A Conversation with Malwina Gudowska on Multilingualism & the Language of Motherhood

"Ich hab dich so, so lieb," I tell my daughter as I hug her against me, plant another kiss on her forehead, and we settle into our bedtime routine. Encouraging her to grip my index fingers, I playfully spread her little arms out wide as a measure of the immeasurable, to emphasise the so, so much. I know that, in this instance, the choice of words doesn't really matter as much as the moment and the feeling, and yet, it seems necessary to demonstrate that they are "big". Just as deep, profound and, frankly, untranslatable, as the - for lack of a better description - grown-up version, ich liebe dich. So I tell her once more, just as she's drifting off to sleep - but in English. I love you, I quietly whisper. On other nights, I keep it in my head, an overwhelmingly wonderful thought and sensation, captured in these three words, bold lettered and loud. For everyone to hear and see and feel, especially her.

As I lay there in limbo - too tired to get up again and enjoy that one little window of time to myself (usually to work), too frazzled to give in to the daily exhaustion - I start analysing and future-tripping. Why is it that the "I love you" my parents and I, and the rest of my German family share, doesn't feel like enough when I say it to my daughter? How is it that, what has ultimately become my dominant language (English), now feels more emotional to me than what was essentially my first language (German)? And what does that say about the future of my relationship with my daughter? If I am raising her in German yet tend to fall back on English as my emotional language, isn't that cheating? Confusing? Jeopardizing our bond? What happens when she starts school and adopts Spanish as her dominant language? When she starts hitting me with the breathless speed of a Castellano newscaster, only with a teen vocabulary and slang I can't even come to grips with in English, let alone German, dog forbid, Spanish?

In an attempt to stop the creaking wheels of my brain from turning, rolling their way into a ditch and capsizing into a sleepless night, I decide to read. On my phone. This is something I usually give myself a hard time for but not tonight. Because somehow, it turns into smooth surfing, with one wave leading me onto the next and so on, until one giant swell carries me onto the shore of where I need to be. The kind of source and community I've been longing for but hadn't yet found, all by ways of honestly written and beautifully presented pieces bound into the printed pages of Mother Tongue Magazine, and offered in bitesize on their Instagram account. And among these, one immediately stands out to me. It reads, "We are forever attempting to translate motherhood because its equal ordinariness and extraordinariness evades us, especially in the early postpartum days when we most crave meaning - or, at the very least, an explanation."

Attributed to London-based (Poland-born and Canada-raised) linguist Malwina Gudowska, the post continues, "Because of their shared familiarity, both language and motherhood are often perceived as ordinary. But both are remarkable if we consider what language and motherhood truly are, and what they represent. We rarely remember our first language acquisition, but seldom forget our introduction to a so-called maternal language, one that we are told is supposed to feel familiar, but in reality, is often foreign. In theory, mothers share a common tongue but because every motherhood and mothering experience is unique, there is no true collective language, or at least one that is easily articulated. And yet, shared experiences help us to find some sort of meaning. In a similar way, we love to look to other languages to help us define often highly-emotional moments we don’t know how to explain— literal and figurative translation."

Reading her words, I feel comforted and understood, excited by the idea of a fellow mother and writer dedicating her work to a subject that only ever seems to be discussed in negative undertones, and usually with the child's wellbeing central to the conversation. This is something I learned long before my daughter was born, a recognition that leads way back to the dinner table in my maternal, tri-lingual home, where my mother was advised to keep it to one language due to the difficulties in hearing and speech my brother was experiencing at the time. A few weeks after stumbling on to Malwina's account, Meaning of Mama, and reading her work, we connect over Zoom. She's just as warm and open as I perceived her to be through her writing, and listens intently when I describe my brother's story. I tell her about his reaction to hearing we were going to raise my daughter tri-lingually - which was funny, but nonetheless appalled - and how he has made a problematic association between speech and language.

 "I'm not a speech therapist, but I know for a fact that any speech or language psychologist that knows more about bilingualism or specializes in it, would say that multi-lingualism is absolutely not the issue. I would say that his logopaedics’ approach was probably the incorrect - common, common, common - advise. There are so many studies that show that, if a child has a speech impediment, they will have it in both languages. It doesn't matter, if it's one language or two languages - it's a speech impediment, so it has nothing to do with actual language. It's unfortunate and it happens all the time, especially when looking at any kind of neurodiversity or speech delays - it's always blamed on bilingualism, especially by speech pathologists who are not trained in bilinguals."

Continuing on this thought, we both agree that these kinds of approaches and the sadly typical concerned or exasperated reactions to bi - and multilingualism, encourage multicultural parents to drop their native language for the circumstantial. By suggesting to drop one - our - language, it is as though they are suggesting we drop our roots. "It makes me so frustrated because it's just so common. In the UK, when you have a baby, you have health visitors who come to your house, to check on you and the baby. In theory, it is a really positive thing but sometimes they can be super annoying and evasive and a lot of them aren't trained very well. Both my PhD supervisor and I had kids maybe twenty years apart, and were told that we should only speak one language (English) in the beginning, as a base. I think about all the immigrant parents who end up thinking that makes total sense, that yes, the children are saddled with more and maybe it's too much - but that's just not how the brain works. I'm trying to work with midwives and health visitors here to do some workshops because they are often the first point of contact."

