Point of Heritage Language Transmission

I've never considered not speaking my first language, Polish, to my daughter.  It's the most natural thing in the world for me.  All my early childhood memories are in Polish, and I get to relive many of them with my daughter now, in large part because we are using the same vocabulary.

But I know there are families for whom passing down a heritage language is more of an effort.  I also know there are adults whose parents didn't pass down their native language, and are now adult heritage language learners.  In other words, they are studying a technically foreign language, but their motivation in choosing said language is because it is the language of their ancestors.  Maybe they want to feel better connected to their ancestors, and being able to communicate in the common language, or even just read the thoughts of others who share with them a common history, without dependence on translations, does that.

So I got to thinking; what would be my motivation for teaching Natalia Polish?  Is it just so I can feel more like her mother by parenting her in the language of my own childhood?  Or does it go beyond that?  Does my motivation have anything to do with the future?  Or just our current family life?

Let's look at the facts.  We do not live in Poland, nor do we intend to move back.  Only one of Natalia's parents is Polish, and Polish is not the language in which Oscar and I communicate, so it's not our family language - English is.  Yes, Natalia has a more natural connection to her grandmother (my mom) through their common knowledge of Polish.  But does knowing Polish benefit Natalia in any way outside of the family?

Many years ago, my father was involved in a tragic and very serious vehicular accident.  My mom was left to care for him and figure out a new normal without the support of family (no relatives live in the US other than us three kids), and the people we all considered friends of the family all turned their backs on us.  My parents were involved with the Polish church when we first arrived in the States.  No support came when we really needed it.  Americans speak of meal trains, visitors, donations.  My family got none of that.  The Polish community failed us.

And when we return to Poland for visits?  We are looked at as strange Americans, no longer "purely Polish" because of our strange ways.  This applies to relatives and strangers alike.  Again, the Polish community wants nothing to do with us.

So why would I care if my daughter learned Polish or not?  It's not a global language, like English or Spanish, both of which she also knows.  It's not a language that will give her a particular leg up in a future career, like Arabic, Mandarin, even Russian.  It's not a language that will help her study medicine or law, like Latin.  Polish is spoken by Poles in Poland, and a few heavily Polonia-populated areas elsewhere, like Chicago.  There's not really a pressing socio-economically political reason to know Polish, though I know some non-Poles do study Polish, which must be based mostly on some personal interest in the culture.

While my siblings both know Polish, they do not use it on a regular basis outside of the nuclear family, much like me. And we speak English with each other. My brother has a son in Kindergarten who is not being spoken to in Polish. Let's be honest: If I don't pass down Polish to Natalia, it will die with me, as far as our branch of the family is concerned.  This may bother some people, but it doesn't really bother me.  Polish isn't an endangered language.  There are plenty of other families, families with a truly vested interest in the language (like living in Poland!) who are keeping the language strong.  I'm not worried about hurting Poland.

And really, I don't think I'm worried about hurting my family either.  My parents have one grandchild who speaks English to them, and they love him to pieces just the same.  And no other relatives have any meaningful contact with us.

So is Polish a mere novelty?  A reason for bragging rights among monolinguals?  That's not how we operate.  We speak our languages to her because they're our native languages, and that's what naturally comes out of our mouths.  We don't care if monolinguals are threatened by that.  It would be more of a burden to avoid our languages than to engage in them as the situation dictates.

Instilling in Natalia early childhood memories IN POLISH is how I hope to help her feel more "like" me, her mom.  She is mixed race, and American society will treat her accordingly.  If it has been an effort for ME to maintain my Polish identity among white Americans who would happily have me assimilate completely into the mainstream and be one of them, with no hint of the traditions, worldviews, or preferences of my original culture, then how much more impossible it would be for Natalia to be accepted as having a birthright to her mom's Polish heritage?!

And it's not just Americans who present an obstacle to maintaining a Polish identity.  Us Polish-born Poles, we don't tend to sympathize with second/third/fourth/fifth generation ethnic Poles who do not speak Polish.  Especially if they are ethnically mixed, as undoubtedly most Polish-Americans past the first one or two generations are.  It's not enough to have Polish DNA.  It's not enough to look Polish.  It's not enough to claim a Polish identity.  Fellow Poles will judge you based first and foremost on your Polish language abilities.  For Natalia to have any chance at all of being accepted as part Polish, she must know the language.

