Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  By the time Otto turned six, a form of Franglais had seeped into the house, where sentences like “Why do the good guys dans les films always beat the wrongs?” would be the norm. Gucci was pronounced Gookie and Calvin Klein Calveen Klayne. In the end, though, our blurred language wasn’t Otto’s or Bibi’s fault. It was mine. I’d spoken to them too often in French, which is odd considering I don’t speak that well.

  It wasn’t until we were on vacation in the United States, when the kids were forced to sink or swim, that I could reassure myself both spoke English fairly fluently. But this only turned the knife more. “Why won’t they speak English to me?” I’d snivel to Anaïs, sensing there’d always be a sort of distance between me and my children. Anaïs didn’t want to hear my complaining. Only five days had passed since we landed in the United States, and already she’d had her fill of American kids.

  * * *

  Americans love to say they admire the French system, until they meet Anaïs, and realize it’s much more hardcore than they thought. Anaïs is the walking embodiment of “not to be fucked with.” She has no problem telling kids to disappear while the adults are having an apéro, and any form of whining is met with a “Stop trying to make yourself interesting.” Once a friend of Otto’s proudly proclaimed to Anaïs, “I don’t do the dishes at my house,” at which point she handed him a stack of dirty plates and said, “Well, here’s to new beginnings.”

  When we visit the United States, our friends’ children, you can tell, aren’t sure what to make of this woman with her cigarette and glass of wine. They’re not used to someone with an accent and a husky voice, telling them, “If you can’t arrive at a choice for a movie in the next five minutes, then there will be no movie. Un point c’est tout!” (she says the last part in French to make it sound more intimidating). Anaïs has made a name for herself even inside France, to the point where my friend Fred christened her the “méchante dame” (the mean lady). The title couldn’t be further from the truth. Anaïs is as loving and nurturing as they come, but for her, children crave limits, and there’s nothing more borderline cruel and abusive than giving children the run of the place. Ironically, this makes my job easier, especially when it’s my turn to restore order during a dinner. All I have to do is lean into the room and whisper to the kids, “Do you want me to call the méchante dame?”

  It wasn’t until Anaïs began working on plays and operas abroad and outside Paris that I realized how much of the load she carried. With her gone, I was the constant chaotic mess of the neighborhood, walking the dog to pick up groceries and paper for the printer before dropping by the school to let them know Otto had a dentist appointment for . . . “Wait, it was yesterday. Merde!” Ironically, the ones who sympathized the most weren’t fellow dads, but other mothers, which showed how macho France still is despite all its crèche-ness and working moms.

  “Honestly, I admire you, John,” they’d say as they grimaced at their husbands, who glared at me as if I were some teacher’s pet. These women didn’t know the real story: that without Anaïs, we lived off Picard (the frozen gourmet supermarket) for months and that I’d sometimes go to bed before the kids, reassured that “at least they ate well at school.” Each day at drop-off, I’d eye the menu Margaret posted on the front door, amazed by the variety and balance. Filet of sole with taboule and peaches for dessert. Saucisses de Morteau and lentils with a side of puree (if you wanted it). The school puts such a premium on food, the head chef has an apartment across the street so he can arrive early and start making everything from scratch first thing in the morning. There were times when I was parenting solo that I considered asking Otto and Bibi to smuggle out some of their lunch in Tupperware to eat that night.

  * * *

  For collége, we decided Bibi and Otto would have a bilingual education. The majority of schools that offer this are private, but there are a handful of public schools, we found, that have a section internationale whose classes are composed largely of Anglophone kids. There’s an excruciating entrance test, and it’s a fairly rigorous schedule and course load, which includes eight hours of English literature, history, and geography on top of the normal French curriculum. But the setup does exist, and it is free. And the idea of each kid reading Catcher in the Rye in English at a French public school was too good to pass up.

