I went to see a movie alone at the Carlton Cinema in the last few weeks before you were born. Though I haven’t in years, I love to go to the theatre on my own, and the Carlton is one of my favourites. Each room is so tiny; the theatres are too small for aisles. The maroon carpets, compact screens, sticky floors, the illicit rustle of bagged candy from the bulk shop next door: it’s the feeling of watching a movie in someone’s rec room with a dozen strangers. When I lived down the street as an undergrad student, I’d spend $2 on a bag of gummies and $4 on a matinee ticket. The best thrill, conveniently cheap, and one I indulged in religiously for years.

It was November 2016, and Donald Trump had just been elected president of the United States. In the newsroom where I worked at the time, colleagues had just lost bets over the results and were recalibrating their sense of the world order, despite, only a few years earlier, having seen a similarly yellow-haired buffoon take office in Toronto and proceed to subject the city to extreme civic mismanagement and global humiliation.

I eased myself into a front-row seat with a quarter pound of Swedish Berries and stared up at the screen, eight and a half months pregnant. I was achy, happy, and ready to cry at any kind of movie that popped up on the screen. I didn’t know a child would die within the first ten minutes.

Arrival is intended to be a film about language. Adapted from Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, it features grand, sweeping scenes of misty grasslands in locations all over the world that have been visited by massive alien spacecraft, each the elegant ovoid shape of a well-filed nail. These ships are staffed by teams of squid-like aliens responsible for teaching humankind their language in order to communicate the reason for their appearance. Only one group of human researchers is successful in understanding it—the Americans.

Amy Adams plays Louise, a quietly determined linguist who connects with the beings and, by virtue of learning their language and writing system, changes the way she experiences time. By the end of the film, she is able to see what has been, is, and will be happening, all at once. It is suggested this knowledge has implications both universal and personal. The audience watches Adams talk a military official down from a set of actions that may start a global conflict and, minutes later, accept a future in which she becomes the mother of a child who will die before she turns fifteen.

It isn’t clear to the viewer in that moment, but in watching the opening sequence, they know how the movie ends, before it really gets started. The revelation itself isn’t so much the film’s structure but the truth we were meant to understand all along: a woman chooses to become a mother despite knowing she will outlive her child. At the time, and as pregnant as I was, I burst into tears. I left my last few Swedish Berries at the concessions counter and waddled out of the building.

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When I was five, your grandmother took me to an audiologist for a hearing test. I remember sitting in a dark, soundproofed booth with a pair of headphones on; looking out at the adults through a small plastic window; holding a little joystick with a red button I was instructed to press any time I heard a beeping sound. I remember listening hard, wanting to excel at this exercise that had absolutely zero stakes. I knew my hearing was fine.

I didn’t learn until years later that my kindergarten teacher had requested I take this test. I don’t remember being asked multiple times if I understood English, or to stop speaking Spanish to the other kids in class, or any of the teacher’s other instructions I apparently didn’t follow, which had led her to think I had a hearing problem. I do know that I was used to speaking how I wanted, something that shrank away over time as my Spanish deteriorated.

I don’t see those two things as causally related, exactly, but before I watched you acquire language of your own, I’d often wonder about that version of me—someone who shared a first way of speaking with her mother. Singing the lullabies to me that she grew up with; saying pórtense bien instead of goodbye. For a long time, I’d have a visceral reaction to hearing those words. They’d open up something in me that felt like sitting in that soundproof pod, as though the window was much smaller than I’d originally thought, as though much of my childhood was and still is sitting somewhere in my brain, unremembered. Even the touchable fragments have the quality of a dream.

Children learn to identify objects as singular things, and then they learn to categorize. This is as much the process of learning to speak as it is the building of a framework for how one understands the world. It is also essential: without categorization, every unfamiliar object or situation would be experienced completely anew—a fact that sounds lovely in theory but only to those who’ve already learned about the world through categorization.

