Saturday, February 28, 2009

Talking to children is scary

Have I mentioned how often I think "Wow, people are idiots"? Well, it's often.

According to this article from CNN.com, the BBC is receiving complaints about a new host on one of its children's programs. The host, Cerrie Burnell, whose right arm stops below her elbow. People are apparently complaining that this one-and-a-half-armed woman is "scaring their children." A quote from the article:

In one chat room, a father lamented that Burnell being on the show forced him to have conversations with his child about disabilities.

Now, those of you who know me a little, what do you suppose I'm going to say? Say it with me now, everyone together: DON'T WATCH THE SHOW, THEN.

But aside from that obvious nugget of wisdom, what the hell makes people so scared of talking to their children? First of all, are people who spawn kidlings unaware of the fact that there are certain talks that they simply cannot avoid having with their children? For those of you who are about to argue that the dad in the quote simply wants to be able to choose the right time and place, nope, nope, zip it! Let me refer you, first of all, back to the "DON'T WATCH THE SHOW!" golden rule, but also remind you that people with disabilities exist on subways and in stores and in the schools that his children attend and generally out in the world all over the place. Is he going to ask them to hide themselves from his kids as well? "Well, yes, sir, it's true that I have no legs and therefore ride the subway because it's just a wee bit easier than driving a car, but I feel so gosh darn sorry for YOU and YOUR dilemma that I'll just try to make sure I take the 9:06 instead of the 9:12 in the future, how's that?"

The bottom line, though, is really just this: what is so difficult about talking to your kids about disabilities? About sex? About the fact that there are bad people in the world? Why is it that parents seem to feel the best thing for their children is to pretend these things don't exist -- sometimes indefinitely, or sometimes to the point of expecting the kids' schools to take care of those nasty little issues for them -- rather than just sitting and having a normal conversation? What are they afraid could go wrong? Are they afraid that they might not explain everything exactly perfectly and that the kid might not grasp the concept entirely?

For Pete's sake, so what? Believe me, I'm a teacher, I'm familiar with the idea of a kid not grasping a concept entirely. Guess what? They live. And you have a chance to answer their questions and explain again the next day.

Since both my sister and I are the product of artificial insemination by anonymous donor, I'm familiar with being on the child's side of a concept that is truly difficult for a child to grasp. One of the few things my parents managed to be smart about during my upbringing was attempting to explain this to me from the very beginning. Guess what? I didn't quite get it right away. I thought I was a robot, actually, that was the interpretation I ended up with. (This is partially because my parents barely seemed to understand the science behind the whole thing themselves, quite frankly, but I digress.) But guess what? I was all like, "AWESOME, I'm a robot. I ROCK." I somehow survived until the next attempt at explaining and the next attempt, and eventually I understood what it was all about. I was admittedly a little bit bummed over not being a robot anymore, but dude, it was fun while it lasted.

No, I have another theory. I think that the reason parents don't like broaching so-called difficult subjects with their children is because they're embarrassed about it, and in two -- no, wait, maybe three -- different ways. The first is that they're simply too prudish to talk about sex or disabilities or mean nasty people without blushing. The second is that they're afraid their kids are going to go to pre-school or wherever and says "MY DADDY HAS A PENIS AND MY MOMMY HAS A VAGINA!" (the problem therefore ACTUALLY being too much of a wuss to talk to other PARENTS about difficult subjects). The third is that they might even feel that their own knowledge on the topic is lacking enough that they wouldn't be able to explain it to someone else.

My answers to that? Suck it up, suck it up, and blame your own parents for a vicious cycle.

Friday, February 27, 2009

Mother Tongue

Today, my last day at work before going on maternity leave (yay!), I went out to lunch with 3 girls from work -- two that I work with now, and my former boss who is currently still on maternity leave with her second child. Since all three of them have small children in the daycare age, children and daycare and school and such things were a natural topic of conversation.

Part of the conversation ended up being about language, as we discussed my former boss's interest in sending her children to the International English School in Linköping, and our intention to have our kids start in daycare and Swedish school as early as possible since we speak English at home. I was inspired to write by the fact that another of my co-lunching co-workers had a hard time understanding why we intend to speak English at home with our child -- not just me, but even Fredrik.

