I’ve always been fascinated by foreign languages. I picked up American Sign Language in middle school by watching the interpreter in our seventh-grade class and then befriending my deaf classmate. When official foreign language instruction in my school district started in 9th grade (much too late, by the way, according to the brain development research), I took French and also some Latin.
In college, after spending a summer in Colmar and feeling more comfortable with my French, I was the only (nerdy) senior to take a daily 9am Spanish 101 class with a bunch of freshmen. At that point, I saw the clock ticking on my chance at learning things that were already included in my tuition payments.
After college, I spent a month in Tours, France, in an intensive language program and then a year living in Aix-en-Provence going to a political science school on a Rotary fellowship. I experienced the lost-at-sea feelings that came with a noisy dinner where conversation moved too fast for me. But I also felt that startling joy of learning a new word and then somehow managing to hear it everywhere.
At the beginning of my second year of law school back in the US (the so-called 2L year), I, like so many of my classmates, interviewed for summer associate positions at law firms. In one interview, the law firm associate sitting across from me asked how I knew I wanted to be a regulatory lawyer. “Reading and interpreting regulations is like reading a foreign language,” I told him. “And I love foreign languages.”
One of the best compliments anyone has ever paid me in my legal career was when the CEO of the Association of American Medical Colleges (my employer at the time) introduced me to one of his colleagues as we stood together in an elevator as “one of the only lawyers I know who actually speaks English when we talk.” That, to my translating heart, was high praise.
What Do Foreign Languages Have to Do with Working Parenthood?
Let’s start with what foreign languages have to do with parenthood – then we’ll turn to the work front. The moment a baby arrives in your house, they are communicating with you in a language you don’t understand, right? The various gurgles and grunts and cries aren’t words, true. But they are still communication tools, waiting to be interpreted.
When my eldest was a year old and trying on spoken language for the first time, he made up words for various things. And we tried to understand him. “Buh,” meant “dog,” it turned out. Pointing helped us know how to translate. As our kids got older, they started speaking foreign languages that contained recognizable English words but that we, as parents, still couldn’t understand. Take Pokémon, for example. Or the card game Magic the Gathering. My (“unrotted!”) brain knows the individual words on each card, but I can’t decipher their meaning in context.
Then there’s the actual foreign languages we try to teach our children. If this topic interests you, I highly recommend Masha Rumer’s book, Parenting with an Accent. I, for one, had grand visions of speaking French with my kids at home when they were little. And while I did manage a few French books from time to time, the children eventually took a strong and vocal dislike to my efforts, declaring loudly and in an ironic combination of both languages one night at dinner, “Ça suffit speaking French!” (In other words: STOP speaking French!) My boys have come back around to French as tweens and teens, and it brings me great joy to cuddle up with my youngest on the couch to help him read the silly T’choupi books designed for French elementary schoolers. (“Imagine having a name with an apostrophe in it!” my son recently exclaimed.)
And what about the work front? Anyone who has ever started a new job has had to learn not only the language of their trade but also the language of an organization’s culture. My sons sometimes mimic the work conversations they hear over dinner, too. “Hi, I’m heading to the LMA PDI ACC NALP Conference,” we’ve heard one of them say. Which reminds me these acronyms aren’t obvious, despite the fact they roll off our tongues.
After having kids, we have also had to, of necessity in working parenthood, learn the language of boundary-setting. Like foreign languages that feel funny in our mouths at first, we may initially feel strange saying words like “I can’t stay late tonight, because I need to pick up my child from daycare before it closes.” These phrases are a language of survival that, for many of us, can feel scary to utter. Yet these words become more natural over time.
It’s Only Foreign Until You Learn It
Foreign languages are, it turns out, only foreign until you learn them. After I was taught both how “acacia wood” is used in Minecraft and also how you say it in Hebrew (my son’s Torah passage for his upcoming Bar Mitzvah is about building the tabernacle), I felt like I had access to multiple new worlds.
The skills required for learning a different language are exactly the types of skills I admire in my colleagues and that I want to encourage in my children. Curiosity about the unknown. Empathy for anyone who is confused. A willingness to practice and be wrong. An admission that you don’t understand something.
Last weekend, I was at a march with a friend and her two elementary school-aged sons. They were pointing to posters and asking what words like “democracy” and “tyranny” meant. (Okay, so those weren’t the most colorful words we saw on posters, but you get my point.) Yes, these words were in English, a language the kids spoke, but the words were still foreign to them. The kids’ curiosity, and our translations into terms they could understand, however, hopefully bridged a divide.
More curiosity? More empathy? And more trying to understand one another, regardless of the language we speak or how we communicate? Yes, please, more of all that.
P.S. For those of you suffering from the language of random numbers these days, you’ll find amusing a post I saw on Instagram recently. It was written on the dry erase board of a school classroom and reads as follows: “If you say “6,7” or do the motions associated with “6,7,” you will be assigned 670 word handwritten essay about how brainrot is affecting the younger generation!
Want more practical tips on working parenthood? Check out my book, Back to Work After Baby: How to Plan and Navigate a Mindful Return from Maternity Leave