An infant learns to call those who love them by name. Maybe one of these names is Mamá. For the child, this word is for a singular person and represents a singular relationship. But the person being called Mamá is at the disadvantage of having learned that this word is a category too. It describes a role, often with prescriptions. Perhaps this knowledge sometimes gets in the way.

When you were new to running and new to wearing sandals, you tried doing both together and tripped on the sidewalk, skinning your knee for the first time. I fanned the little wound to air it out and put on your first Band-Aid. You learned to say booboo , and you didn’t cry.

I thought you’d simply learned to say a new word. But within a day, you saw booboos everywhere. The pillow with a ripped seam, the toy missing a piece, the little purple scar in the well of your tio’s throat. Booboo? Booboo? It wasn’t just a word you’d learned; it was a category, and you were seeking out examples. It seemed you could find a wound in everything, but rather than seeing this as a child learning about their environment, I took it to be an indicator of your outlook on a life you’d barely begun, an outlook not all that unlike mine. You’ve long since stopped talking about wounds, and I am grateful for it; I am still trying to unlearn the inclination.

You taught me language too. Every grammatically fuzzy turn of phrase and compound word you and your brother made up in your first years of life: asking “what you said?”; calling something untrustworthy or gross “scamey”; asking “what it doin?” as a request for more information about an unfamiliar object. You sometimes still speak this way. I never correct you. I want to remember these phrases long after the world has plucked them from your mouth. I want to save them for you, but I also want them for me.

“When children are very young, you are the director of the play of their life,” Rivka Galchen writes. “Later you have front-row seats for what is happening with them. Then maybe fourth-row seats. They get older, and you, the parents, get to watch from the front of the mezzanine. But you keep getting moved farther back. Eventually you’re so far, you’re in the seats they used to call paradise.”

I am starting to see through how language is one of the ways this movement happens—and that this description is also accurate for how one forgets a way of speaking. There’s a saying my mother used to bark out in exasperation when I’d purposely hide from her in department stores as a kid, or when my brother would chew up, then spit out, the peas in his rice: “¡Que coraje me da contigo!” It means “I’m annoyed with you,” but coraje can translate to both “irritation” and “courage” in English, so I’d sometimes purposely flip it and pretend my mother was asking for the courage to parent a wandering brat and a relentlessly picky eater.

I used to dwell on how this Spanglish way of interpreting events was once possible. I now know that this mode of speaking made a certain version of parenthood possible for my mother too. Parents create a language with their children, a way of speaking they are destined to outgrow.

I have a tidy little dialogue I’m quite used to performing when talking about fluency in public. Someone asks me about something or other in Spanish. On the bus, while travelling, at the Apple counter of a Best Buy. I don’t know why it’s Spanish specifically; I don’t think my physical appearance draws a direct line to how I speak, nor do I think there’s a specific set of characteristics that could universally suggest such a thing. Given the violent history of this language’s trajectory across the globe, how could there be?

I don’t have an accent; I haven’t stuttered. But I have the grammar of a toddler, and my speech is odd. The man has rectangular bifocals attached to a glasses chain. He takes them off and folds them up to look at me, and I already know what I need to say:

I’ve said this phrase so many times, in exactly this way, it’s become all I believe about my relationship to this language. That I say perdóname (forgive me) instead of disculpe (sorry)—that I’m more comfortable with asking forgiveness—is just another example of the problem. This person was just shopping for an iPad; asking for directions; trying to sell me bus tickets. Why should they care about my relationship to how I speak? How is my discomfort and its attendant problems something to forgive?

Once, in my early twenties, this happened at a jewellery store that doubled as a bus stop. I’d taken a trip with two friends to Playacar, a hotel neighbourhood south of Playa del Carmen, which itself is its own small town south of Cancún. The resort’s transportation into the city was free so long as you spent twenty minutes browsing a two-storey building filled with emerald-studded jaguars, opal collars, and Aztec calendars etched into gold and silver flatware. It was immediately clear to anyone working there we weren’t buying anything. The sales associate, an exceedingly kind man who looked like Alex Trebek in a three-piece pinstripe suit, didn’t try.

