Two hours later Bean emerges, smiling, and says it went very well.
“I just kept thinking of what you told me,” she said.
Which thing that I told her?
“To trust myself,” she says, as if this is obvious. And apparently, she did.
* * *
—
Though I’m winging it, I’ve realized that everyone else is, too. Parenting starts out as a concrete project. You’re full of ideas about how to shape your children. But you end up with this jellyfish of a family that you can’t control exactly. All you can do is warm the waters and nudge it in the right direction.
I’ve started following some of my own advice, and trusting myself more. Instead of assuming a “parental” persona, I try to be myself. I’ve accepted that whatever my true story is, it’s enough. The next time my kids chastise me because I’ve mistaken the gender of another French noun (“It’s le réfrigérateur, mommy”), I reframe the problem.
“Do you know why I came to France?” I ask. “I thought it would be interesting to live in another country. I wanted to travel and have an adventure. And guess what? Even right now, I’m having it.”
Bean, truly French in her ability to explicate, clarifies her feelings for me.
“I’m embarrassed of you sometimes, but I’m not ashamed of you. I never don’t want you to be my mommy.”
And when I ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, she says, as if it’s obvious: “Maybe a lawyer, but maybe a writer, like you.”
You know you’re in your forties when . . .
Your reaction to seeing a newborn baby has gone from “I want another one” to “I can’t believe people are still doing this” to “Ah, the cycle of life.”
In the course of a year or two, you have morphed from ripe young mother to middle-aged mom.
When looking at pictures of a high school friend on Facebook, you think she’s her teenage daughter.
You swear in front of your children, but they’re not allowed to swear in front of you.
You still use birth control, even though it’s probably unnecessary.
23
how to be afraid
IT IS A PERFECTLY NORMAL DINNER PARTY until someone stands up, checks his phone and says: I think there’s been an explosion at the Stade de France.
Simon is not at the dinner because he’s at the Stade de France as a journalist, watching the France-Germany match. Everyone runs to their phones. I say something I’ve never said at a Parisian dinner party before, and that I even hesitate to say now: “Could we turn on the TV?”
Soon people are staring at their phones and calling out the names of familiar cafés where there have apparently been shootings. All of these places are between the dinner party and my apartment. I passed by one of them an hour or so ago, on my way to dinner. We hear that there are hostages at the Bataclan concert hall. When I walked by it earlier today, to take my older son to the eye doctor, there was a huge white tour bus out front. It’s six minutes’ walk from my house, where my children are at home with a babysitter.
No one on French TV—or any TV channel we turn to—knows what’s happening. But our city appears to be under siege. The dinner-party guests are scanning Twitter and calling out estimates of the number of dead. There are apparently dozens of people being held hostage inside the Bataclan. What about inside the stadium?
To my surprise, I reach Simon on his phone. He says the explosions were outside the Stade de France. He’s inside the stadium’s press box, tweeting and being interviewed on Dutch radio. He’s a scared Parisian, but he’s also a journalist who has found himself at the center of the biggest story in the world. Soon all of us will hear him on television, explaining that even after the explosions (there were several), the match played on, and the fans cheered French goals and did “the wave.”
He has spoken to our babysitter, who says the kids fell asleep before the attacks began, and they haven’t woken up. Since the Bataclan is under siege and there are shooters on the loose, I’ve decided to stay put. Simon will wait and see. He says: “The key goal for our family is that we all survive tonight. The kids will almost certainly be safe in the flat. Let’s not take risks.”
No one knows what’s happening outside the stadium, or what will happen next around Paris. The host of the dinner, an Italian, says the same band of people must be doing the shootings at different cafés. Where are they now?
A friend in New York who did security training sees on Twitter that Simon is inside the stadium. He texts me instructions about what Simon should do in case he comes under fire: “Stay as flat to ground as possible. If he has to move, crawl low.” This doesn’t apply in all situations; will it apply now? I email these instructions to Simon. He usually thinks I’m excessively cautious. Will he think so this time? (He later tells me that he didn’t get the message.)
A couple from the dinner party is trying to reach their teenage children. I call my babysitter. I text my brother. I reply to a kind message from a man I know only from Twitter. Two other dinner-party guests get text messages from their exes, wanting to know if they’re okay.
“This is worse than Charlie Hebdo,” I say to the room of people. That was the attack ten months earlier at a newspaper near our house—and then at a kosher supermarket—in which seventeen people were murdered. No one replies. Apparently the scale of tonight’s attacks was already obvious to everyone.
A map comes on the BBC showing the sites of two of the shootings. It’s basically a map of my neighborhood. It’s not just Paris that’s in the news—it’s my small part of it, a former working-class district that’s been overrun by “bourgeois bohemians” like me.
French people are tweeting #portesouvertes, to help those stranded on the streets. This sounds generous but risky: Who would open their doors right now? Police are warning everyone not to go outside.