The concept of a native language, or a mother tongue, is typically defined in a far too narrow way, in my opinion. What would you say the definition of "native language" is? Or "mother tongue"? Are they even the same thing? Is it whatever language you learned first? Is it the language you speak most often? Is it the one that you're "best at" -- and what does that mean? The most important question is: does one communicate best in one's native language? I contend that the definition ought to be the other way around -- the language in which one communicates best should be the definition of "mother tongue," and contrary to the typical definition of these concepts, a person can have more than one. That which determines what a person's mother tongue is is highly dependent upon the situation. A person's mother tongue can change throughout their lifetime, or even throughout the day.

Fredrik was born in Sweden of Swedish parents, and the first language he learned was Swedish. He started learning English at a young age, a phenomenon that is simply unavoidable in this country, even if you try to cover your eyes and ears. But he played video games in English and was most likely exposed to a bit more of the world at an earlier age than other people might be, and this, coupled with a natural gift for languages, made him the type of person who could correct his English teachers in school. He knew the words, he knew the grammar, and he could read and write fluently. But of course, no one would call English his native language or mother tongue just because of that -- so ABILITY and correctness in a language is clearly not the deciding factor.

I was born in America of American parents, and spoke no other language but English for the first 24 years of my life. I studied a bit of French in high school and took my language requirement in ancient Greek at St. Olaf, but I was never able to have more than the very simplest of 5-minute conversations in French, and given that I never met a 2500-year old Greek, those skills were nothing to brag about, either. There is no controversy in claiming that English was definitely the only contender for Lori's native language.

But then something happened in the year 2000. Fredrik started calling me on the phone. Within a few minutes, his somewhat clumsy accent gave way to a less nervous, more fluent and phonetically correct English. Within a couple of phone calls, he spoke well enough that one could accurately say that he spoke American English and not British English (most Swedes cannot claim to speak either, since the distinction requires a level of consistency with relatively subtle differences that is simply too difficult to achieve for a speaker with little practice). But this also shows that formal correctness with a language is not what makes you native or even fluent -- the words and the grammar were clearly in his head, dormant enough to require -- and simultaneously good enough to make sufficient -- a short warm-up period.

In 2001 we became a couple and started spending gobs of money and time and plane tickets. In 2002 I moved here. In 2003 I started studying an intense course in Swedish, and by the time 2004 began I spoke fluently. Despite my need to learn Swedish in order to become a productive member of society, we have always spoken exclusively English to each other at home. We tried a few times to speak Swedish in order to help me learn, but it just didn't work. We became angry with each other, we misunderstood each other, we felt strange and foreign and not like ourselves. This is despite the fact that I spoke the language fluently, and Fredrik had spoken it since he took his first steps. We made a discovery: a relationship can have a mother tongue. The mother tongue of our relationship was clearly English, and we were suddenly transported into some other strange, unfamiliar, uncomfortable relationship when we tried to speak Swedish.

We discovered something else: people have opinions about these things, and they're not afraid to butt their noses into other people's business. (Just as a side note and a clarification: I do NOT mean that my co-worker was irritating or nosy today; just want to make that clear.) Despite the fact that I was the best student in my Swedish class, became fluent in everyday situations after a few months and was more than ready for the Swedish world by the time the course was over, people still wondered why we didn't speak Swedish at home. They insisted on grounds such as "Lori would learn faster" or "It just doesn't make sense since you live in Sweden" and god knows what else. There are people who STILL don't understand that we can speak English at home and protest that this can affect my ability to "learn the language" -- and yet these people seem to agree that I speak Swedish so well and without an accent that they didn't even know I wasn't Swedish until someone said so. Most people understand when we explain that we were together for three years before I was able to have a simple conversation in Swedish and that our relationship is very dependent upon the ability to express ourselves on a very high and academic level, and that by the time I was able to express myself on that level in Swedish, there was little point in shaking things up at home. Those that don't understand that explanation usually get it after the following example: if a Swedish couple moves to America, do we really expect them to start speaking English at home just because of geography? No, of course not.

So now that we've established the concept of our relationship having English as its mother tongue, what about Fredrik? He went from being a normal Swede -- a person who speaks Swedish almost exclusively, even if Swedes are exposed to a good deal of English on a daily basis -- to being a person who spoke only English at home (and sometimes Swedish, sometimes English at work, as he started working quite a bit with Asian customers). Is it really possible that this drastic change does not affect a person's "mother tongue"? Again, I think most people see mother tongue or native language as something that gets cemented during your childhood, but I contend that that is simply not the case.

