I also realize that they want me to speak for an hour straight and then take questions. I’ve never given such a long, uninterrupted talk. (At the U.S. university it was mostly a discussion.) My stump speech on the topic only lasts twenty minutes.
“The public is expecting a lot,” the organizer—a Brazilian mother herself—writes. I press her for details on what, specifically, she’d like me to talk about. I have trouble imagining what might interest Brazilian moms. And I’ve given lots of speeches at this point, so I’m tired of repeating myself. I feel a mounting sense of dread.
“It would be very interesting if you can talk a bit about the mother/woman perspective,” she writes back.
That’s all she says. I find an online speech calculator, and learn that if I speak at an average pace, I’ll need to say five thousand words. So I paste together five thousand words from various talks I’ve given and organize them.
Then I board a plane to Brazil. The fact that I’ll soon be in front of a thousand mothers feels ominous and unreal. During the overnight flight, I have an anxiety dream in which someone discovers a sex tape of me. When I wake up, I’m in Belo Horizonte.
In the airport’s arrivals area, I meet another of the speakers. She’s an American grandmother who has written parenting books, too.
“Did they ask you to speak for an hour?” I ask her, as we’re wheeling our suitcases to the taxi.
“I know, it’s nuts,” she replies. I’m relieved that she also struggled with the assignment.
At the hotel, I meet the organizers in person. They’re a group of Brazilian veterinarians who have gone into the conference business. This is their first. One of the women is tall and glamorous, with long black Charlie’s Angels hair.
“Are you a veterinarian, too?” I ask.
“I’m a pig specialist—swine,” she replies.
I want to go upstairs and work on my speech, but instead, I’m escorted into a press conference filled with journalists and Brazilian “mommy bloggers.” One of the bloggers, a blond woman in a furry vest, is telling the group that today is the first time she’s ever been away from her baby. Her comment unleashes a wave of emotion. Soon everyone in the room—except me—is in tears.
Later I sit behind a table and greet some of the mothers attending the conference. They’re mostly middle-class dentists, marketing consultants and stay-at-home moms. Each wears a name tag with a picture of her young child on it. Some of the pregnant women wear a picture of their fetal sonograms. I’m struck by how young they all look. When my book came out just a few years earlier, I looked like one of them. Somehow, I’ve now morphed into their elder.
Practically every woman hugs me. I’m hugged more during three days in Brazil than during twelve years in Paris. Many also want a photograph of us together, with our heads touching. If there’s an outbreak of French lice in central Brazil, I’ll be patient zero.
These mothers seem to have a hard time managing their kids. I learn that there are many words for “tantrum” in Portuguese: manha is whining and complaining; a chilique is a full-scale meltdown. I’m reminded that mimada means spoiled, that a babá is a nanny and that a folguista is the nanny who comes on your regular nanny’s day off.
I try to edit my speech more, but I barely have time. The next morning, I head downstairs to deliver it. One of the organizers—a cattle specialist—tells me that an earlier speaker described how her husband died two months before she gave birth. “The talk was incredible,” she said. “We were all in tears.”
I walk into the double-wide ballroom where the grandmother is giving her talk onstage. A thousand Brazilian mothers wearing headphones are listening, rapt, to the simultaneous translation.
Clearly, it’s going well. The mothers are buzzing with interest and chuckling on cue as the grandmother answers questions. She is sincere and sensible—and clearly relishing her role as a teacher and expert. She walks off the stage to warm applause.
A minute later, the editor of a Brazilian parenting magazine introduces me. I am suddenly facing a sea of Brazilian mothers. There’s no podium, so I have to hold my seventeen-page speech, the slide changer and the microphone, and take my glasses on and off, depending on whether I’m looking at the speech or at the audience.
For the first five minutes, I’m fine. I introduce myself in Portuguese, and tell a story about arriving in Paris and feeling like an alien. I can feel that they’re ready to go on a ride with me.
But then it all slows down. By the time I reach page six of the speech, the room is so still, I can practically hear the translation coming through the wireless headsets. It doesn’t help that each time I turn a page, I turn my back to the audience and put down the microphone on a chair behind me. I’m severely testing everyone’s goodwill. By page eight, I fear that some of the mothers might just leave.
As I’m speaking, I’m aware that in the movie version of my talk, this is the moment when I would stop reading, tear up the papers and speak from the heart about my struggles as a mother. But to do that, I’d need to be surging with adrenaline and inspiration. In fact, I’m just as bored as the audience.
I trudge on, as a polite, resigned silence settles over the room. When I finally finish, I answer some questions, then walk offstage to very mild applause.
There was no mass exodus from the conference hall. My speech was low energy and mediocre but not a disaster. As the French say, I saved the furniture. (This means that the house caught fire and burned down, but I managed to at least drag some furniture into the yard.) I feel terrible.
“Nice talk,” says the grandmother, who’s been watching. I assume she’s feeling triumphant.
I compliment her on her talk. She smiles, and admits that she spent weeks preparing it.