My hosts makes up some extra beds for the night. The couple from the dinner party tries to figure out whether they can drive home. Their kids are fine, but now they’re home alone. Simon is still inside the stadium.
The French president, who was at the France-Germany match, says France’s borders have been closed. I learn the French word for curfew: couvre-feu. On the news they’re reporting that dozens of people may have been murdered inside the Bataclan. The numbers are hard to fathom.
Simon was safe inside the stadium, but now he and some friends are heading home, back into central Paris. My kids are still asleep. Their babysitter isn’t. All I keep thinking is: What will I tell them when they wake up?
* * *
—
In the end, I don’t have to tell my children about the attacks. Their babysitter does. Having spent the night on our couch, she’s sitting in our living room when they wake up. Simon is home, too; he arrived in a taxi at 2:00 a.m. I come home when they’re having breakfast. I’ve barely slept. (I will hereafter add eyeshades and sleeping pills to the list of items I carry everywhere.) We decide to let the kids watch cartoons indefinitely. Paris is calm, but we’re afraid to go outside.
I slowly learn that people I know had been much closer to the shootings than I was. My friend Carmela was eating dinner at home with her daughters when they heard gunshots outside. Her eight-year-old, primed from the Charlie Hebdo shootings, asked immediately, “Mommy, is it an attack?”
“No, I’m sure it’s not, it can’t be,” Carmela replied. Then she looked outside her window and saw bodies on the ground at Le Carillon, the café on their corner.
Simon is coping with his fear the only way he knows how: by writing about it. I track his feelings by reading about them. “I am pessimistic,” he writes in one article I find online. “I fear that fear and danger might become the new normal here. I do not know how to tell my children this.”
French newspapers begin running articles on how to discuss the attac
ks with children. Their advice is to be honest. This springs straight from Françoise Dolto, the psychoanalyst who was the French equivalent of Dr. Spock. Dolto believed that parents should tell children the truth in simple terms and help them to process it, even in tough times. Kids don’t need to be constantly happy, she said, but they do need to comprehend what’s happening. As with adults, seeing the world clearly is critical to their well-being.
There’s a lot of reality to take in right now. Children all seem to have the same question that we adults do: Will there be another attack?
The special kids’ edition of one French newspaper tries to answer that: “What happened is very sad and very difficult, attacks are still very rare. But for now, we cannot say there won’t be more.”
Children “don’t live on planet Mars,” the editor of another children’s newspaper tells me. “They live in the same world we do.”
Bean wants to feel that this isn’t an unprecedented horror, and that children routinely deal with such events. She asks whether it’s “normal” to have two terrorist attacks in your neighborhood in less than a year. How many attacks were there near my house when I was growing up?
I know I’m supposed to tell her the truth, but I hesitate to say it: there were none. It’s happening now, to all of us, for the first time.
24
how to know where you’re from
VERY SOON AFTER those men attack my neighborhood, I develop a fervent interest in my own genealogy. I’ve always been curious about my origins, but I haven’t spent much time researching them. I’ve been busy working and raising kids.
Now, suddenly, I’m obsessed. I’m soon spending much of each workday and most of every weekend trying to map out my family tree.
I’m not sure why I’m doing this. Perhaps it’s because soldiers are patrolling Paris, and I’m afraid to send my kids to school. Forget being called “madame”; I’m now worried that my café will be ambushed. My mother has been texting, urging me to move back home. The past seems relatively safe by comparison.
The attacks were also a reminder that if I’m ever going to learn my family’s history, I need to get on it. All my grandparents are gone, and my mother’s generation is falling into disrepair. As far as I can tell, none of my relatives have much interest in our ancestry, or in any bad news that might be buried there. If I don’t uncover our history, it could be lost forever.
I’ve made some gains toward feeling like an adult. I can now spot narcissists before they ruin my life. But without much concrete information about my own past, I still feel like I’m that astronaut dangling in space. Spending hours on genealogy websites is a way of putting some solid ground under my feet. And as I’ve learned, understanding your own origins is an element of wisdom. It helps you situate yourself within a broader context, and shows the material that you were made from.
That material has always seemed a little strange to me. I do look like my relatives. But they mostly married locals, became merchants or small businessmen and stayed in the same American cities—or in some cases the same neighborhoods—where they grew up. I studied languages, married a foreigner and moved to France.
Is my wanderlust a genetic fluke, or does something in my ancestry explain it? Have our untold stories left traces on the present, and on me?
I have some leads, including several pages of notes I took years earlier while interviewing my grandparents. And a few years before my grandmother died, after I’d pressed her about whether anyone from our family had stayed behind in Russia, she emerged from her walk-in closet holding three sepia photographs with Russian writing on the back. She said these were pictures of some of those relatives. I put the pictures into a folder and brought them with me to France.
