’You comes later than it,’ said my linguistics professor. I wrote down the sentence and suddenly felt its crushing weight. The module, titled, ‘Interfaces in Syntax’, was about how syntax and semantic interpretation of person, causation and information structure interact. That day’s lecture was on how children learn pronouns. My first child, not yet two years old at the time, was learning pronouns at a crowded and costly London nursery, filled with echoes of baby babbles and other children’s first words, while I sat in the badly lit, windowless classroom, attempting to reinvent my career. In English first-language acquisition, you comes later than it because second-person pronouns are acquired after third-person pronouns. But in that moment, during a class about boundaries and interactions, causation and relation, and asymmetric coordination, it was also the perfect analogy for motherhood.

I was a pupil of linguistics, ‘the science of language’, and a novice at motherhood, the art of caregiving. The modules I was studying, the same ones introducing each part of this book, went far beyond the classroom, permeating my day-to-day caregiving. To me, sociolinguistics was not only the study of language in relation to society, it was how motherhood and language corresponded for me and my child, especially in public spaces. The semantics and pragmatics of early motherhood eluded me, and syntax exemplified how small fragments of the everyday, not unlike words and morphemes, the smallest units of language that have meaning, form a whole. I was the you, my baby was the it, and I had only begun to discover what the world expected from mothers, and what it condemned them for, in caregiving but also in language.

I began an MA in Linguistics shortly after my son turned one, and suddenly, I was a new student, learning about Wugs, a well- known experiment to investigate the acquisition of the English plural in children, and William Labov’s fourth floor, the 1966 study about language and social class. After nursery drop-off, I mastered syntax trees, struggled to memorize the International Phonetic Alphabet, and barely made it through a semantics course. A year earlier, I was a new mother, deciphering the language of motherhood: meconium, colostrum, nipple shields, fourth-degree tear, annihilating emotions and unadulterated love. You know, same, same. As my son was born in London, where my partner and I had moved to from Canada two years earlier, my baby-related lexicon was British English: nappy for diaper, dummy for soother and pram/pushchair/buggy for stroller. (I am still unsure of the difference between the three.) When I called the doctor in London to make my first pregnancy appointment, I had a momentary back-and-forth with the receptionist: he kept asking if I was calling about an antenatal appointment, I kept insisting I wanted to book a (Canadian English6) prenatal appointment. Although the pregnancy was a surprise, I did not want to terminate, I told him, and an anti-natal appointment was not what I required. Ohhh, ante- not anti- I ultimately realized. Whether literal or figurative, everything in my new world was about language.

Once my son was born, I was not only living the parallel lives of a linguistics student and a new mother, but I had simultaneously begun a crash-course in raising a multilingual child. Polish, my first language, the one I grew up speaking at home with my parents, had become, through English socialization after our immigration to Canada when I was five, despite my fluency, my non-dominant language. When I became a mother, I also began to mother my first language, to coax her out, at times coerce. I had to untangle her from English, the language she was forever entwined with, and one that threatened to devour her for years. Motherhood made me question my cultural and linguistic identity in ways I never had before. My identity as a woman was at times, especially at first, at odds with my identity as a mother. My multilingual and multicultural identities, ones I had considered throughout my life often, but not for some time, and not at the same scale, or with the same urgency, were vying for my attention. In early motherhood, I lost the language of self, and was unsure for a long time how to find it, or how to create something new from the fragments of my past life in any language. In the words of Julia Kristeva, my child’s language acquisition implied I too had to re-learn language, a maternal vernacular but also a day-to-day conversational Polish, one I had not used regularly since moving out of my parents’ home fifteen years earlier.

Before our baby was born, my monolingual English-speaking partner and I both knew we wanted him to be multilingual. Living in the United Kingdom, my children – a daughter was born nearly three years later – would learn English because that is the societal language and the language spoken between me and their father. But Polish was the language I alone was responsible for, no matter the cost, I told myself. Having lived most of my life between, beyond and across three languages (I attended French immersion school in Canada until I was seventeen), I knew raising a multilingual and multicultural child would not be a simple endeavour, but I never imagined how exhausting and emotional it could be.