The Boy With Two Identities

As you may have gathered by now, my son is the product of a French father and Anglo-Australian mother.

When you first meet someone from a different country, it is always very exciting and exotic, and when you start dating someone, your mother brags to her Mahjong friends that her daughter's boyfriend is from Provence. It's all very fun. After a few years you get to know the person behind the accent. You stop noticing that your friends only nod when they talk to him because they can't understand him. It's no longer funny when he uses the excuse "I'm French they expect me to be arrogant" and you learn to accept their cultural differences.

Then you decide to have a baby together. Again you get excited: The baby will have dual citizenship, he can go and live and work in Europe when he grow up - what a great gift to give. He will have his own story of his family backgrounds. He will understand - deeply - two very different and distinct cultures and appreciate both. We decided, of course, that our son will be bilingual, and my partner would only speak to him in French. His grandparents don't speak English, so it makes sense to do this. 

We gave him a name that is understood in both languages. Things aren't going as smoothly as we expected, because, obviously, life doesn't work that way! His name is Lucas but in French it's pronounced "Luca". This is confusing a lot of people. Even my parents forget to put the "s" at the end. My partner is speaking French to him only when he remembers to. I had a friend, (funnily enough my partner's ex but that's another story altogether) who grew up in Australia with a Dutch father and French mother, spoke French at home but bombed her French at school. I always though that was strange...

Is it possible to have two identities? To comfortably slip into either nationality, and to be completely fluent in both languages? Or does one outweigh the other? I've no doubt that Lucas will call himself "Australian", but I wonder what this means for his relationship with his French relatives. Perhaps I should just stop worrying about it and let him figure it out for himself. That is the brilliant thing about Australia, we live in a nation of individuals, and perhaps that is what he will be, rather than French/Australian, and I should stop worrying.

The important question: The Wallabies or Les Bleus??