At a conference, years later, not too long before I watch Arrival, I hear Lee Maracle speak. She is writing a new book. She wants to know who among us have histories in places where English is not the majority language, as it has become here in Toronto. She asks how many of us don’t speak our inheritance. About half the attendees raise a hand. She says she asks this to help explain what her book is about.

In the book, a time traveller goes a great distance, and at great hardship, to arrive at a particular time and place. He meets two small animals when he arrives.

“There’s two minks in this little bush staring at him,” she says in an interview about the book a few months later, “and he says, ‘Is this Tkaronto?’ And they start laughing at him. ‘Tkaronto? That’s Mohawk, man. Nobody talks that anymore! Not even the Mohawks speak Mohawk!’ and they just kill themselves laughing at him. And he can’t figure out how they could not speak their language, so he starts panicking. ‘Okay, okay, some of them speak Mohawk. But nobody says Tkaronto, they say Toronto. Torawnna.’”

The time traveller is distressed at this loss. “Your resonators, your lips, your tongue, your whole body, your very cells are shaped for this language,” she says.

And so she asks us: How does it feel to not be able to communicate with your own body? To not be able to speak with yourself?

“What I’m hoping is that people will get that they have to know their original language,” she says in that interview. “And I think that’s why the Six Nations have a constitution that guarantees you your original language. And it’s a thousand years old. So for a thousand years, we’ve known this. That the body speaks to itself. And it speaks the original language. It won’t give it up.”

This idea calms me. It doesn’t immediately dawn on me that what I’d consider my original language embodies its own fracture with history.

My first expressions of love communicated to you in human language were “M’ijo, mi amor.” And then: “It’s you.”

Birth and memory are mischievous cousins who like to play tricks, though, so while I do remember speaking them in this order, I don’t know for sure. But I’m glad if I did. It felt good for me to speak to you in this language while I was pregnant.

I sometimes say mira because I want you to look, and you do not need me to point to know what I mean. I say vamos, and we get going. I say aiee no, in that particular, satisfying whine that is more Mexican than Spanish, when rushing toward the site of some small non-emergency.

Right now, I know you understand me either way. It’s the form—the language the words come in—that would send you into a rage from time to time when you were little. I’d read you bilingual picture books—sing songs I remembered from childhood. You hated them. “Speak normal!” you’d insist. I remember the Saturday mornings my mother dragged me out of bed for Spanish school; I resisted those too.

I can’t know what the experience of sharing a body was like for you, just as I can’t know for sure what you take from either language when I use it. But some things are givens. That I once pumped blood into your growing body. For a while, you would bump into my ribs, kidneys, and hip bones with spells of hiccups. There is a lilt to Spanish, and when you cried as an infant, that made it easier for me to tell you: “Please don’t cry, I love you—and please don’t cry because I love you.” It comes through in the elongated sounds of saying, “No llores, mi amor. No llores.”

Spanish was the first language I was shown love in, and I don’t think I began to understand this until I had another way of speaking to show me the difference.

In grade school, I was taught that the Tower of Babel was a curse story, that the confusion that follows from giving people different ways of speaking was God’s divine punishment for human ego. Then, in later years, something that debunked that earlier xenophobic idea: that linguistic diversity can mean a variety of ways of knowing are possible. We are taught that the way we speak determines the way we experience and think about the world, that words aren’t the containers for our knowledge so much as the nature of the knowledge itself. This is meant to be encouraging. The more languages, the more ways to understand one another, the better we all get along.

As a film, Arrival hinges on the Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistic relativity, a hypothesis generally accepted in principle but whose underpinning research is troubled by Western scholarship’s tendency to rely on Indigenous languages to confirm preconceived notions about the people speaking those languages. Working after his mentor Edward Sapir’s death in 1939, Benjamin Lee Whorf took a particular interest in Hopi, an Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the sovereign nation of people who live in what’s now known as northeastern Arizona. His interpretation of how time is used—or, in his view, not used—in the language led him to believe that the Hopi perceive time differently, an argument that pop culture somehow transmogrified into the idea that Hopi culture does not have a concept of time at all. An argument that has since been thoroughly disproven.

