French Children Don't Throw Food

by Druckerman, Pamela

  I soon notice that French and English kids’ books aren’t just in different languages. Often, they have very different storylines and moral messages. In the English books there’s usually a problem, a struggle to fix the problem, and then a cheerful resolution. The spoon wishes that she was a fork or a knife, but eventually realizes how great it is to be a spoon. The boy who wouldn’t let the other kids play in his box is then excluded from the box himself, and realizes that all the kids should play in the box together. Lessons are learned, and life gets better.

  It’s not just the books. I notice how deliriously hopeful I sound when I sing to Bean about how ‘If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands’ and when we’re watching a DVD of the musical Annie, about how the sun will come out tomorrow. In the English-speaking world, every problem seems to have a solution, and prosperity is just around the corner.

  The French books I read to Bean start out with a similar structure. There’s a problem, and the characters struggle to overcome that problem. But they seldom succeed for very long. Often the book ends with the protagonist having the same problem again. There is rarely a moment of personal transformation, when everyone learns and grows.

  One of Bean’s favourite French books is about two pretty little girls who are cousins and best friends. Éliette (the redhead) is always bossing around Alice (the brunette). One day, Alice decides she can’t take it any more, and stops playing with Éliette. There’s a long, lonely stand-off. Finally Éliette comes to Alice’s house, begging her pardon and promising to change. Alice accepts the apology. A page later, the girls are playing doctor and Éliette is trying to jab Alice with a syringe. Nothing has changed; and that’s the end.

  Not all French kids’ books end this way, but a lot of them do. The message is that endings don’t have to be tidy to be happy. In Bean’s French stories, life is ambiguous and complicated. There aren’t bad guys and good guys. Each of us has a bit of both. Éliette is bossy, but she’s also lots of fun. Alice is the victim, but she also seems to ask for it, and she goes back for more.

  We’re to presume that Éliette and Alice keep up their little dysfunctional cycle, because, well, that’s what a friendship between two girls is like. I wish I had known that when I was four, instead of finally figuring it out in my thirties. Writer Debra Ollivier points out that Anglophone girls pick the petals off daisies saying, ‘He loves me, he loves me not.’ Whereas little French girls allow for more subtle varieties of affection, saying: ‘He loves me a little, a lot, passionately, madly, not at all.’1

  In the French kids books, a person can have contradictory qualities. In one of Bean’s Perfect Princess books, Zoé opens a present and declares that she doesn’t like it. But on the next page, Zoé is a ‘perfect princess’ who jumps up and says merci to the gift-giver.

  If there were an English version of this book, Zoé would probably overcome her bad impulses and morph fully into the ‘perfect princess’. The French book is more like real life: Zoé continues to struggle with both sides of her personality. The book tries to encourage princess-like habits (there’s a little certificate at the end for good behaviour). But it takes for granted that kids also have a built-in impulse to do bêtises.

  There is also a lot more nudity and love in French books for four-year-olds. We have a book about a boy who accidentally goes to school naked. We have another about the school heartthrob who pees in his pants, then admires the little girl who lends him her trousers, while fashioning her bandana into a skirt. These books – and the French parents I know – treat the crushes and romances of preschoolers as meaningful and genuine.

  I get to know a few people who grew up in France with Anglophone parents. When I ask whether they feel French or British, they almost all say that it depends on the context. They feel British when they’re in France, and French when they’re in Britain.

  Bean seems headed for something similar. I’m able to transmit some American traits, like whining and sleeping badly, with little effort. But others require a lot of work. I begin ditching certain American holidays, based mainly on the amount of cooking each one requires. Thanksgiving is out. Halloween is a keeper. American Independence Day, 4 July, is close enough to Bastille Day – 14 July – that I sort of feel like we’re celebrating both. I leave the transmission of British holidays and bad habits to Simon.

  Making Bean feel ‘Anglo-American’ is hard enough. On top of that, I’d also like her to feel Jewish. Though I put her on the no-pork list at school, this apparently isn’t enough to cement her religious identity. She keeps trying to get a grip on what this strange, anti-Santa label means, and how she can get out of it.

  ‘I don’t want to be Jewish, I want to be British,’ she announces in early December.

  I’m reluctant to mention God. I fear that telling her there’s an omnipotent being everywhere – including, presumably, in her room – would terrify her (she’s already afraid of witches and wolves). Instead, in the spring, I prepare an elegant Passover dinner. Halfway through the first benediction, Bean begs to leave the table. Simon sits at the far end with a sullen ‘I told you so’ look. We slurp our matzah-ball soup, then turn on some Dutch football.

  The following Hanukah is a big success. The fact that Bean is six months older probably helps. So do the candles and the presents. What really wins Bean over is that we sing and dance the hora in our living room, then collapse in a dizzy circle.

  But after eight nights of this, and eight carefully selected gifts, she’s still sceptical.

