Polish is much more considered and calm in that I must think before I choose my words because it is my weaker language. When my equilibrium tips and I am no longer able to brush things off calmly, my monologues in front of my children about kindness, respect and appreciation begin in even-toned Polish and, with the rise of my heart rate and the gradual loss of composure, English begins to invade. I turn from the mythical maternal figure offering comfort and guidance to a woman crushed by motherhood and language. I surrender.

My verbal affection is typically offered in Polish, and I hope my soft-spoken utterances envelop my children in a protective layer for many years to come. It does not feel unnatural or uncomfortable to verbalize affection in English, but it also does not feel as effortless, especially after nearly ten years of parenting predominantly in Polish. In a moment of parental defeat, if one of my children has carelessly upset someone or gone against my wishes, I say I am disappointed. And in the same breath, when my child is sad or gets hurt, I say, żal mi ciebie (translation: I feel a deep sadness for you but profounder and, for me, more affectionate than the detached and often offensive I feel sorry for you). My daughter, unprompted, has begun to say the same Polish phrase back to me when she sees me upset or hurt, the same phrase my mother spoke to me, the one I still implore her to say when I feel the weight of the world.

When I tell my daughter she is cudna or my son that he is cudny, the meaning is far more ethereal than the English translation, ‘wonderful’. When I utter the sentiment before bed, I want my children to know that for me, they are otherworldly, imagined and yet, to my daily astonishment, there, in front of me in the flesh. My affection is beyond language as I hold my child’s hand while they fall asleep, breathe them in, stroke the bridge of their nose or tuck their hair behind their ear. Polish has no neutral words for me, not because it is my first language, learnt in childhood, but because it is the language I relearnt and, often, translate for myself as a mother. It has allowed me to be a person I never imagined, a maternal figure I never desired nor expected but one that whispers Polish diminutives into her children’s delicate ears. English is always close by when I need to
assert authority, or rather some semblance of it when childhood chaos ensues, and to remind myself I am also me, before and beyond motherhood. Even so, my children and my mothering has changed my languages – all my languages – forever in ways that, yes, are outside language but also between, across and entrenched deeply.

Bilinguals may switch languages for a variety of reasons: to show they really mean something (not unlike using someone’s full name for emphasis), for affection, to connect with someone who uses the same language, or even to distance themselves from a strong emotion as a form of protection, as I did in the early days of my relationship with my partner. The advice I often come across for bilingual parents from trusted professionals is to ensure they, the parents, speak the language they are most comfortable in with their children. This is sound advice, especially because it counters any erroneous suggestions parents receive to stop speaking a heritage language in the home. (Please never give or take this advice!) Families should not force a language they are not comfortable in, especially if this decision is a result of someone else’s opinion. However, emotions and language are immeasurably more nuanced and sometimes a non-dominant language may play a part in the parent–child emotional connection or, as in my case, a caregiver may feel the pull to draw on different languages at different times.

Family language planning, or which and how languages will be used, and by whom in the family, is never a bad idea. But language plans can be altered, revised and, in the end, not unlike birth plans, are often out of one’s control, especially the language of/and emotions. A language may seem unnatural, false, or fake at first, but may shift over time, as Polish has done for me during motherhood. Looking back at some of the early baby videos with my first child, I hear my piercing voice, first in English and then, as if a jolt awakens me, an apprehensive Polish surfaces. It took a long time to return to my first, now non-dominant language, to feel at ease in its world and make it my own. Polish did not come naturally at first with my children, and only now do I consider the connection to another falsehood new mothers are fed, the one about the maternal instinct.

When I had children, I began another socialization, this one not only into motherhood but also back to Polish. When I am mothering, I am both the agent socializing my children in Polish and also the subject being socialized by my children and my partner, in both languages. It is a complex back-and-forth between identities and languages, but it is not an either/or. 

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There is a quote in Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother that I consider often in the context of caregiving but also language. Cusk writes how after the birth of a child, a woman’s understanding of what it means to exist is completely changed. When the mother is with her children, she is not herself. When she is without them, she too is not herself, so it is a continuous struggle, the child living within ‘the jurisdiction of her consciousness’. I do not have singular personalities and I am not a different person in any of my languages, but I often feel I am, also, never fully myself, especially when mothering in multiple languages. ‘The experience of motherhood loses nearly everything in its translation to the outside world,’ writes Cusk. I am an in- between, an amalgam, a boundary of something I can never truly be part of, and yet, perhaps that is what it means to be forever changed by motherhood.