Suzanne Kamata has called on 20 women writers worldwide to publish their personal insights and experiences on parenting across cultures and continents in an anthology of essays on cross-cultural mothering. These confidences and confessions reveal the challenges of motherhood which can be multiplied many times for expat parents raising “global nomads”.
We are extremely grateful to Suzanne for giving our readers a sneak preview of the upcoming publication by allowing us to reprint just one of the thought-provoking experiences from her compilation Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering, to be published in May.

Mothering across cultures

One day, my son and daughters will ask me what I remember of Spain and I will talk about my garden. I will say that when I was a girl, the place I loved most in the world was el jardin, that this was the place I went while my Spanish father and my American mother built a house that crumbled.

I will tell about the “u” of stone walls surrounding it, of how they were covered in thick strands of ivy that made them seem ancient, enchanted, as if they had been taken from a castle; about the honeysuckle spilling over the fourth wall of ceramic-tiled terraza. I will speak of the way the wind wrinkled the water over the blue and white swimming pool tiles, of the sound the pomelos made as they struck the ground like golden fists.

I will tell about my solitary games, how I plucked geranium and rose petals off of their flowers and soaked them in water. How I watched, by night, trails of light form as the snails licked the walls with their slug bodies.

I will tell them that in this very place their mami learned magic: to press my ear to the ground while sounds and words in Spanish and English ran through open doors, over the walls, to me. That aqui, mami learned to speak the two names for every beautiful thing.

I will not tell them this magic of mine was conditional, that it granted itself to me only by virtue of my always existing in more than one place, simultaneously: Spain, the US, memory, the present tense. The subjunctive mood. More than likely, I will not need to; my three Guatemalan-born, Spanish- and Mayan-blooded, American-raised children will understand that part of the story already.

Before we adopted our children, I dreamt about their first mothers. Without having met them, I dreamt of meeting them and of seeing the way they manifested themselves in the children between us. I dreamt of making them the impossibly great promise to honor the lives they were giving my husband and I. In the dreams, recurrently, I promised to do this by love and by language.

My husband and I knew when we said our first ‘yes’ to each of our children – that ‘yes’ of we choose you, we’re waiting for you, come home – that our children would inevitably lose certain people and things even as they gained us, and others.

Our plan, our hope, was that we would try to ensure that their losses be as few as possible. And so, with a purpose that might not have been so fervent had our children come to us through birth, we set about fusing the American, the Spanish, the Guatemalan, flavors of our family.

For us, carrying this out has been more natural than the average person might expect. I speak more Spanish than English to the kids while my husband speaks more English than Spanish to them; but we both speak both. Most of the resources we have to think about – toys, books, music, media – go towards strengthening Spanish, while everything else over the course of the day falls into English. And it’s also less ordinary.

One mid-summer morning, a friend and I are walking our children in their strollers down the street. A woman stops us as we’re walking, wanting to see the kids. She peeks into my friend’s stroller, then bends over mine, extending a hand to my two-year-old son and daughter. They’re engrossed in the local wildlife, watching a squirrel scamper across the street. My daughter yells “Ardilla!” and neither she nor her brother pay any attention to the stranger in front of them. When they don’t take her hand, the woman asks them to at least say hello. When they don’t do that either, she grows insistent. “Don’t they understand English? Don’t they talk yet?” There’s rising outrage in her voice.

My friend’s son and daughter are a few months older than our kids. They’re also fairer skinned, lighter eyed. Though she’s a stranger, their mother is assumed to be American, which she is, whereas I am suspected in the neighborhood as a foreigner. It’s not a coincidence that although it’s my friend’s children who actually sit in greater silence, their language development goes unquestioned.

This seems like the never-ending story of my kids’ toddlerhood. Strangers, as well as some friends and extended family, ask whether they don’t speak or understand English, whether their language skills are delayed, whether I’m confusing them by exposing them to two languages. It’s not everyone who does this, and it’s probably the same percent of the general population who accost mothers everywhere to give unsolicited commentary on their children.

Nevertheless, it catches at me, makes me wonder whether I’m burdening our kids with one more thing to make them unusual. And yet, this is not a wonder that makes me turn to Google, or to a parenting book, or to the pediatrician, for advice. Nor is it a wonder that will make me keep my voice down when I speak Spanish to the kids in public or train them to answer certain people in a certain way. It’s a wonder that makes me keep on doing what I’m doing with the tug of instinct and personal memory.

When I speak to someone who knows both English and Spanish, often even my posture will change. The way I uncoil as surprising and restorative as a sigh. My husband points this out one evening as we sit on the terrace outside, having just witnessed an animated forty-five minute phone call to my American, but equally bilingual, mother on the neighborhood drama (conducted in our familial brand of ‘Spanglish’, so as not to be overheard by others and understood).

His jaw is set in a strong, handsome line, as always, but his eyes are uncertain about whether he should bring this up. I don’t mind. I want him to be able to make sense of why my hands flutter expressively, and I hold my mouth differently, and my breath changes like this sometimes.

“When I’m around other bilingual people,” I tell him, “there’s no more ‘either/or’. There’s nothing I need to stress about not including. It’s the gift of and. I get to speak and act the way my mind thinks.” He puts his arms around me. “Nuestros niños tambien.”
Our kids, too.

One day, my son and daughters will tell me what they remember of their childhoods. They will not need to reconcile themselves with that half language of translation, but be full of that bilingual, bicultural magic of being able to go and come back constantly between place and time. They will speak of things my husband and I will know. Of the way, in Guatemala, the ground moved a bit beneath their still small feet due to the volcanic soil. Of how, during rainy season afternoons, rain spilled from the great clouds over the city and thunder rumbled entre las montañas, making them stir.
 
Of how, when we first met them, we whispered their names and tipped them from our arms towards tropical flowers. Of how they reached their small fingers towards the mosaics and the ceramic statues hung on the stucco walls of our Guatemalan friends’ patio. They will tell us, maybe, of the way, in their memory’s first jardin, the vines linked each plant to each other, like a thin, green thread of cobweb. Of the way they later noticed this can happen in Guatemala City, Madrid, Pittsburgh... anywhere. Listening to them, I suspect they’ll remember more than I even expect. The breadth of their lives will astound me, even as I stand beside them.

One day. If I give them anything, may it be the chance to call forth all the beautiful things they deserve.

Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering
Compiled by Suzanne Kamata
ISBN: 978-1-932279-33-7; trade paperback, $16; publication date: May 2009
Publicity contact: Nancy Cleary, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Suzanne Kamata was born and raised in Michigan then South Carolina. She now lives in rural Japan with her Japanese husband and bicultural twins. Suzanne’s work has appeared in over 100 publications and she has authored a novel, Losing Kei, and a picture book, Playing for Papa, both of which concern bicultural families. She has also edited two previous anthologies: The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs, and is currently fiction editor of Literary Mama. www.suzannekamata.com