When Your Child Becomes a Little Foreign to You Too
On sakyo, the head bobble, and eating rice with her hands.
She does not say I'm finished anymore. She says 'sakyo'.
It means the same thing. It is simply the word that comes to her first now, the Nepali one rather than the one I would reach for. And when I ask her something and the answer is yes, she does not nod. She tilts her head from side to side, the small rolling movement that means agreement here, the gesture I have spent years learning to read on other people and never expected to see, quite so naturally, on my own daughter.
She eats rice with her hands. Hot rice, the way it is eaten here, pressed and mixed with her fingers before it reaches her mouth. I do not like eating hot food this way. It does not feel fine to me, even after all these years. She does it without thinking, the way you do something you were simply raised inside.
I know I should feel only one thing when I notice these moments. Pride, perhaps, or relief, since she is half Nepali and this is, in every reasonable sense, good news. But what actually arrives, underneath the pride, is something smaller and harder to admit. A flicker of strangeness. A sense that she is, in these small and entirely ordinary moments, becoming a little bit foreign to me.
The word I did not expect to use about my own child
Foreign is a strange word to reach for here, and I want to sit with why it is the right one anyway.
I have used that word before, about a country, about a street, about a bus line that no longer ran. It described the unsettling feeling of encountering something familiar that had quietly changed without me. And now the same word is surfacing again, except this time it is not a place. It is my daughter, doing something small and unremarkable, in a way that is not quite the way I would do it, and I notice, with some discomfort, that the gap between us has widened by some tiny and entirely natural amount.
There is no single moment where this happened. No event I can point to and say, here, this is when it changed. It arrives in increments so small they would be invisible to anyone except the person standing closest to her. A word. A gesture. The way she holds her hand around a ball of rice. Each one is nothing on its own. Together, they add up to something I notice.
What is actually happening, underneath the discomfort
What is happening is exactly what I hoped would happen when she was born into two cultures rather than one. She is not choosing Nepal over me. She is not rejecting anything. She is simply doing what children do, absorbing the world around her without weighing it, taking in the language, the gestures, the customs of the place she is actually growing up in, the same way I once absorbed the customs of the country I grew up in, without ever experiencing that absorption as a loss.
She is becoming more fully herself. Half Nepali was always true. It is simply becoming visible now, in small physical and verbal ways, rather than remaining a fact stated about her rather than lived by her.
And yet the discomfort is real too, and I do not think it needs to be argued away. It sits alongside the rightness of what is happening rather than contradicting it. This is one of the less discussed textures of grounded identity inside a family that spans more than one culture: even the people closest to you, even your own child, can shift in ways that mean the ground under your closeness moves slightly, even while nothing between you is actually wrong.
The smaller language between us
There is a particular kind of closeness between a parent and a child that requires no translation. A shared vocabulary, a shared set of small physical habits, gestures that need no explanation because they were given to the child by the parent in the first place. When my daughter reaches for 'sakyo' instead of finished, or tilts her head instead of nodding, the automatic overlap between us becomes very slightly smaller. Not gone. Just slightly smaller than it was.
That is worth naming honestly, rather than smoothing over with the reminder that this is good news. It is good news. It is also, in this very small and specific way, a kind of loss, and both of those things are true in the same moment, without needing to cancel each other out.
Holding both feelings without choosing one
I do not think the goal here is to resolve this into a single tidy feeling. I do not need to decide that I am only proud, or only quietly sad. I can be both, in the space of watching her eat rice with her hands at the dinner table, in a way I will never quite do myself, and feel the pride and the small ache arrive together, without forcing either one to win.
What helps is remembering that her growing into the Nepali half of herself is not a subtraction from what she shares with me. The parts of her that are mine are not being replaced. They are simply no longer the only parts visible in a given moment. There is more of her now, not less, even when what is showing up is something I cannot fully share in myself.
If you recognise this
If you have noticed your own child absorbing the other half of who they are, a word, a gesture, a way of eating, and felt something more complicated than simple pride arrive alongside it, that complication is not a sign that something is wrong with you as a mother. It is one of the quieter, more specific costs and gifts of raising a child between cultures. The free guide Why Women Living Between Cultures Start Doubting Themselves speaks to this same layered experience, the sense of loving something that is also, in small ways, slipping slightly outside what feels fully familiar.
She is not becoming less mine. She is becoming more fully herself. I am still learning to let both of those be true at once.
