As soon as I arrived in London and was pregnant with my first child for five months, I started to learn new vocabulary.

The doctor told me that if he doesn't cut it immediately, my back channel may have problems in the next few years.

Backlog is not a term we use in American English. My native language is, so I am not familiar with it. But the doctor explained that the baby was stuck behind my pubic bone, and based on the fact that the incision he wanted to make was in my perineum, I understood his meaning from the context. This is a relief, because I like to try to figure out what British English words mean to me. I don't want to admit that I don't understand.

Maybe I should back down a bit.

Four months ago, I had just arrived in London, five months pregnant with my first child, and I started to learn new vocabulary.

In order for me to move into his apartment, my new husband had to evict his roommate.

When I got off the plane and was pregnant, a roommate was still in the apartment. Tom should have left long ago. Standing in front of him, watching him put his clothes into a bulging suitcase, waiting for him to leave, I felt a little embarrassed.

Tom knows my story: how I met my husband when he was traveling in San Francisco, and I have always lived there. How do we date long distances, and then after one of our passionate visits, how do we get happy surprises, I...

While I was hesitant, my husband and I were scrambling to get married and apply for a spouse visa, but while our fetus was pregnant, the visa got lost in the bureaucratic chaos. During this time I learned another new word: MP (abbreviation, Brit. Eng.: Member of Parliament). Our immigration lawyer suggested that I should petition my husband’s MPs to lobby the British immigration authorities to approve my visa, lest it is too late and I am forced to stay in the United States and have children alone.

In the months after arriving in London, I ate a lot of chocolate ice. My pregnancy has progressed to the level where my belly bulges out of the building, with a dangerous cantilevered balcony on my hip bones.

"It looks like the baby is going to take you for a walk!" My mother-in-law said, every time she took a train from Essex to visit.

"It's like: Thanks for checking my body," I will hiss after my husband leaves, and my anger burns like acid reflux at the beginning of pregnancy.

Eating chocolate ice is a difficult problem, bite off the fragile chocolate coating without dropping it on the ground. In the hot August air, this is a race against time. This is a little comfort, perhaps sad, but honestly it helps. Maybe it's because this is a problem that I can solve. Maybe it's because my husband gave it to me. Just because everything seems so difficult, unfamiliar and unpleasant now, doesn't mean he doesn't love me.

In my country, we have an upper bed sheet, a middle blanket layer, and then a thinner upper blanket that we call the "quilt". Replaced by a series of reasonable thin layers (take off some! Put on some more! Look, comfortable sleep!), now there is a confusing, unfamiliar, suffocating duvet. My husband thinks that its thickness does not have any contradiction with the heat of my arrival season, and it is no problem for us to share something just for him. I created the term two veterinarians (n., composed of English: two duvets) to describe the solution I found for this problem.

Everything in my life suddenly became like this: my negotiation with my husband. Our habits are both stubborn and weird, but he is from his hometown. The two duvets almost allow me to do my own way, which makes me feel tired and consumes my energy outwards, while the baby consumes it inwards.

Everyone we talked to told us that we had better join an NCT group to make some friends with parents in our area.

Facts have proved that the NCT group is a form of secular fellowship based on common beliefs: we will all become good parents one day. We form a circle with our matched strangers because we all have similar due dates. These women are in the construction stage of pregnancy, rubbing their belly or putting their palms on top. Most men remained silent when the group leader spoke, telling us that we will learn about childbirth, breastfeeding and baby care. My husband couldn't help breaking almost all the silence with a nervous joke.

Soon, these strangers became familiar people, if uneven. We may not know their surnames, or what they make a living on, but we know who thinks they are “ready,” based on the equipment they buy. Which did not sleep because of a persistent metallic smell in her mouth. Which one is worried about how her chronic depression will affect her parenting ability (that's me).

On November 6, my contractions began. They rolled in my body for 10 hours, and then they became regular enough that we could call Uber (Uber drivers are not staged) and accelerate to St. Thomas at night. The red light London Eye stared through the window of the room, and in the next 26 hours, I gave birth to my son. The recovery room faced the tower shrouded in the scaffolding of Big Ben. I looked at the glowing clock face and wondered how long my son had lived. Infant: an immutable existence that precedes language, a fact that transcends language.