  Any new school, however, also means leaving the familiar confines of our neighborhood schools, and with them, the life-long friends they’ve made. It was also a two- or three-change subway ride from our neighborhood, which means the kids routinely left the house at 7:15 to be at class by 8:00. And since the school doesn’t provide lockers, both kids lug giant backpacks to and from on a crowded subway looking like sherpas. Instead of the famous carnet de correspondance, everything is electronic now, including texts from the school starting with the unusual J’ai l’honneur de vous informer (I have the honor of informing you) and ending anticlimactically with something like that Bibi was late this morning. I can tell this suits many of the parents, who send out emails on a nightly basis asking not just about what homework is planned, but who knows the answer to question five on the second page.

  I’m the opposite of these parents. I’m so impressed that Otto can write a four-page essay on Clovis, what do I care if his grammar’s a bit off? I, for one, didn’t catch it. But starting in collège, every grade in France matters, I’m told, and it’s true that the lovey-dovey we’re all in it together approach I witnessed in elémentaire and maternelle is scrapped for a passionless culling of the herd. Collège is where the French public system shows its schizophrenia.

  The same schools that give dyslexic students extra time on the baccalauréat tests or hire an additional assistant when a handicapped child needs help walking to class can also show a cold indifference to those students who skip classes or fail out. I’m sure this is the case with many U.S. public schools as well, but in France I assumed a no enfant left behind policy really existed.

  Students surprise us, too. On one hand, they seem to lack school pride; there is no cheering for your home team, no interschool rivalries, no prom, and yet each year, students will organize protests called blocus, where they’ll block the entrances and effectively shut down the school as a way to bring attention to their demands for smaller class size, better conditions, and, go figure, better school supplies. Any time Bibi comes home early saying school was canceled because of a blocus I’m annoyed, while at the same time impressed.

  These very students are at the forefront of a debate that’s consuming France right now. Unlike the U.S. system, France’s educational system makes up 16 percent of the total federal budget, fifteen billion euros more than the military. It’s the largest expenditure other than debt financing, and yet many in France feel it’s not enough; that class size and school conditions and teacher pay can all improve, not to mention that the days should be shorter. As an American who’s watched public education wither and die since the Carter administration, I want to tell these people, “Be happy with what you have.” But that’s the thing. They have what they have because they’re not happy and because they’re willing to speak up and block entrances and go on strike and defend their privilege to have this right.

  When I visit my old private school and see the sumptuous renovated football fields and flashy new wings alumni like me have contributed to, I compare that to the school Bibi and Otto have attended since crèche and think “Was all this floor-to-ceiling glass necessary?” And perhaps it is the case. Perhaps there’s enough money for scholarships and teacher pay to go around. But whereas my reflex once was to turn my nose up at anything free, I now judge anything private and high-end with skepticism, probably because my idea of quality has changed somewhat.

  Our pediatrician’s waiting room doubles as his living room at night. And that’s fine. I’m not looking for the meticulous and gadgeted. I’m looking for a good doctor. Same goes for school. Sure, I want Bibi and Otto to come home once and not co
mplain that there’s still no toilet paper in the bathrooms. But that same school took Otto’s entire class to Brittany last month for a classe de mer (sea class), where students slept in bunks and studied tides and learned to sail catamarans for a week, free of charge. And they couldn’t be blasé on the trip because they were joined by others who’d never even been to the ocean before.

  Another of the critiques (with which I agree, to a point) is that the school system is grueling, and that France is slowly becoming a European version of Japan. Too much weight is given to grades and your child’s score on the Bac, a one-shot test kids prepare four years to take. The grading system can be so difficult, American and U.K. universities have been briefed to make an adjustment for French students applying. For example, a 14 out of 20 here is considered an A in the United States. Countless French parents have told me that when their children hit university, they have trouble adjusting to the informality of discussion groups with professors. Since it’s been drilled into them to take copious notes and not to speak out of turn, the result often is reticent kids who know tons but who are afraid to jump into the fray. And this isn’t just for engineering or history majors, but for drama students as well. One French actor told me years ago he needed to take improvisational classes just to get him to the place where “American actors are naturally.” According to a recent study by two professors at the Grenoble École du Management (cited in the monthly Les Echos), French pessimism, which is often 10 percent higher than the world average, finds its roots in the educational system. Teachers, the study says, tend to lace commentary and grades with judgment, “making students feel guilty for not knowing.” The result is students going to school with “a fear of failure rather than a desire to learn.”

