"Maman!" squealed my toddler, "Le chiot's in the toilet." His small face looked at me expectantly, a cheeky glint in his eye.
I nodded, half understanding his jumbled French-English sentence. As an anglophone parent still learning French, I wasn't sure what "chiot" meant but I pretended I did.
"Oh, you went to the toilet by yourself? Good job," I said.
I was distracted, and the moment quickly passed. But an hour or so later I learned the meaning of 'chiot' in a way I will never forget. From the bathroom, a tiny whimpering sound emerged. Upon getting close, I saw my mother-in-law's new puppy ('le chiot'!): wet, miserable - and stuck inside the toilet bowl. Unfortunately, this kind of incident isn't unusual in our household. But for some reason, it bothered me more than it perhaps should. My son had managed to get himself out of trouble, while telling the truth plainly to my face. It should have been funny, but in the moment, I found it both frustrating and humiliating - a reminder of my own fledgling ability to communicate with anyone outside the English speaking world. In short, I felt keenly my own shortcomings and that was irritating.
I found it both frustrating and humiliating - a reminder of my own fledgling ability to communicate with anyone outside the English speaking world
Since relocating from Australia to my husband's home country of French Polynesia, my son's language skills have blossomed. Living together with a large extended family means that he is continually exposed to three different languages: English with me and my husband, Tahitian with his grandparents and French with everyone else.
Although English used to be my son's first language, he is beginning to use French more, much to my chagrin. I had so badly wanted my own mother tongue to take precedence, to be the one he prefers to express himself in. And so, the initial excitement I felt over my son becoming bilingual faded when he began using his second language more frequently than his first.
In fact, for a while I was so focussed on this that I never fully experienced the quotidian joy of watching him grow as a French speaker, which is a shame. I remember being surprised recently that my son could sing 'Petit Escargot' (a French children's song) almost perfectly. I was delighted by I also wondered if I was missing out on that 'French' side of him.
Research in linguistics and psychology reveal that we do indeed think and act differently in different languages. For example, an in psycholinguistics found that bilingual people, when asked to finish sentences such as "real friends should...", answered them completely differently depending on the language used. As a mother, I find it incredible that my son's language learning is allowing him to think and perceive the world in different ways. It is both incredible and sobering for me.
As a mother, I find it incredible that my son's language learning is allowing him to think and perceive the world in different ways
Aside from my son keeping unintentional secrets and my curiosity about his budding 'Frenchness', there's another by-product of bilingualism that's a little harder to articulate. As an immigrant parent, I feel a strange sense of loss for an imaginary all-Aussie childhood. A boy that grows up in the suburbs eating Vegemite on toast for breakfast, watches the Wiggles on TV and uses words like 'sunnies' and 'arvo' as a matter of course.
Naturally, this is not just about eating Vegemite on toast. On a deeper level it is a kind of homesickness, a fear of not being able to relate to and know my son fully, a loss of shared childhood experiences and all that comes with it. Needless to say, I wouldn't change a thing about my child. I love him exactly as he is. However, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I share the secret yearning of every parent - that he would grow up, maybe, a little like me.
Most of the time though, I love watching my son embrace both of his parents' mother tongues. In the end, the joys far outweigh the downsides. And perhaps it is one of the greatest gifts to have a son who teaches me through example how to surpass my own limitations.
I guess it's never too late to learn French fluently, right? Allez c'est parti!