After the baby was born, we stayed in the recovery ward of the hospital for three days for no reason. Here, as the days pass by, they seem to forget us. No one can directly answer what we are waiting for. In the end we had a hours-long showdown. My husband spoke fast English in front of a series of more and more experienced midwives until he could fully and firmly apologize to us and leave. There. In my country, he just needs to say that we don’t want to pay for it.

We went home in a black taxi driven by a Cockney driver. He wanted to tell us about the births of his seven children.

After returning home, I started to learn another vocabulary.

The baby needs a "vai-st" and my NHS midwife almost yelled at me.

I can’t understand her accent, my husband said it’s a Yorkshire accent. She told me that if there is no "vai-st" underneath, the baby cannot wear "bai-by gr-Ow" (she uses this word to mean the long-sleeved one-piece I wear for her).

"You do have a vai-st, don't you?" she asked incredulously. She was very nervous about us-news spread to the midwife's command system, saying that we did not listen to advice and left the hospital and need to be observed.

I was forced to make a rare confession: "I don't know... what that word means." Two days after the baby came home from the hospital, I think I slept for an hour. "Sometimes, many words for clothes... and baby products... are different."

She seemed relieved, because my hesitation was an incomprehension, not necessarily due to negligence and lack of vai-sts. Maybe I have not passed this maternity test.

"A small top without sleeves and rivets at the bottom," she said. I called them snaps, not studs, but I understand now.

"Oh yes," I slowly got up, feeling every stitch between my legs that saved the passage of my back. I staggered to the baby's room, found a light blue vest, grabbed it, and staggered back to where the midwife was sitting in the living room. I raised it, and she nodded. victory. The midwife stripped baby growths from our son’s tiny limbs in order to add a vest without being affected by his tiny, harsh crying.

The NHS therapist I met for my postpartum depression often said that he needed it because he flipped through an A4 paper in a dilapidated folder, trying to find the right exercises or flowcharts to help me understand my noisy and painful thoughts.

This is cognitive behavioral therapy, not the expensive talk therapy I paid for in China. There are some things to practice in this therapy. There is homework. Our course starts with a questionnaire that I filled out, in which I will score all aspects of my anxiety and depression on a scale of 1-10. Obviously, there are many slightly different variations of the questionnaire, and few therapists are completely suitable for me. "Oh, well, it is necessary," he would say, and crossed out most of the version of the questionnaire he managed to make from his folder.

I searched for this sentence on Google, hoping to understand the rest of it. This sounds like one of the idioms like "If the shoes fit your feet," by allowing listeners to fill in the gaps in their minds, it hints at the end and gives extra weight. But I don't know the ending.

It turns out that this sentence is: "The devil must have to drive when driving." When I passed the months of postpartum depression, the idea of ​​devil driving made sense. I have been frustrated before, but this is different from anything else. Days passed day by day, hour by hour, each day passed extremely long but piled up indiscriminately, weeks like snow in a blizzard, making me freeze to death. This is the first time that depression really makes me powerless. It's like being drunk, I can't help it anymore. I hardly left home. I barely talked to anyone for 13 hours a day, not even my children. When my husband comes home from get off work, I have almost nothing to say to him. The language gradually fell silent.

I know what happened, but somehow it didn't really become clear until I woke up.

Citalopram helped wake me up. Exercise wakes me up. The sudden end of the nine-month maternity leave woke me up.

My son started going to the nursery three days a week, and two days a week to the nursery of an abandoned church near the Tower of London. At work, I wrote text for an app that delivers food from different restaurants to your doorstep. I write in British English and keep asking my British colleagues if what I write sounds like English, which makes them feel uncomfortable.

The family asked if my son would have a British accent, as if it were a problem. It seems that somehow I can simply give him my voice and protect him from the torrent of language around him. He will speak like the people around him. Just like everyone, everything changes until they move elsewhere.