Il Bambino Bilingue

I've studied many languages in my time. I adore languages. I think most of my family and friends believe I speak about 10 or 12 by now. Sadly, I don't. I speak a fluent, very non-native version of Spanish. And I know pieces of lots more. Just pieces.

This child should be bilingual. We should all be multilingual. But what in the hell am I going to teach it and how?! Gee, I think I remember most of "Morning Has Broken" in sign language. That should prove useful. Or should I teach it my imperfect Spanish made more imperfect from years of teaching immigrants without much education who've adapted their native tongue to their new culture. We both, the immigrants and I, now speak in oh-so-elegant pseudo-Spanish phrases like lunche – pronounced "loon-chay" – that refers to greasy empanadas bought off the truck parked at the edge of the brussel sprout field blaring mariachi music from 11 to 2.

I barely remember which baskets and birds spell my name in ancient hieroglyphs. My Hindi, which only ever consisted of a few phrases written on my jeans, pretty little vowels floating above, and telephone courtesies, is completely gone. I know! My child could learn all the metro stops in Budapest! But even that's a risk, since the other day I couldn't remember how to count above three in Hungarian.

Perhaps I could lend the baby my now passive and broken knowledge of Russian. You'd think it'd be a bigger part of my life since I fought so damn hard to get to it. It was 1987 and studying Russian still raised eyebrows here and there. This was a bonus incentive. They'd lured me in, made me fall in love with the crazy alphabet I practiced to the detriment of all my other subjects. And then, poof! No level two. Unacceptable. So I "petitioned" the dean to get the class on a tutorial basis. That meant I showed up at her office every single day for a week until she caved. My bright purple Russian primer, my teacher's flaming red hair, we were a match. Four years and a different university later, I wasn't half bad. But now, I have a few lines stuck in my head from Friday night singing at the intensive language course – something about Katoosha waiting by the steep shore for her love to return. (To no one's surprise, he didn't.) I can recite a few verses of Lermontov. And I have my memories of my instructor, Sasha: a sad man who looked 20 years older than he was, beaten down by life, communism, and, mostly, vodka.

In the case of Japanese it is also my teacher that stands out to me the most after so many years and so little practice. I only fiddled with a couple semesters. My teacher was a lovely woman who frantically pantomimed the answers to us from behind the back of the official test administrator whenever we took oral exams. She told us the story of how excited she'd been when she learned she was pregnant, and how she was going to teach her daughter Japanese. She was nearly heartbroken when her daughter was inexplicably born deaf. The girl did learn Japanese, sort of. She learned English too. She just didn't know when she was speaking which or the difference between them.

There are two kinds of teachers: those who will bleed their souls for you, and those who won't. My current Italian teacher is the second kind. What to say of Italian? Language of my ancestors. Current pain in my ass. They should have cut looser the ties with Latin like their Spanish-speaking compadres because this shit is harder than it needs to be! I so want to be good at it. I cried when telling my husband about how I won't be able to take the Italian course in the spring because of the impending birth of his child. I could say it's the hormones…

Spanish didn't come easily either to tell the truth. Years of self-consciously sitting in classrooms hadn't prepared me too well for an undergraduate research trip to Mexico. Initially, my host parents would shake their heads and sigh at my frozen stares when they spoke. At times like those, I'd either go off and talk to strangers who praised my practiced stock answers to their predictable questions, or I'd sit on the floor and play with the kids. The time I was there was during the first Gulf War. (My memory of the inception of this war includes a picture of me sitting in the hallway of my college dorm scouring the New York Times for articles about the then Soviet Union and my roommate's boyfriend storming out of our suite and stomping to the elevator yelling "Goddammit, we're bombing Iraq!" - a phrase that runs through my head often these days.) Not long after, one day in Mexico, when speaking in Spanish to the adults was way more than I could handle, I plopped down next to Saulo, the youngest son in the family, and watched him play with pictures of flags. He got to the flag of Iraq, which at the time I wouldn't have recognized for my life, and calmly informed me, Y esta donde el Sr. Bush tiene su guerra. "And this is where Mr. Bush has his war." He was seven.

My brain is confused. I once insisted to my husband that the instructions for whatever it was we were putting together were "Right there!" in front of him. After all, I'd read them! Later, we discovered that they were in Spanish and I hadn't noticed. Roots and language connections jump out to me from the page. I can recognize all kinds of words and read all kinds of things, just don't ask me to tell you in which language they are or to produce it back on my own. I can't spell worth a damn anymore. Too many possibilities jumbled into my head. How can I successfully impart anything useful to my baby, a young brain ready to eat up infinite combinations of sounds and structures?

Soon after we moved to this apartment, which was also soon after I learned I was pregnant, an old postcard fell out of a book I was shelving in "unpack now!" mode. It says, "Children Born into Happy Families Grow Up Speaking Love as their Native Language." Oh great gods of Serendipity and Sentimentality, speak to me of your will. And then shut up and help me figure out how to teach this kid something.