One of the things I've repeatedly been told is that bilingual children's speech is often delayed. It's something I secretly worry about - something that could be held over me, a you see from all those tutting external opinions around me. "There's such a tie to the emotional weight of language, but it also ties so closely to the role of motherhood and mothering. That maternal work, and that's something I just find so important - there's this study based on "the word gap" - that if children don't hear a certain number of words by a certain age they won't be as successful. It goes back to a very flawed study back in the 70s or 80s. It was very discriminatory, the sample size was ridiculous, but it constantly gets cited and people make money off of it, I think even Hilary Clinton had a whole campaign about it. Of course, it's wonderful to read to children, but this idea of "well, if you're not speaking a certain number of words, your child will not be successful" - it's really like, if the mother is not speaking a certain number of words - it's never the father, it's always the mother that's blamed or shamed."

The maternal work behind language and, particularly, multilingualism, is exactly where Malwina's focus lies. Having completed her MA on empathy and bilingual children, she realized she was much more interested in what the parents - specifically mothers - were experiencing. No one seems to be talking about the emotional side of it and how mothers - whether they are monolingual or multilingual - are so rarely considered. Their thoughts and feelings are always overshadowed by their children, and this is something that has repeatedly come up in her research. "It ties back to the whole element of motherhood, not only is there a labour involved with mothers being the primary caregivers especially for the first year of a baby's life, but even after, in dual working homes there’s a steady hierarchy, and mothers are the ones that are transmitting the language in the evenings. Even in situations where the partner is the one that has the language, mothers are reminding the partners to speak the second language."

One of the things Malwina's research concentrates on is the connection between emotionality and emotional communication. When it comes to multilingualism, it's almost as if the stakes are higher because there is a choice of language to be used which affects both the parent's emotionality and the way the child then takes it all in and essentially learns about their own emotions and how to process and regulate. Mothers may feel they can convey their emotions easier in one language but then want to use the other, causing this internal and external dilemma. "If a mother's dominant language is different than her child's dominant language - a common occurrence for immigrant families - there can be a power struggle and a loss of authority for the parent, for example. With that comes the emotional side of potentially not feeling connected or there being a huge disconnect between mother and child in communication, in parenting, in respect. As a child of immigrants, I also look at it from the perspective of the adult child and possibly feeling like they might not know their parent entirely if there is a linguistic disconnect. I can't imagine not being able to completely share myself with my children through language, but this is something that happens so often when there are multiple languages in a family."

Having migrated from Poland to Canada aged five, Malwina quickly learned English and French at school. And though her home and, in large parts, her community language remained Polish, her dominant language became English. Now, as a mother of two based in London, her Polish has gotten exponentially better through her sheer will to pass the language on to her children by speaking and reading to them every day. "But now, we're getting to a tricky part where my eight-year-old and I have serious conversations about life and death and friends. We were having a conversation about gender identity the other day because one of his friends who's a girl wants to be a boy, and I just don't have the vocabulary for these things in Polish because I never learned them. And for me, that's a hard one because sometimes I feel the connection stronger in English, than in Polish. It's emotional, super emotional," she sighs, her face a picture of compassion. "Are you worried that your daughter won't see you in your entirety? That's something that I find so incredibly moving, when I read about these instances where the child and the mother don't see each other in their entirety, especially if you identify linguistically with one language in which you are that person, and if they aren't fluent in it, they don't really know that person..."

It's the first time anyone has ever asked me that, the first time these thoughts have been articulated in relationship to my role as a mom and, the truth is that, yes, it's something I think about a lot. It's not just the choice of language and terminology I have available to me that make the indescribable even harder to exemplify, it is, indeed, the strange but undeniable difference in character, my essence, I fear might get lost from one language to another. One of the first times this truly hit me was in my early twenties, when I had just moved to Spain after seven years in Holland and was starting to spend more and more time focused on writing - in English. A language the paternal side of my family does not understand beyond the basics. My ability to express myself as easily and clearly in German had already been dwindling over the years, and with writing having become my true emotional expression, I felt that the distance was not just building in mileage, but heart. This moved me to tears which, in turn, led me to call my uncle, sobbing, you don't know me anymore. A tad dramatic in the moment, sure, but a genuine sentiment all the same. Which is why I am so adamant to find the best possible way to nurture bonds that stretch across each linguistic version of myself.

At the time of writing this, Malwina is in Canada visiting her Polish family for the first time in years. There, she's been thinking a lot about the concept of a home/homeland, how to redefine it for herself, and how it ties in with the issues she has with the idea of a "mother tongue". Her perspective on an approach to language is incredibly compassionate, and the many literary and academic sources she draws from are eye-opening to anyone interested in multilingualism, especially from a maternal standpoint. Since discovering her work, I find myself looking forward to seeing a new post pop up on her Instagram platform, Meaning of Mama, and being prompted to think about phrases such as "airing your dirty laundry" and the hidden, maternal work behind said laundry, or the psychology often associated with a "stepmother tongue". Her work has become a comforting go-to in my motherhood journey and I'm excited for other bilingual/multilingual mamas to connect with her words too.

And then, of course, there's the fact that she recently made a shoutout to one of my all-time favourite TV shows, Better Things, and the perfectly picked opening song, Mother, by John Lennon - and as you all know, anyone who is a fan of Pam Adlon's (maternal) work, is a friend of mine.