  It’s true that when Otto and Bibi come back each year from their U.S. summer camps, I can tell they’ve had a culture shock. Not just from the “kiss, marry, or kill” games they learned or the Gronk jerseys they suddenly want, but from all the positivity they apparently absorbed. Each admits it took weeks to trust that their fellow campers and counselors weren’t bullshitting them. And for about a month following their return, some of it sticks. “Great job, Dad!” I’ll hear when I take out the dog, or, “Dad, I’m glad we had this talk,” Bibi will say in a syrupy voice when I turn off the light for bed. By the time French school starts again, the cheeriness is usually out of their systems, and thank God for that.

  * * *

  I’m sure I’m not the first American father living in France who’s wrestled with the very questions I’m posing now: Will our kids be the stifled French kids the system often churns out, the well-behaved and emotionally put-together ones who often turn out to be like the boring French parents filling my list serve with questions about homework? Or will they be the overexuberant, full-of-themselves, self-empowered, privileged child-star American kids whom I see everywhere in the States, their parents scurrying behind them, too afraid to say no?

  Perhaps Otto and Bibi will be a hodgepodge of both: one whose mom has to play the role of the méchante dame on occasion only because their dad signed something he probably should have read in the carnet de correspondance. One whose son is never late to anything anymore because of the bench of shame, or whose daughter shines with pride because she just burned a Dumpster in front of the school in the name of République.

  * * *

  Now that Bibi and Otto are old enough, they take the subway to school, sometimes leaving before I even wake up. My job is no longer to carry them to class or return to the crèche with the blanket we forgot or to make sure they have that zippered banana-shaped pouch that holds all their French pens and pencils. I walk the dog instead. And it’s during these walks that I see the younger parents of our neighborhood reliving my mediocre life, running frantically at 8:29 dragging their crying kid in one hand and a folded collage in the other, hoping to avoid the bench of shame at all costs. I spot their peers on the American Church corkboard looking for starter apartments the way Anaïs and I once did, and at Ikea, of course, in the child bedroom section staring at the same bunk beds, those hideous blue plastic bags slung over their shoulders filled with half-moon-shaped clocks. Each of these sightings reminds me of a not so long ago time, when the CDs sitting on my shelf marked Bibi and Otto birth could actually run on my computer or when the VHS tapes of Dora the Explorer could help us sneak in thirty minutes of sleep. All of these are relics now, part of my personal archeological dig.

  In France, each child has a carnet de santé, the vinyl-covered captain’s log of all their medical issues since birth, the doctor’s visits, the vaccinations, and the markings showing a gradual increase in height and weight. I stared at Bibi’s carnet the other day while we sat in a doctor’s office, thumbing through the pages, starting with her birth and moving toward the middle, where all the bronchitis scares and broken arms lay, and I hazily recalled her now-retired pediatrician, Dr. Massenon, in his apartment/office.

  When I looked up from the carnet there was a French adolescent across from me now, one who this time needed an X-ray of a sprained ankle. And there in the waiting room, amidst tons of future parents holding ultrasounds and looking on nervously, much as I did years ago, Bibi turned to me, smiling, and spoke loudly in perfectly native French (just so everyone could understand): “Papa, I promise. Next time I’ll use protection.”

