A few years ago my family made an unexpected move from the Western US to French Canada. We had never dreamed my spouse would get a permanent job Montreal, Quebec, but he did. The day we flew there from the Seattle airport was surreal. At the time, I thought this permanent move to a place I knew very little about felt like throwing my life into a black hole.

Since we needed to become permanent residents for my husband’s work situation, my kids, 5 and 8, would soon be required to attend school in French (the law for all children in QC who are PRs or citizens unless they have a Canadian parent who attended school in English). People in the university community where my husband worked advised it was better to have them attend school in French from the beginning. So my children started their journey learning French in special “welcome” classes alongside other immigrants. This and the move in general was a very challenging transition for them.

I, too, threw myself into learning the language. While Montreal is fairly bilingual, tasks like communicating with my kids’ schools required French. I got involved in classes and started making progress. The first time I understood someone speaking French on the phone was a major milestone. Surviving a couple months of volunteer work in French did as well. After eight years in Quebec, my kids are gradually surmounting the language barrier and the disadvantage of not being raised in the language they are studying in. We’ve managed to build a life here that we generally enjoy.

Despite my efforts, in recent years I’ve felt pretty cynical and self-deprecating about my French. I never expected to be an awkward immigrant mom whose language skills can be embarrassing to my kids, but here I am. I work full time in English, and my main hobby is reading and writing in English. I sometimes reluctantly rely on my kids to translate the dumbest things like the bread options at Subway. When I make French-speaking friends, they usually want to use English with me because their second language skills are strong and they want to practice. I still feel on the outside of French Canadian life, even though I like the culture and in many ways its warmth and spirit remind me of parts of the US (did you know some Quebeckers line dance and wear cowboy hats? Check out a favorite music video of mine that reflects their love of and sense of shared identity with the States. A ballad told from the perspective of a trucker describing what he sees in his rear view mirror as drives from Florida home to Quebec; the chorus refers to “America crying”).

I’ve felt bad that I can’t help my kids in French as much as their friends’ parents. That I haven’t been able to help them learn rich vocabulary or how to use more advanced grammar through the way I speak. And that even the most common sounds and words like “un” or “our” still trip me up sometimes. My last volunteer tutor, a kind older women from France, winced at me a few times in a way that made me feel like I’ll never measure up.

But the other day I realized my efforts have mattered more than I’ve given myself credit. When her grandparents visited, my daughter told them about how my willingness to learn French made an immense difference in her own learning experience. Because I could understand French in the early years, she was able to practice and play around with the language at home. My jumping in head first to learn to converse in French energized her to do the same. All those trips to the library and learning to read to my kids in French mattered. She says that if my husband and I hadn’t made the effort to learn and to put ourselves out there, she is confident she wouldn’t be having the same kind of fulfilling experience swimming in the French-speaking world that she is. She now often feels she belongs in this world just as much as she does in the English-speaking one.

I was really moved by this and its something she (now 16) had never said before.

Sometimes we are very hard on ourselves as parents and feel hopelessly inadequate or ashamed of what we can offer. But in reality so much of what we do helps our kids and does matter. 

This encouraging instance made me think about all my self-doubt about handling faith and spirituality in my home. I haven’t felt nearly as supported as I expected to be by the Church in trying to pass down faith and spirituality to my kids, or even in just helping them develop social and emotional well-being. I often feel very lonely in these tasks and as if I’ve been asked to do the heavy lifting on my own. I feel terribly, hopelessly inadequate and clueless about what I’m doing at times. I’m always improvising, trying out things on the fly hoping they will help us connect spiritually or that something we do as a family will speak to their personal question or their needs to find meaning, hope, and connection.

One time I pleaded with God for help: Let me hope that something I teach them will help them in their lives. Show me how to support them. A couple days later, I was walking in the woods on a beautiful summer day. I spotted a raccoon family, a mother and two fluffy babies. The mom was digging for grubs in the soil and eating them. The babies were hugging a tree one on top of the other. The babies climbed down and started doing exactly what their mother was doing. This is the only time I have seen raccoons in nature while I’ve lived in QC, even though I walk in the forest most days.

This isn’t the first time I’ve experienced a meaningful animal encounter. It seemed to me to reveal something I could hope for: As I model ways to spiritually sustain myself, in time, my children will follow. Maybe not in ways I clearly see or understand now, but I do think I can trust that some of the healthy spiritual approaches I role model will be passed down.

Many of the religious transitions we undergo as families remind me of a journey of unexpected immigration. While my family used to live mostly only in the English-speaking world, now we have to learn to function in a bilingual one as well as in an international neighborhood. Many Mormon families like mine once rubbed shoulders in mostly Mormon circles and saw the world through a distinctly Mormon lens, but now find we need to venture out beyond this. We realize that, for a variety of reasons, we need to become more inclusive, open, and expansive in our worldviews and how we live.

Also, that we need to do a better job than past generations at acknowledging and respecting our children’s agency and various personal needs, and that we need to put family relationships above religion or tradition. Such shifts may not be what we expected or originally wanted, and they require that we learn new spiritual vocabularies and skills. We may feel uprooted or inadequate as supporters for our kids as we face such transitions.

We face such challenges regardless of our exact path– whether it is participating in Church as a family to glean goodness and community even though our relationship with the Church has changed, transitioning out of the faith tradition, or choosing to root our families in a different community. The challenge we share is to learn to live in a space that is more open to the greater, diverse world of people, cultures, and forms of spirituality. We move from a spiritual perspective that is more insular, tribal, mythic, disinterested in diverse worldviews, and competitive, toward perspectives that are more complex, humble, cooperative, and appreciative of intellectual and spiritual diversity.

Such migrations can be painful, but also spiritually profound. We have the opportunity to cross into toward a higher level of spiritual consciousness, find greater inner peace, and to feel more compassion for other people and all life. There are incredible things we model to our children, including humility, curiosity, open-mindedness, cross-cultural community building, love, spiritual autonomy, and more.

We can trust that the efforts we make as we develop ourselves and grow all matter. In time, all of this can and will all benefit our kids. All of it can help them gain the skills and tools they need to flourish in the pluralistic world they live in. We can’t and won’t see all the benefits of our efforts now, yet we are probably benefitting them even right now more than we can recognize or give ourselves credit for, and we can hope that our children will uphold many of the values we seek to live by, whatever the outcome may be concerning religious affiliation.

It might just be that our children will turn out more spiritually multilingual and resilient than we have been. It’s not easy to be the adult generation that immigrates, who always speaks in a bit of an awkward accent and who sacrifices to pave the way to a better life. Perhaps we will never be quite as home in the “new country” as our children will be, but that’s a good thing if our greatest worries are about our kids!

I trust that we parents are going to look back on what we’ve accomplished with the same kind of perspective I have with my immigration– I didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing, and it often didn’t feel like I was doing it right, but I can see now that it mattered for my children. I supported them and modeled healthy approaches and good values during that difficult period of transition.