– “Mama, I don’t like wh………..”
– “What? Speak loudly, my daughter, otherwise I won’t understand!”
She, speaking even more quietly: “No one ever understands me!”.
And sometimes we really don’t understand. Like when she speaks softly, looking down, with the hood of her jacket over her head as we walk to school early in the morning. Or when her brother is speaking loudly – in that eternal competition for attention – next to her. The reality is that we would understand her, I think, if she were speaking in Portuguese, my (and my husband’s) beautiful and comfortable native language.
The funny thing is that Portuguese was my daughter’s first language: at 11 months old she said “woof-woof” and “meow” instead of “doggy” and “kitty”. She said mama and papa and never mommy and daddy. Her first sentences were in Portuguese and, to this day, watching videos from when she was younger, Portuguese was her exclusive language until she was 4 years old. Everything changed in kindergarten when she realized that no one but her spoke her parents’ language (my son summed up this whole story by telling me, also at 4, that from then on he would only use Steve’s language, his preschool teacher at the time). Between my two children, it has always been English.
In view of these decisions, my husband, in all his wisdom, decided that he would only “listen” to what the two of them said when and if the children addressed him in Portuguese. It was cute, but not very practical. Imagine: “Papa! There’s fire coming out of the fireplace and spreading into the living room rug!”. “What? My daughter, please repeat, I already told you that I don’t understand English in this house!”. As an anecdote, the fire did come out of the fireplace and began to spread – I’ll leave that for another time – but at the time there was no battle of languages! The example is extreme, but it was like that: they were determined to use what was simplest and quickest for them, while we adults fought to maintain some trace of the native culture in the house. After all, they are Brazilian too. Or are they? Except for the occasional rice and beans, bananas brought by my father-in-law and cheese bread, what else screams Brazilian in our house? A colored engraving of Meaipe beach, ES, the children’s books by Clarisse Lispector and Ana Cecilia de Carvalho, the language their parents use loudly and clearly when they lose their patience…
The other day a friend from Brazil asked me if my daughter still said “não sabo” (instead of “não sei”). For years she had been saying it that way and no one had corrected her because it was funny and cute. I confessed that she spoke so little Portuguese at home that… I didn’t know the answer! When I casually mentioned my frustration about this, my well-meaning friend said “yeah, but her English… is great!” But that’s beside the point, I immediately thought, this girl is American – but of course she speaks English!
There’s no way around it, I console myself, children are sponges that absorb whatever surrounds them. I myself, to my parents’ horror, lost my gaucho accent within a few months of moving out of Rio Grande do Sul. I can’t expect my children born here to have, like their parents, a strong identity with a country they rarely visit. Or to root for Brazil during the World Cup and the Olympics… that doesn’t happen (we’ve tried). The interesting thing is that they understand and don’t even question our duality – the ability to root for two teams, our love for everything Brazilian while at the same time choosing to live here. Maybe that’s what we’ve managed to pass on: the reality of eternal human duality, a functional gringo’s Portuguese and a fierce love for cheese bread. Mission accomplished.