Masha Rumer and "Parenting With An Accent"
An interview with author Masha Rumer about why her kids have multiple pairs of slippers, and the one holiday she doesn't celebrate anymore.
I’m so happy to bring you an interview this week with journalist and writer Masha Rumer, whose book about parenting as an immigrant in America was published in 2021. “Parenting With An Accent: How Immigrants Honor Their Heritage, Navigate Setbacks, and Chart New Paths for Their Children” is an engaging blend of personal narrative, research and reporting that highlights the unique joys and challenges of raising a kid across cultures. You can listen to more of my conversation with Masha here.
Tell me about your book, and how it came to be:
I was born in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, and America was considered to be our enemy even though everyone was secretly wishing they could live there. But I moved — I was a refugee — with my family to the United States when I was 13, so I basically grew up here. My husband is American, I now have two kids who are 6 and 8 years old.
The idea for this book started when I first became a parent. It was like a culture shock all over again. I had this longing for my home, which doesn’t even exist — the childhood back where I grew up looks very different. So there was a sense of homelessness. I was really missing those dishes, those songs, that music. I was like an emotional mess when I would see cartoons from my childhood and I wished I could share some of that with my daughter, but she was growing up in a multicultural environment and an American home. I started speaking to her in Russian as well.
I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what kind of parent I was going to be, but suddenly Russian was like the way to do it. And socially I was also wondering, where are my people? I have American friends, Russian friends, other immigrant friends that I socialize with, and I always tried to figure out where I fit in, especially if there were people who came from my home country very recently.
I had this longing for my home, which doesn’t even exist — the childhood back where I grew up looks very different.
So there was a sense of nostalgia and longing, but also, so many questions when you have all these languages and cultures. What foods do I feed her? What books do I read her? Especially if the books I grew up with are scary or have all this propaganda in them, or xenophobia, or sexism? I began writing articles about some of these things, and one day my husband got me a class at a local writing school, the San Francisco Writers Grotto, about writing a nonfiction book proposal. I was like, I can’t go, because we have a child’s birthday party with the bouncy house and the pizza and free cake. What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t go to the birthday party? But he was like No, you should go. And when I came back, I had this idea in mind. I wrote out the chapters that week and then I started publishing a bit more strategically started looking for an agent and here we are.
It’s not an advice book — I share my own personal stories, but I don’t give advice, because I obviously don’t believe there's any one way to be a parent or to be an immigrant. But it’s also based on more than 60 different interviews I’ve conducted with immigrant parents, immigrants, children of immigrants, because it talks a lot about acculturation, being discriminated against, and finding a tribe. There are also experts with speech language pathology, people who study bilingualism, cross cultural sociology and all of that.
But aside from those bits of advice, I just hope it would be a nice book to commiserate with. I wrote it because I wished there was something like this for me. I was feeling very nostalgic and very lonely as well, and very confused. And it’s not until I started talking to other parents about some of these personal problems — my child is not very excited about learning my language, or is watching a lot of TV in my language considered educational? Maybe there’s some outrageous advice from our ancestors, and how do you take that? Just hoping someone would be able to relate to it and not feel so alone. It’s easy to feel so different when you are an immigrant.
When you’re working, where are your kids?
Usually they’re back in school, except today, because of COVID. They weren’t when I did a large chunk of the book. The book took four years but my manuscript, a large portion, was completed during the lockdown. After I signed the book contract, I took a leave of absence from my day job for a few months to complete the manuscript, and then COVID happened almost right after. So my partner would finish his work around 4 or 5 p.m., and then I would write at night and also on weekends, in a closet sometimes.
But now they’re back in school for the most part, so work has to fit into the school day, but it really never does. I used to teach college for a number of years, and the work day there never really ends. I was always really jealous of people who were like OK, I’m clocking out, it’s 5 p.m. and I’m going home now. And I don’t think that’s possible for so many of us. But writing, I also feel there’s no boundary, because a lot of it happens around the clock. At night, I wake up and I write things down. I conducted interviews whenever people could do it, even if it’s at night or on weekends.
Even before COVID, as parents, we’ve just become so agile and we’re just able to multitask and we’re able to take advantage of the little breaks we have, whether it’s outside the preschool pick-up lines or in the really odd hours in the early morning or late at night. We have to switch back and forth. Because you never feel like you’ve done enough. And it’s always a trade-off. If you’re working in the kitchen, then you’re looking at all this mess on the counter, but if you go take care of that, you’re not doing your work. And if you’re doing your work, you’ve abandoned the kitchen things that need to be done.
