It’s the last day of classes before summer vacances, and I’m picking Oliver up in front of his school in Bordeaux’s city center. The parents surrounding me are all chattering with one another in French as we wait for dismissal, and I stand quietly off to the side, offering an occasional bonjour or salut. By now they know that the American mom still can’t manage much more than that.
Soon the doors open and the kids flood into the street, Oli giving me a quick hug and dropping his bag at my feet before veering off to play touche-touche (tag) with his friends. His teacher spots me and approaches, speaking to me in rapid-fire French. She’s smiling widely, and I can pick out enough of her words to guess she’s talking about Oli’s progress, and how she’ll be moving on to a new program at another school next year. I want to tell her how grateful I am for her work with Oli, how much he’s loved his time with her, how impressed we are with his French. I dig around in my brain, desperate to form these sentences, but I find only a handful of words surrounded by blank space. And so I smile and just keep repeating d’accord (OK), merci (thank you), and au revoir (goodbye). I leave feeling dumb and deflated.
I’ve never been a big talker. I’m usually more comfortable observing, or asking questions, letting others speak until I have something to say. Silence has never really bothered me — that is, until we moved to France, and I discovered what it feels like to lose my voice.
We’ve visited France many times before, and I was encouraged by the fact that I could easily get by with basic conversations at the bakery and bistro. It’s a simple enough script to follow.
But living in France, we’ve encountered many more situations where, ready or not, we’ve had to try our best to understand and speak French — like speaking with Oli’s teachers, meeting with a doctor for our visa approvals, and speaking with the neighbors when their apartment begins leaking into ours. It is these simple, everyday interactions that leave me feeling so confused and incompetent. I open my mouth and find that I have no words.
When we moved here in December, I knew the language barrier would be a challenge. Although I’d diligently studied French on my own for years before our move, my knowledge of the language was still basic at best. Still, I felt confident that full immersion would speed up my progress, along with local language classes and committed study. I assumed I’d be comfortably conversational by the end of the year.
I was being very optimistic, and a tad naive. Real-life French is completely different than the slow, stilted French we hear on our language apps and podcasts. It’s fast and complicated by regional accents and slang, dropped words and casual contractions. I must use my full, focused attention to have even a passing chance at comprehension. Attempting to speak, I get caught up in vocabulary gaps and technicalities — the gender of words, the correct prepositions to use. Not to mention pronunciation, which I previously thought I was quite good at. If I had a euro for every time someone looked at me in confusion when I ordered a “Coke Zero”... I’d have a lot of euros, but I’d still struggle to pronounce that word, too!
I had heard that moving abroad can be isolating. I’d assumed it would have more to do with missing family and friends and the familiarity of home. But for me, the root of this isolation is my inability to speak, or to understand the words of anyone around me. I feel like I’m both deaf and mute in France.
I know it takes time to learn a language, and that after another year or two, I could be in a very different place — more comfortable and confident. But I’ve also spoken with expats whose French skills far surpass mine, yet they still struggle to express themselves. Even with near fluency in a second language, we will never be as confident or as clever as we are in our native tongue. There’s far too much nuance, particularly in French. We will always be lacking, no matter how hard we try. We’ll always be immediately recognizable as outsiders.
And I desperately miss the part of me who has all but disappeared into silence. The me who is a bit quiet but also loves to talk in-depth about things I’m passionate about, who prefers deep, intimate conversations over small talk. The part of me that’s sometimes shy but will also volunteer with the PTA and host a big Halloween party for our friends. I miss being able to order a drink without second-guessing myself, and going into a pharmacy without struggling to memorize a handful of words beforehand.
I’ve tried hard to focus on the positive aspects of this experience — expanding my worldview, breaking out of my comfort zone, challenging my aging brain to learn something new. But at a certain point, it does feel unbearably exhausting to be so constantly challenged.