* * *
—
I quickly discover that the place in Russia that my great-grandparents were from—which my grandmother knew as “Minski Giberniya”—was a place called Minsk Gubernia. This wasn’t a town, it was an administrative region covering the city of Minsk along with several hundred surrounding towns and villages.
It also becomes clear why my family is obsessed with clothes. It’s in my bloodline. A chart I find online, called “Occupations of Minsk Gubernia Jewish Population,” explains that more people worked in “garment production” than in any other job. Once I plot it out, I realize that three of my great-grandfathers were tailors.
My mother suggests that I contact her cousin Barry, a handsome retiree in his seventies who was, until recently, a men’s tailor himself. He now lives in a condominium in coastal Florida. He and my mother aren’t close, but she says he knows a lot about the family.
When I call Barry, he’s friendly but cautious. He says he’s been compiling a family tree himself, and that I should just email him whatever information I have. I get the feeling that we’re reporters competing for the same scoop. He doesn’t send me his tree. And perhaps to get me off the scent, he spends a lot of time telling me about his father, a kind man—and also a tailor—who wasn’t my blood relative.
When I finally get a copy of Barry’s tree (my mother finds one in a drawer), it’s unclear why he was so secretive about it. It’s a handwritten one-page chart that mostly contains the birthdays and anniversaries of Barry’s children and grandchildren. I’m not on the tree, and neither, conspicuously, is the family of Barry’s sister. The “family tree” is basically a chart of who Barry likes.
As I call more and more relatives, bits of bad news begin to surface. Don, a retired mental-health administrator whom I’ve only met a few times, says he’s surprised that a family member is contacting him at all.
“None of my first cousins are interested in keeping relations,” he says sadly. “The family has kind of fallen apart.”
Don is the first person who confirms that, as a clan, we’re oddly uninterested in our own history.
“It’s a family that’s largely written off the past,” he says. “There’s almost like a denial of history. They didn’t know and they didn’t want to talk about it.”
As I speak to more relatives, I’m struck by how some peoples’ whole lives are remembered in a sentence or two: one great-great uncle “danced with all the ladies at the bar mitzvahs.” His wife “served shrimp cocktails in glass jars.”
These people are the lucky ones; at least we’re still talking about them. “Almost everyone in history is forgotten,” says my husband, who’s been observing my research with bemusement. It’s chastening to see that there are death certificates for all my ancestors. This drives home the fact that, eventually, everyone dies. There are no exceptions.
Much about our history has evaporated, but traces remain. My cousin Donna mentions that, back in Minsk Gubernia, one of my great-grandmother Rose’s sisters was kidnapped by a Russian Cossack and never heard from again. Donna assumes that I knew this story already, but who would have told it to me?
“It was during the period of the czars,” she says. “There was a soldier riding on a horse. My mother told me. And my grandmother told her the sister was very beautiful.” Another cousin, Jane, confirms that she’d heard the same story.
Did my sweet South Carolinian grandmother know that one of her aunts was kidnapped? My mother says she never mentioned it. But from the list of siblings my grandmother once dictated to me, I can deduce which of her aunts was taken: Esther. My grandmother was named after her.
* * *
—
I break through Barry’s defenses by sending him copies of the sepia photographs and of an old family tree written by my grandmother, going back five generations. Finally convinced that I’m not a rival, Barry is soon calling me regularly to discuss our latest findings.
During one call, he reveals he has the silver candlesticks that Rose brought with her from Russia. He even sends me a picture. They’re polished and sitting on his dining room table in Florida.
I call my mother to report on t
hese developments, but she isn’t interested in the family stories.
“Get the candlesticks!” she says. (She’s convinced that Barry’s children won’t want them.)
I’m obsessed with the relatives who appear in those sepia photographs with Russian writing on the back. My grandmother claimed that she had merely “lost touch” with them. Who were these people, and what happened to them? I’m probably the only person on earth who cares, and I suddenly feel that it’s up to me to keep them alive.
“You’re finally interested in history,” says Simon, who has a history degree.
“Yes, but it’s the history of me,” I say.
I make an online family tree and urge my relatives to add whatever details they know. When I cross-reference the tree with a late-nineteenth-century Russian census, I’m pretty sure I identify our village in greater Minsk. It’s called Krasnoluki. It has probably been at least fifty years since anyone in our family uttered this word.
I’m thrilled, and email this tantalizing finding to all my cousins. No one replies.
It’s similar when I suggest that we meet in real life. None of them are keen to spend any time with me. Indeed, after hours of calls with various relatives, I realize that almost no one has asked me a single question about myself—not how old my kids are, what I do for a living or why I’m calling them from France. If they’ve heard about my work, they don’t mention it.
Thinking maybe they’re shy, at the end of one call I ask a cousin if she has any questions. Is there anything she’d like to know about me or my life?
There Are No Grown-ups Page 18