Ask yourself how many times Fredrik has said "I love you." Now ask yourself how many times he has said "Jag älskar dig." Unless his relationship with his co-workers is a lot more sensitive than I've imagined, his quotient of "I love you" to "Jag älskar dig" is astronomical after 8 years of having English as his household language. This goes for almost any expression of feelings, emotions, or vulnerability. It certainly extends into other areas as well -- topics such as household chores, cats, politics, pregnancy, etc. are to varying degrees more often discussed in our household than they probably are at Fredrik's workplace. There are several possible consequences of this. One is that he might be just as good at talking about such a topic in English as he is in Swedish. Another possibility is that he's just as BAD at speaking about the topic in both languages -- there can be quite a bit of interference when there's a 50/50 shot of coming up with the right word in your head at the right time. And the other possibility is, of course, that he is better able to discuss such a topic in English, since it is more often discussed at home than it is at work.

The same phenomenon applies to me. I speak Swedish at my place of work, so my fluency in work-related conversations is much better if the conversation is conducted in Swedish. A few weeks ago I had to help a guy from our Stockholm office solve a problem with a test run. He's originally from Scotland, and has been in Sweden for 4 years or so. But it simply wasn't an option for us to speak English to each other while trying to solve the problem. We're both fluent enough in Swedish and so used to using it when talking about telephone hardware and builds and fixtures and test software and everything else that goes into our job that speaking English simply slowed us down; we lost too much time having to translate in our heads. And then there are certain topics that I never encountered before moving to Sweden, so my ability to talk about them in English is next to zero. I still have a hard time translating the word "besiktning" in a way that satisfies me. But that's because I never bought a brand new house in the U.S., nor do we have to get our cars inspected every year in the rigorous manner that is required in Sweden. I got my teaching degree in Sweden, so certain pedagogical concepts -- especially the ones that are related to Swedish school laws and procedures -- just do not have translations in the readily available part of my brain's storage. Hell, they might not even have translations in the dusty, locked-away parts, either -- what is "läroplan" in English? That's practically an unanswerable question; it is one thing in England and another in Ireland and a most likely non-existent or state-by-state thing in the U.S., none of which I know the word for because I was not trained to be a teacher in any of those places.

So what is my native language? What is Fredrik's mother tongue? Does it really make sense to say that Lori's mother tongue is English, period, end of discussion, if there are situations in which I struggle to speak English and throw in a bunch of Swedish words because, when it comes right down to it, my thoughts are in Swedish when I'm in those situations? Is Fredrik's native language Swedish simply because that's the one he learned first, even if there are certain areas in which he has participated in countless discussions in English and perhaps never discussed the topic in Swedish, and would therefore surely find himself having a good deal of difficulty doing so if the occasion ever arose?

This brings us, then, to the new bit that people are having difficulty understanding. We've decided that our kid needs to start in daycare as soon as they are allowed -- 12 months -- so that they can start learning Swedish as soon as possible. By this we mean that we intend to continue speaking only English at home, even with our kid. And people don't quite get this -- and, in fact, some people get downright upset about it.

Yes, it is true that many international couples like us follow the pattern where the Swedish parent speaks Swedish with the kids, the non-Swedish parent speaks the non-Swedish language with the kids, and the parents continue speaking to each other in whatever language they always have (alternatively they speak their own "native languages" even when having a conversation with each other, so that the kids consistently hear the same language come out of the parents' mouths). People seem to think that it would make more sense for us to do this -- I speak English and Fredrik speaks Swedish. But I'm telling you, I simply don't believe it would work. These people insist that we can continue speaking English to each other, but seriously -- it's a situation that I simply cannot imagine, even if I understand that it can work really well for other people.

The first reason is that communication on a very high level is simply too important in our little Paulsson-Ceangailte family. I find it hard to see myself being comfortable with my husband speaking one language to me and a different language to my child. In my mind, that situation would throw up invisible barriers between us and even give me a sense of some kind of bizarre tear in the space-time continuum whenever the three of us were in the room together. It would, for me, create a sitaution in which the relationships husband-wife, mom-kid and dad-kid exist, but where the full harmony of mom-dad-kid could never be complete. The lunch companion who is my former boss -- who, by the way, is German, so this issue is very real for her as well -- was very insightful when she compared these feelings to the fact that some families think it's very important to have the same last name or any other kind of "solidarity" that perhaps another family doesn't think is so important. For me, everyone speaking the same language -- no matter how TECHNICALLY excellent we all are at both English and Swedish -- is a necessary kind of solidarity.

