How do you say “guilt” in Russian?
There are a few standard questions that people I have recently met ask me. First, where are you from? Russia. Second (optional - only if they’re dumb), how do you like it in America? It’s okay, I guess. :P Next, inevitably, comes the dreaded question - are you teaching your children Russian?
Why do I dread it so much? Does not teaching my boys Russian make me a bad mother? Is it on par with leaving them alone in a car, or forcing them to listen to Bette Midler? Am I uncaring or selfish not to give them every single opportunity I can to succeed in life? Maybe, but I have perfectly valid exc… I mean reasons. You’ll see.
Reason 1. People who came here in their childhood understand what leaving their birth country so young means for their control of their first language. Imagine if your command of the English language was frozen when you were 12 years old. Now imagine if you were forced to learn a different language and could only speak English in the evenings with your parents. Except that you didn’t want to hang out with your parents all evening, but spent most of that time watching non-English TV and reading non-English books and hanging out with your non-English speaking buddies. How much English would you retain?
Reason 2. People who are married to someone who does not speak their first language know how hard it is to teach their spouse that language. Unfortunately, due to Reason 1, I didn’t do it. I preferred for the two of us to have fun together instead. Most of my family speaks English, so it didn’t seem necessary. Antonio picked up a few useful words here and there, such as beer (pivo), meat (myaso) and mustard (gorchitsa). And isn’t that all a man needs to know to survive in Russia?
Reason 3. Parents who work full-time understand how precious the time they spend with their kids in the evenings is. We’ve already established that my command of Russian is not so great, and my husband’s is non-existent. Sure, I could speak broken Russian to my kids for a few hours a day, and exclude my husband from our conversations. But it wouldn’t work. The kids are a wonderful part of our life, but they’re not the center of it. During the course of an average evening I converse with my husband about work, friends, family, and the running of the household. I don’t just sit and talk at the kids all evening long. Nobody does. Show me a family with bilingual kids, and I’ll show you a stay at home mother, or both parents of the same background, or at the very least one parent who immigrated as an adult. Because that’s what it takes.