If you’re working in the kitchen, then you’re looking at all this mess on the counter, but if you go take care of that, you’re not doing your work. And if you’re doing your work, you’ve abandoned the kitchen things that need to be done.
What’s challenging about parenting for you at this time in your life?
Well, definitely the universal issue of COVID. And all the same things that were before — how do I make sure that they’re safe and secure and well-fed and speaking the language, but at the same time, are they well fed with the food of their ancestors? Or is it frozen dinos from the freezer? It’s not always the homemade soups that my grandmother would approve of.
Part of the book also is that it’s not just how to be a good enough parent, but also how do we take care of ourselves? When I think about everybody’s struggling with something, I’ve learned to feel a little bit less guilty. Am I enough of this good immigrant daughter, or am I teaching them my heritage, am I helping them integrate into the American society, am I checking off all the holidays from my heritage and my husband’s heritage, and how do I find time to do all of that?
When my daughter was 2, she refused to speak Russian, and for a long time, I was like, it’s my fault, I did something wrong. But the more I read about it, the more I realized, it was a phase. And my son did the same at approximately that age. I just learned to chill out. This one moment or this one experience or meal or holiday or sentence is not the totality of a parenting experience.
We think once we get married or partnered or adopt a child or become a parent, the family members are going to step back and not ask us about it at every holiday. But no, there’s always somebody’s cousin who speaks the language better. Somebody's doing gymnastics like five days a week and you hear those stories. But I think it’s important to try to take that in stride and not get affected by that.
Compared to the household you grew up in, what’s one thing you’re doing differently as a parent?
I mean, we no longer celebrate Lenin’s birthday and deify him, so there’s that. But to me, there are two parts to this question: How do I wish I could parent in a similar way, and how do I not wish I could parent in a similar way? It’s something that comes up when you grew up in an immigrant home. A lot of times, we feel like we would do things very differently. Maybe not force our children to eat when they don’t want to eat. Or in a lot of cultures, it’s considered OK to hit our child. That’s not something that I consider OK in any way. But there are things that people grew up around, and I think a lot of it is very survival-based.
Nancy Foner writes that maybe children of immigrants may disavow the way they were brought up, but when they become parents themselves, they realize they’re adapting those behaviors. I grew up in a very tight-knit community — people were packed in with each other, individuality was not necessarily prized, and you were always aware of being part of a group and part of a community. But the negative aspect of that is that people are in your space a lot, you’re shamed a lot, and compared to others, and not just by your parents. I remember I would be walking down the street with a friend of mine who had blonde hair and some grandma would stop her and say “Why did you bleach your hair this way? It looks awful.” People could come to you and say “You're talking too loudly!” That shame — that’s not something I want to have in my child’s upbringing.
I’ve noticed that when my child does something that I would have gotten in trouble for as a kid, it makes me feel really stressed. Do you ever notice that kind of reaction?
There was a moment when I first became a mom, and — I don’t even remember what my child did, maybe they had an accident, and instead of taking her aside and saying something very quietly, I said it more loudly, because I was worried about what people might think. I was saying it so that others could hear. And it haunts me to this day that I did that. You realize you might be doing this thing that you hated so much.
That’s one of the things that really surprised me when I became a mom — so many things that were latent, and there’s so many things we have to figure out how we want to react to it. That’s actually a lot of the book — a lot of it is just picking and choosing. In addition to all these often confusing schools of thought, eventually we just pick and choose what we want to keep. There’s a layer of our own heritage, but we have to figure out what feels right. And it does happen — it just might not be immediate.
Tell me something your kids do that really pushes your buttons:
The fact that they always lose their slippers — you have three other pairs here, how can you be losing them? That would be one.
Tell me something wonderful about your kid(s):
They’re really curious — and I think all kids are curious, but they are really curious about where their father is from, where I’m from, and they’re learning it at their own pace. They’re learning the language of half of their family, and I think they’ve learned to be proud of it, and it’s not just language — it’s their ability to connect to that part of their family, to be able to talk to their grandmother, to one day visit my homeland where they have so many family members there yet to meet.
And by virtue of being interested in my country and heritage, they’re interested in others as well. It kind of makes them potential citizens of the world who are open-minded. It’s the benefit of not only speaking another language, but being interested and curious. I think a lot of it is because also I learned to chill out. There was a point where I was like, Do I force them to speak my language? When we force kids to do something, with language learning and retention, they’re not going to be really into it all.
Also, my son recently made a very delicious sandwich. He wanted to make us breakfast, so he made super crispy toast with cream cheese and jam and some basil on top, and I think also some ketchup!
A huge thank-you to Masha for speaking with me for this newsletter!