The second reason -- or arguably, a deeper explanation of the first -- is that I believe English is Fredrik's "family situation" mother tongue. Yes, I can fully understand why it seems odd to my other lunch companion that Fredrik would speak English to our child even when I wasn't around. And I can't swear on my life that he will, I can't know how it will be until the kid is here. But my feeling is that it is far less natural for Fredrik to speak Swedish to our child than my co-worker imagines. In her mind, Swedish is Fredrik's mother tongue, and the assumption is that it is always more natural for him to communicate in that language. I contend that life just isn't that simple.

However, since my co-worker is a nice and reasonable person, I must point out again that I didn't feel she was butting in at all, and she very much so understood my point of view after I explained it this way: if it's more natural for Fredrik to say "I love you" than it is for him to say "Jag älskar dig," then that right there is exactly why I hope he chooses English when speaking to our child. Language exists so that we can communicate with each other, and real communication is not about technical and grammatical correctness but rather about expression of thoughts and feelings that feels natural both to the speaker/projector and to the receiver. (This is why there isn't one universal sign language in the world and why useful, practical, expressive forms of sign language are ones that have not been forced into a correlation with the surrounding written and spoken language.) Yes, I definitely want my kid to be as much of a word smith as Mom and Dad are, but the fairly natural assumption of "the kid will learn Swedish better if Fredrik speaks Swedish with it" becomes more suspect if we assert that even Fredrik expresses himself better in English than in Swedish in certain situations. And when we really consider the language development aspect, we realize that we're talking about a child who probably won't have babbled more than a word or two before being immersed in a Swedish-speaking environment, and that the few months of delay before our children start talking (which tends to be true even for the bilingual-from-birth children) will quickly be vastly eclipsed by the excellent language skills our children will undoubtedly have because of being raised by parents who value reading, education, curiosity, language skills, communication -- and having a Mom that's a certified teacher to boot. Seriously, our family is the type that the Swedish socialist bloc is bitching about when they complain about how unfair life and school are for kids who DON'T have parents like us.

Whatever Fredrik decides, or whatever comes to him most naturally, at the end of the day I put much more value in our kid feeling and hearing genuinely and naturally expressed emotion and humor from Dad than in having a few months' head start on the Swedish language.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Fecundity

A friend of mine gets on my case whenever I haven't blogged for a while. I tell him that I haven't been seriously annoyed and sitting in front of a computer simultaneously for a while now, so he'll have to deal.

A lot of the not sitting in front of a computer has to do with me having "symphus pubus disorder," which means I have an unusual amount of pain associated with the loosening and widening of my pelvic bone that occurs in every pregnancy to prepare for the birth. The Swedish term "foglossning," which basically means "coming apart at the seams," is a much more telling description of what is physically happening (the "seams" in the pelvis are softening and widening, so the two halves move much more independently than normal) and of how much it hurts.

Anyway, this means that sitting (or standing, or walking, or going from sitting to standing, or getting into or out of bed, or turning over in bed, or... well, everything but sleeping) makes me hurt more. My computer has mostly been sitting at the end of the bed and being used to watch episodes of Scrubs.

Yesterday I managed to get my midwife to confirm that many people who experience foglossning still have it even after the baby is born. Oh, and that it gets worse with every pregnancy.

JOY.

So my goal is to be so rich by the next time I'm pregnant that I can take much more time off before the baby comes and just lie around with my feet propped up. Or rather, let's be honest, the goal is for FREDRIK to be rich enough by that time. I always thought that I was smart enough to end up rich some day, and I've come to terms with the fact that that smartness involved marrying someone even smarter and with much more applicable talent.

My talent appears to be in the baby-making category. Okay, we'll ignore the fact that the last attempt didn't go so well. On this attempt, I got knocked up on the second try, for starters, and I'm currently passing all the midwife's tests with flying colors. My hemoglobin is up (despite not taking daily iron supplements), my blood sugar is stable, my blood pressure is low and there's no "egg white" in my urine (that just sounds so weird, doesn't it?), my symphus fundus measurement is spot on (read: I'm as fat as I'm supposed to be), and this kid is already head-down and engaging. Locked and loaded! There are other things that are working as intended as well, but quite frankly, I'm not sure I know you well enough to discuss them with you. And yes, indeed, I take credit for it all! I'm sure it's all because I'm super awesome and have done everything right.

Okay, so I will blog again soon, I hope. Don't fret. The post will probably be about Republicans saying stupid things about Guantanamo, or Mona Sahlin saying stupid things about taxes, or maybe a recipe for lime pie.