Love Has an Accent 💛

I recently published a piece on the Brazilian platform Mães que Escrevem — and since that one was in Portuguese, I wanted to bring it here for everyone who reads me in English. It’s about a moment at a playground that was small and ordinary and somehow cracked something open.

The other day my daughter fell at the playground.

Nothing serious. Scraped knee, startled cry, the whole standard production. And instinctively, I was already half-standing, the words forming before I’d made any conscious decision to speak: Oh my God, be careful, sweetheart, in that particular Brazilian pitch that means I love you and you scared me and please be more careful, all at once.

I stopped halfway up.

Because here in Switzerland, no one runs. No one shouts. Parents stay seated with their coffee and their books while their children scale things that would trigger a community meeting in Brazil. A father nearby saw his son dangling from a rope above gravel and responded with a thumbs up. A thumbs up. His heart rate presumably stayed under sixty.

I sat back down, heart pounding, words stuck somewhere between two completely different languages of love.

Raising a child abroad is not just about learning new vocabulary. It’s about unlearning your old tone of voice.

It’s realizing that the volume you use when you’re scared is cultural. That the way you hover, or don’t hover, carries a whole history that has nothing to do with how much you love your child and everything to do with where you learned what love looks like in action.

In Denmark, babies nap in prams outside cafés while their parents eat indoors. In Australia, a birthday party means store-bought cake and a picnic blanket and that’s genuinely considered a success. In Brazil, we rent a venue, inflate every balloon in the northern hemisphere, and invite cousins whose exact relation to us we couldn’t quite explain under oath.

All of it is love. Just with completely different grammar.

Then one day your child, born into a country that isn’t yours, looks at something you do — some ritual, some reflex, some way of being — and asks: why do we do this?

And you start to answer. Because it’s beautiful. Because it’s ours. Because my mother did it and her mother did it and—

And then you stop. Because the question is fair. And it lands somewhere tender, right in the place where your old self and your new life haven’t quite finished negotiating.

The truth is that love has an accent.

It has a volume and a rhythm and a particular smell. Mine smells like beans on the stove and sounds like someone shouting your name from the other end of the house just to say dinner’s ready. It is not subtle. It was never designed to be.

When you move countries, that love doesn’t disappear. It just has to learn new manners.

You learn to love with fewer words, or quieter ones. You learn when to stay seated even when every instinct is telling you to run. You learn that being a good parent has no clean translation — that it’s something you’re always approximating, adjusting, doing imperfectly in real time.

And you discover, slowly, that the courage it takes to keep loving in a language that will never sound entirely native is not a small thing.

It might actually be the whole thing.