Despite being heavily informed by linguistics, it’s notable that in Chiang’s story, which Arrival is based on, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis isn’t mentioned once. But a good deal of dialogue focuses on explaining Fermat’s principle of least time, which suggests that the path a light beam takes is the fastest one regardless of the medium it moves though—air or water or gas or otherwise. This principle, theorized well before physicists better understood the properties of light, seems troublesome at first.

The idea of fastest can exist only within parameters, and such a calculation is possible only if the location of point B in relation to point A is known in advance. It suggests that a beam of light already knows where it’s going. As it relates to this story, not “known” in the anthropomorphic sense but in a goal-based one: that light travelling through air changes direction once it plunges into water is not so much caused by the water as it is a means of faster arrival. The alien beings Louise learns to speak with see the world on these terms, and she comes to see it too: once past, present, and future coexist, one acts, and feels, in terms of inevitability.

I was stunned when I read Story of Your Life, well after watching the film adaptation. At its tone, pacing, and how the protagonist’s daughter is written as a living, breathing human being, not the result of a choice. It is tempting, upon first read, to see this story as Arrival does: as Louise choosing to have a child despite a new language giving her the power to understand what will happen if she does.

Story of Your Life suggests something far quieter and more hopeful. Louise knows she will have her child, and has chosen to live as though she is putting one foot in front of the other always, despite her newfound ability to see her life in purely teleological terms. It’s how she retains her humanity. It’s how anyone might when confronted with circumstances that might otherwise give way to despair.

Louise describes life inside a language in which she can now think. “Usually, [this new language] affects just my memory: my consciousness crawls along as it did before, a glowing sliver crawling forward in time, the difference being that the ash of memory lies ahead as well as behind: there is no real combustion. But occasionally I have glimpses when [it] truly reigns, and I experience past and future all at once; my consciousness becomes a half-century-long ember burning outside time. I perceive—during those glimpses—that entire epoch as a simultaneity. It’s a period encompassing the rest of my life, and the entirety of yours.”

In inhabiting both, for Louise, the past becomes as mutable as the future; specific memories take on new significance and become as vital as her present. The language isn’t time travel, but it holds another power: it helps her make sense of her life. She is coming to terms with grief as she is living through the part that makes it worth it. She is rehearsing a story she knows she will never get to tell her daughter, even before she is born.

Anxiety, especially that of early parenthood, laced my mind to thinking solely in cause and effect. If this, then that. Over and over. But a few times since you were born, I have experienced that half-century-long ember burning outside of time, and I’ve been chasing it ever since. It gets easier. I’m on the streetcar with you, and you’re still in the stroller. I hear a woman speaking on the phone, presumably to a child. Pórtense bien. It translates to: Be good. It means instead: I’m going now. I love you.

I’m on the streetcar with you, but I’m not. I’m four years old, and my mother is putting me to bed; she makes a sign of the cross on my forehead the same way she will sometimes do for her grandchildren thirty years later. I’m sixteen and on the phone with my aunt while she paints her nails, and I feel like I’m speaking through a sieve. I’m twenty-eight, and I’m pregnant and do not yet know it. You’re two years old, and I’m reading the Spanish translation of A Color of His Own, a board book about a chameleon who just wants to remain one colour forever, and you pluck it out of my hands. You’re sixteen, and you call me for some reason or another: you’re going to be out late, I need to sign some kind of form, you forgot your keys at home. Or maybe thirty-six, as old as I am now, and you’re calling again, from some other place, some other time. What version of your life will you have dreamed up by then?

Excerpted from Story of Your Mother by Chantal Braganza. Copyright © 2025 Chantal Braganza. Published by Strange Light, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

Chantal Braganza

Chantal Braganza is a writer based in Toronto and food editor at Chatelaine.