That night, there’s a dinner for the speakers. When a woman at the table describes the challenges of raising a son with Down syndrome, the whole table—again, except me—is in tears.
“What’s with you Brazilians? Do you need to cry every few hours?” I ask, trying to lighten the mood. Everyone looks at me like I’m a monster.
Just then, I finally understand—too late—what all those Brazilian mothers wanted from me, both during my talk and at this dinner. They weren’t just looking for parenting tips. They wanted to take part in a shared emotional experience. They were ready to be brought to tears. Crying is the mark of a successful gathering in Brazil and a sign that you’ve connected. (“The communal emotive experience is very Brazilian,” the Brazilian American writer Juliana Barbassa explains to me a few weeks later.) The veterinarians took for granted that I knew this, and didn’t think to explain it.
When our main course arrives, the magazine editor who’d introduced me that morning—a charismatic woman in her fifties—brings up my speech. “I felt that you were sometimes not happy with what you were saying,” she says delicately.
“Yes, I felt I had something much more interesting to say,” I reply. I admit that I’m tired of repeating the same facts about French parenting.
She puts down her fork. She’s angry now.
“Never do this again,” she says. “Forget what the audience expects. Just give the best speech you can, and trust that they’ll come with you.
“They just want to see who you are,” she continues, practically shouting now. “It’s all about having a moment of connection.” She scolds me for becoming bored with my own material. “Respect the work. Keep changing it. Grow with it. That’s maturity!
“Also,” she adds, “next time don’t read.”
By the time she stops talking, I’m in tears. I’m touched that, though I’m in my forties, she’s willing to look past my mediocre speech and see my potential. I’m also moved that she cares enough to say this to me, even though it’s too late for me to fix my speech and she may never see me again. No Parisian has ever held me to account like this, unless it’s to scold me for failing to say �
��bonjour.” I’ve chosen to live in a place where people keep their distance.
I’m crying, too, because I suddenly see my missed opportunity. Standing up in front of a thousand people—even thousands of miles from home—is a chance to create something and to forge a connection. Instead of respecting the audience and trusting that they would come with me, no matter our differences, I treated my talk like a sad obligation and squandered it. I wish I could redo it.
It’s energizing when something goes well. Even a small success creates goodwill and opportunity. (Afterward, the grandmother is invited back to Brazil repeatedly. I am not.) But when something goes badly, the opposite happens. For months after my speech in Belo Horizonte, thinking about it saps my confidence.
The morning I leave Brazil, the editor comes to my hotel lobby to say goodbye. I feel bonded to her after our emotional experience at dinner, and she promises we’ll stay in touch. But I never hear from her again. We had our moment. I saved the furniture. And now it’s gone.
You know you’re in your forties when . . .
You’re living through the second renovation of public spaces and friends’ kitchens.
You accept that you love midcentury Scandinavian furniture, even though it’s a generational cliché.
You wonder whether you still qualify for a “midcareer” fellowship.
You’re now the “older lady” in the improv class.
You have Googled everyone who was ever of any importance in your life. You sometimes forget this and Google them again.
18
how to figure out what’s happening
AFTER MY DAUGHTER WAS BORN, I joined an English-speaking “baby group” of women with similarly aged infants. We met once a week at one of our homes. I quickly decided that I had little in common with most of the other mothers. I attended the group for the company and the potty-training tips, but I didn’t make an effort to be popular. I kept accidentally calling one woman by her baby’s name (both started with “B”). When another woman said she planned to vote for a far-right candidate in the American presidential race, I said something to the effect of “Are you nuts?” The woman looked stricken and insulted. The following week, I got a message saying that the baby group was canceled, then I heard that the mothers had met in a local park without me.
I really didn’t mind. I figured that, in a big city, there are always lots of new people to meet. What I failed to consider was that as you get older and more settled, the same people pop up in your life, just as they do in work settings. This is especially true when you have kids the same age. Plus the Anglophone world in Paris is tiny. I run into the baby-group mothers for years, at the Halloween party, the Anglo quiz night and the English-speaking soccer league. Each time, I’m aware that they hate me.
When my daughter starts junior high, I discover that the woman whose voting plans I’d insulted sends her kids to the same school. Not only that, she’s a pillar of my new community. I spot her at the parents’ night, when she gets a round of applause for planning the Christmas party.
I’ve made some strides since being shunned by the baby group. As a fortysomething, my emotional regulation has improved. I get into fewer sticky situations, and I’m now capable of thinking something without blurting it out.
I also don’t like the thought of being at close range with someone who despises me, so I resolve to clear the air between us. When the parents’ meeting breaks up and everyone heads into a classroom for drinks, I work up the nerve to approach the baby group mom.
“Hi,” I say with cautious friendliness.
She looks at me with confusion.
“It’s me, Pamela,” I say, still waiting for her quizzical look to morph into dislike.
“We were in the baby group together?” I offer. She stares at me for another beat, then there’s a small flicker of recognition.