Why would I want that for her, you might ask?  If Poles are so judgmental, why do I care if Natalia can possibly be accepted by people who are that closed-minded?  Ah yes, that is the question, isn't it? But it goes back to what I said earlier - regardless of our faults, I'm still one of them.  I'm still Polish. And I want to be able to share that with my daughter.  I don't know if we'll end up having similar interests.  Hopefully we'll have similar values.  But here's a way I can guarantee that we have something in common that bonds us together as mother and daughter, something ongoing, something meaningful, in that language is the song of the heart.  I want to be able to literally listen to the lyrics of a Polish song with her and have us both be able to reflect on its beauty and/or meaning.

That's really it.  That's my whole motivation for teaching her Polish.  I don't think being Polish is any better than being any other nationality or ethnicity.  I consider myself a citizen of the world, and I hope that she will likewise consider herself a citizen of the world, not limited by the circumstances of her birth, ancestry, or upbringing in how she identifies herself.  I want to give her a sense of Polishness as an additional layer, an option.  It doesn't take anything away from the myriad other identities she can claim for herself.

But having been born to me, a Polish mother, she has a birthright to a Polish identity.  If I give her nothing else Polish, I will have given her the key to unlock any and all other Polish resources, should she ever want to explore them.

Transracial Parenting: Finding Racial Mirrors

So I have been learning a lot from a facebook group I belong to.  I am embarrassed to admit that I did not consider the practical aspects of what it would take to successfully parent a non-white child. Since getting together with my Latino hubby, I knew any children we'd have would not be white. This was true when we tried to adopt, as well.  It just wouldn't have felt genuine for us, a mixed couple, to be raising a white child, especially a non-Polish white child.  We are both immigrants, outsiders to a degree, and I take great pride in that.  I can't imagine raising a child that wouldn't have a claim to that unique aspect of our background.

So when Natalia was born, it took me by surprise that there are things she will experience as a non-white person that I do not have first hand experiences with, and that as a good mother, I have to learn to anticipate what her struggles may be and try to prepare as best as I can to help her navigate through them.  I cannot just assume that I will fall back on my own experience.  And to be honest, this is a dose of reality that actually applies to ALL parents to some degree, but most don't give it a second thought.  Of course our children's experiences will be different from our own!  Not only are they living in a different generation, but they are unique individuals with their own personalities and experiences that are bound to shape how they see the world.  They have different likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses, from those of their parents, even if their parents share genetics and race with their children.

But for those of us who are of a different race or ethnicity from our children, it becomes even more necessary to make up for the ways in which we're not just a senior version of our kids.

Take racial mirrors for example.  I had never heard of this concept, but now that I have, it makes total sense and I actually would say that it extends to ethnic mirrors and is something I grew up without and hence it affected my identity struggle. If I struggled for decades to figure out where I fit in (still haven't found the answer, by the way), and I grew up surrounded by "fellow white people" who "just" weren't Polish, I can only imagine how much more difficult it would be if my heritage were of a visible minority.  I am generally assumed to be a member of mainstream white America.  My struggle is mostly internal, in that I see how differently I grew up.  But if I were also a visible minority rather than just a white ethnic, I would also have those differences constantly pointed out to me, both explicitly and implicitly, by people in real life and messages in the media and the school system.  Not only that, but those differences would also be treated as making me less-than.  It wouldn't be, for example, that I have a different beauty from what's expected.  It'd be that I have different looks and they do not equal beauty, period.  Or it wouldn't be merely pointing out that I do something "differently" than the mainstream; it'd automatically be treated as me doing it "worse" than the mainstream.

It is very easy to take for granted the need for racial/ethnic mirrors for those of us who grew up surrounded by them.  We've never known a life where we didn't have people of our own race in day to day life to look up to.  For me in particular, my only daily female Polish mentor was my mother.  I only had long-distance contact with other female Polish relatives.  I grew up with no Polish peers.  I was expected to just automatically grow from a Polish girl into a Polish woman, because it seemed to happen naturally to Poles living in Poland.  No one could have anticipated that this is not how identity works.  I couldn't have become a strong Polish woman based on a single role model.  As great as my mom is, she is one person, plus we actually differ in a lot of our preferences and strengths.  It would be ridiculous to think that I would just grow up to be another version of my mom.

I only keep bringing myself up because it helps me to appreciate better the situation that my daughter is in. Luckily, her dad and his family are non-white, so she does have that built in.  But she is female, and even if she were a boy, just like with me, one person, even a parent, is insufficient to expose a child to the myriad ways of being a Person of Color.  My in-laws almost all live in another state, so we don't see them on a regular (say, weekly) basis.

And so enter the first part of intentional transracial parenting: finding sufficient and regular racial mirrors for our daughter.