  While those around us looked up from their phones to stare at us, and while I turned red, I realized how this moment summed up my French parenthood perfectly. For all the refinement and sophistication and urbanity or whatever else I assumed parenting in Paris might throw off, there’s also been an equal amount of humiliation and bewilderment, not to mention scraping and hustling and countless nights of biberon giving, while James Earl Jones’s You’re Watching CNN booms in the background.

  Bringing up babies in France isn’t chic, probably because its socialist system won’t let it be. For good or for bad, my kids are who they are thanks to it. The clay is dry. The sculpture’s set. The cracks in the base will be for some shrink to sort out. And it’s in looking at these two masterpieces that I realize parenting in France has never been the slick shiny car I built it up to be, just a slow and durable junker, one I could never bear to part with.

  Six Weeks of Not So Great Time Off

  One of the selling points Anaïs pitched me after shooting me in the neck with a dart gun and bundling me off to France to live the rest of my days was that we’d have a lot of vacation time.

  Why she was talking about vacation when Bibi was on the way, I do not know. She probably should have been pushing the free health care and day care we’d be getting, which far outweighed for me the lure of time off, something I assumed I’d be giving up anyway by becoming a father. The fact neither of us worked real jobs then apparently had no bearing. To her, the long French breaks simply meant we’d no longer have to feel guilty about not working, our whole country would be doing the same at least six weeks a year.

  To me, a newly arrived immigrant without a job offer in hand, a vacation felt unearned. I was in the throes of grocery shopping my life—tossing marriage, child, and moving to a foreign country into the same basket all at the same time, simply because that was the only way I could have made life-altering decisions like these: on the fly, not really knowing what I’m doing because half of it’s in French anyway. In January 2002, we’d found an apartment. By April we’d had our wedding, and in late June, Bibi arrived. Perfect timing, one of the French nurses remarked, to go on vacation in August.

  That the French went on vacation a lot wasn’t news to me. Street sweepers and taxi drivers, plumbers and waiters—every class took the mandated time off. What I didn’t know was how seriously the French took planning their vacations, that it wasn’t just a brain-dead national ritual, but a year-long project, one that required diligence, a bit of research, and tenacity, not to mention a willingness to squirrel money away to pay for it all, often forgoing frivolous pleasures like
eating.

  * * *

  I learned the hard way my first few years in France that vacation wasn’t to be trifled with, and if I’d listened to the fellow parents more at Bibi’s school, I would have known the game sooner. Before école maternelle, Bibi had been in public day care (la crèche) a block away, with many of the same kids who were in her class now. Over the course of that time, I’d built up a rapport with these parents, a rapport similar to what I imagine fellow inmates share: Although you don’t have much in common, you occupy the same prison yard (the pediatrician, the pharmacist, the boulangerie, the fish guy, cheese guy, all within a three-hundred-yard radius of each other), which ends up meaning you will have a lot in common. Thus, I knew Nathalie well enough to know I probably wouldn’t ever invite her over for a dinner, but that I could shit on other parents with her and complain to her if necessary. I also saw her much more often than my real friends.

  “Vous partez où?” (Where are you off to?), Nathalie asked me as we stood outside of school waiting for our kids to come out.

  I responded straight-faced to her question with “The Monoprix,” assuming she was asking me where I was going to now, as in at that moment, the Monoprix being the local supermarket.

  Her nervous laugh indicated a tinge of worry on her end, because any parent in France who doesn’t have a vacation planned when school’s about to recess is not only neglectful, but also possibly abusive.

  “No, I meant vacances, silly. You’re not going to leave them at the Centre de Loisirs, are you?”

  The Centre de Loisirs is the after-school program every French public school offers kids who don’t go away for vacation, which is a great idea in theory, especially for parents like me who don’t have grandparents called Mamie or Papi at their beck and call, as so many of our French friends do. I’m sure it’s not that bad, but our kids have painted it in an Oliver Twist light, a place where you’re handed pieces of bread and kept in a dark room and forced to play broken games of Connect Four.