September 2009

Raising global children

Back to Brazil

by Sue Katz Miller

Our family chronicle includes three years living in Senegal, and three years living in Brazil. Finally, we settled in Takoma Park when our children were six months and three and a half years old. So they have few, or no, conscious memories of those formative years abroad. And yet, as in many other Takoma families with international connections, those experiences pervade our daily life. Our house is filled with art and instruments from Africa and South America. We listen to stacks of CDs in French and Portuguese. The stories we tell our children about our history together weave in strands from three continents.

As a toddler, my son Ben would sometimes get confused about the chronology and ask, “Did I live in Africa?” And I would respond, “Yes, when you were an egg.” I wanted him to feel that connection, even though he was only conceived later, in Brazil. I wanted his journey through Africa as an egg, and through Brazil as an infant, to help him feel connected in our multicultural city and schools.

My daughter Aimee had vivid memories when she was four-through-six-years-old of her beloved Brazil. She was in fact traumatized by the move from Brazil to Takoma Park and the separation from her Brazilian nanny, Cleide. But at 15, the memories were fading fast. Aimee would sit and marvel at the videos of herself as a toddler, chatting away fluently in a language she no longer understood.

So this summer, we decided it was time to return for a visit to Brazil. Would we be able to rekindle any of Aimee’s memories? Was Portuguese really embedded somewhere in the neural connections laid down in her toddler years? Would our children share our passion for the mangrove swamps and funky rhythms of Recife, the largest city in the least developed quadrant of the country?

We arrived in June in the midst of the Sao Joao festival, a corn harvest and fertility celebration synthesized with Saint John’s Day in the Catholic calendar. Ben, 12, thoroughly enjoyed the firecrackers going off all around us, the bonfires leaping and smoking at every street corner, and the live music played by trios of bass drum, accordion and triangle. For Aimee, the taste of the traditional corn-based festival foods brought back primal memories—like Proust’s madeleine. She craved canjica, a sweet corn pudding dusted with cinnamon. She sought out pamonha, a sweet corn and coconut tamale wrapped in corn husks and sold on streetcorners. She even liked the sweet corn popsicles.

The reunion with Cleide, our nanny, was profound. Both our children immediately fell back into a physical intimacy with her that they share with very few adults. Were they simply responding to her evident love for them? Or was there some pheromone their bodies recognized, a chemical response to the woman who was essentially their other mother? Cleide had rocked them to sleep, sung lullabies in Portuguese, played with them for hours on the floor, nursed them through tropical illness, cooked and blended homemade food for them in a place that had no commercial baby food. When we were far from home and relatives for three years, Cleide was our family, and always will be, cliché notwithstanding.

All that said, the return to Brazil was sheer joy for us, the parents, and difficult at times for our kids. We had a series of long meals with old friends our children no longer remembered, speaking in a language they no longer understood. In spite of horseback riding on the beach, snorkeling on a reef, and a surfing lesson, my children often expressed frustration and missed their friends. Spoiled rotten? Yes. But we also recognized in them the fatigue that goes with culture shock and relentless immersion in a difficult language. We had been through it ourselves, more than once.

By the end of two weeks, Aimee had developed an uncanny ability to follow conversations in Portuguese, and even throw out an appropriate phrase here and there. Was it the return of her childhood Portuguese? I realized we had a confounding variable ruining our experiment. She has three years of studying Spanish under her belt. The two Romance languages are close enough that her Spanish alone could be giving her a boost in picking up Portuguese. So the truth is, we will never really know whether her childhood Portuguese is still embedded deep in her brain or not.

Here is what we do know. Aimee’s painful memory of the loss of Cleide has been overlayed by her strong presence in our lives again, connected by the miracle of Facebook, and with plans to visit soon. Brazil for my children now has technicolor pictures and sound to go with the distant memories of scent and taste. I can imagine either of them returning there for a year to study, or even just to ride the waves, in the not so distant future.