“Wait, were you friends with Kara?” she asks finally. There’s no emotion attached to this statement, just a polite straining to connect with the near-stranger in front of her.
I was indeed friendly with Kara. And this is apparently the sum total of what she remembers about me. She doesn’t loathe me; she barely knows who I am.
* * *
—
I’ve advanced as a human being in the past few years, but I’m still lacking in one key component of wisdom: understanding what other people are experiencing. I long to better grasp social dynamics, and to be able to detect people’s motivations and emotional states.
In my defense, this isn’t easy. For Buddhists, learning to perceive the world clearly is the main task of life. It’s why we’re here. And they say it’s critical to succeed at this. You can experience brief pleasure without understanding what’s happening around you. But for sustained happiness and well-being, you must observe your own life and surroundings with great clarity.
Becoming less clueless certainly seems critical to my happiness. And it seems critical to being a grown-up, too. Real grown-ups seem to understand what’s happening around them. They can detect social dynamics and grasp people’s motivations and feelings.
People my age are supposed to have improved at this. On average, forty- and fifty-year-olds score highest of all age groups in a test called “Reading the Mind in the Eyes,” in which subjects look at a series of photographs of people’s eyes, and select which emotion each person is feeling. This ability remains stable, at a high level, between ages forty and sixty.
This is a crucial twenty-first-century skill, as everything from taxis to taxes becomes automated. The ability to read other people and understand their emotional needs is one task that humans can still do better than computers. In a few years, “people reading” jobs might be among the only ones left.
But how exactly does one do this well? What is the secret to seeing clearly? I’ve improved, but I still miss a lot of what’s happening. Can I hone this skill, and if so, how?
* * *
—
I realize I have an in-house expert on exactly this topic. My husband is so good at reading people. I sometimes suspect that he has psychic powers. When we leave a meal or a conversation, my first question for him is always “What just happened?” At a party once, we met a woman—a former journalist—who seemed to suddenly grow cold while we were speaking to her. I assumed I’d said something to upset her.
Simon had a different take. He said that, while speaking to two journalists, she was suddenly embarrassed that she’d left the field. The chill had settled just as she described her new job in public relations, he noted.
Simon is no longer willing to act as my full-time interpreter of other people. But he has entered a teach-me-how-to-fish phase, in which he’ll discuss his own techniques.
I’ve observed one of these already: he listens very hard to what people are saying. Sometimes he listens so hard, they think he’s scowling at them. Friends have approached me, privately, to ask, “Does your husband hate me?” (Usually, he doesn’t.)
Simon explains that he’s listening—and watching—for certain clues. The first is, when does the person lose interest? He notes when someone looks away because she’s bored. (To his irritation, he catches me doing this often.) He also notices when she changes the subject. “When people say, ‘That’s interesting,’ it’s a classic line to kill off a topic,” he adds.
Simon also listens for what the speaker does care about. What topic does she keep bringing up? Which phrases does she repeat? He says people often have a recurring message that amounts to a kind of personal motto. They’re trying to get you to believe something about them, and this underlies much of what they say. Their message might be “I have a relaxed parenting style!” “I earn in the low six figures,” “I’m authentic and don’t try to project an image,” or “I have loads of friends.”
“They’re not lying,” says Simon, “but most people have some story a
bout themselves that they’ve assembled, and that they sort of believe. And you have to understand what their story is and not buy it.”
I usually buy into people’s mottoes without realizing that I’m falling for interpersonal propaganda. I leave conversations thinking, “What a relaxed parent, and with so many friends.” I’m still easily dazzled by how people look, or distracted by concerns about what they think of me.
Perhaps because I’d grown up without analyzing anyone, it rarely occurred to me to examine people while they’re speaking and try to detect patterns in how they behave. I’m too swept up in the experience to notice much about it.
Once I start doing this, I realize that I’ve been ignoring lots of crucial information. Just as a man will tell you what he wants on the first date, people are constantly shedding data about themselves. If you simply pay close attention, you can scoop it up.
To be able to do this, you must stop obsessing about yourself. That clears the channel of excess static so you can receive the information. Simon isn’t a clairvoyant. He just doesn’t fret constantly about what other people think of him. That frees up his brain to understand their motives, qualities and goals. (“If you don’t act weird and you ask questions, people will like you,” he assures me.)
Fortunately, in midlife it gets easier to turn down the static in your brain. On average, we’re at least moderately less neurotic than younger people, psychological studies show. That means we don’t project our own anxieties onto others quite as much, and we’re less cluttered with worry about what they think of us.
I gradually start to decode people a bit, instead of taking them at face value. When I meet a pretty mother from my son’s school, I no longer think, in a pointless loop, “She’s so pretty, she’s so pretty, she’s prettier than me.” Instead, I study her while she’s talking and think, “She’s pretty, and yet she seems shy, and she’s possibly a bit dim.”
There Are No Grown-ups Page 14