  ‘Hanukah is over, we’re not Jewish any more,’ she tells me. She wants to know whether ‘Father Christmas’ – a.k.a. the ‘Père Noël’ she’s been hearing about in school – will be coming to our house. On Christmas Eve, Simon insists on setting out shoes with presents in front of our fireplace. He claims he’s loosely following the Dutch cultural tradition, not the religious one. (The Dutch put out shoes on December fifth.) Bean is ecstatic when she wakes up and sees the shoes, even though the only thing in them is a cheap yo-yo and some plastic scissors.

  ‘Père Noël doesn’t usually visit the Jewish children, but he came to our house this year!’ she chirps. After that, when I pick her up at school, our conversations usually go something like this:

  Me: ‘What did you do at school today?’

  Bean: ‘I ate pork.’

  As long as we’re foreign, it’s not a bad idea to be native English speakers. English is of course the language du jour in France. Most Parisians under forty can now speak it at least passably. Bean’s teacher asks me and a Canadian dad to come in one morning to read some English-language books out loud, to the kids in Bean’s class. Several of Bean’s friends take English lessons. Their parents coo about how lucky Bean is to be bilingual.

  But there’s a downside to having foreign parents. Simon always reminds me that, as a child in Holland, he cringed when his parents spoke Dutch in public. At the year-end concert at Bean’s maternelle, parents are invited to join in for a few songs. Most of the other parents know the words. I mumble along, hoping that Bean doesn’t notice.

  It’s clear that Simon and I will have to compromise between the Anglo-American identity we’d like to give Bean, and the French one she is quickly absorbing. I get used to her calling Cinderella ‘Cendrillon’ and Snow White ‘Blanche Neige’. I laugh when she tells me that a boy in her class likes ‘speederman’ – complete with a guttural ‘r’ – instead of Spiderman. But I draw the line when she claims that the seven dwarves sing ‘Hey-ho, hey-ho,’ instead of the Anglo-American ‘Heigh-ho, heigh-ho.’ Some things are sacred.

  Luckily, it turns out that bits of Anglophone culture are irresistibly catchy. As I’m walking Bean to school one morning, through the glorious medieval streets of our neighbourhood, she suddenly starts singing, ‘The sun’ll come out, tomorrow.’ We sing it together all the way to school. My hopeful little American girl is still in there.

  I finally decide to ask some French adults about this mysterious word, caca boudin. The
y’re tickled that I’m taking caca boudin so seriously. It turns out that it is a swear word, but one that’s just for little kids. They pick it up from each other, around the time that they start learning to use the toilet.

  Saying caca boudin is a little bit of a bêtise. But parents understand that that’s the joy of it. It’s a way for kids to thumb their noses at the world, and to transgress. The adults I speak to recognize that since children have so many rules and limits, they also need some freedom to disobey. Caca boudin gives kids power and autonomy. Bean’s former caregiver Anne-Marie smiles when I ask her about caca boudin. ‘It’s part of the environment,’ she explains. ‘We said it when we were little too.’

  That doesn’t mean that children can say caca boudin whenever they want. The parenting guide Votre Enfant suggests telling kids they can only say bad words when they’re in the bathroom. Some parents tell me they forbid such words at the dinner table. They don’t ban caca boudin entirely, they trust their kids to wield it appropriately.

  When Bean and I visit a French family in Brittany, she and their little girl, Léonie, stick out their tongues at the little girl’s grandmother. The grandmother immediately sits them down for a talk about when it’s appropriate to do such things.

  ‘When you’re alone in your room you can. When you’re alone in the bathroom you can … You can go barefoot, stick out your tongue, point at someone, say caca boudin. You can do all that when you’re by yourself. But when you’re at school, non. When you’re at the table, non. When you’re with Mummy and Daddy, non. In the street, non. C’est la vie. You must understand the difference.’

  Once Simon and I learn more about caca boudin, we decide to lift our moratorium on it. We tell Bean that she can say it, but not too much. We like the philosophy behind it, and even occasionally say it ourselves. A mild swear word just for kids: how quaint! How French!

  In the end, I think the social complexities of caca boudin are too subtle for us to master. When the father of one of Bean’s schoolfriends comes to fetch his daughter from our house one Sunday afternoon, after a play date, he hears Bean shouting caca boudin as she runs down the hall. The father, a banker, looks at me warily. I’m sure he mentions the incident to his wife. His daughter hasn’t been back to our house since.

  10

  Double Entendre

  SO I FINISHED my book. And for about fifteen glorious minutes before breakfast one morning, I’m within 100 grams of my target weight. I’m all ready to be pregnant.

  And yet, I’m not.

  Everyone around me is. There seems to be a last gasp of fertility among my friends who are, like me, in their late thirties. Getting pregnant with Bean was a bit like having a pizza delivered. You want one? Phone up and get one! It worked on the first try.

  But this time, there’s no pizza. As the months go by, I feel the age gap between Bean and her theoretical, possibly counterfactual sibling widening. I don’t feel like I have many months to spare. I’d envisioned having three kids. If I don’t have the second baby soon, the third will become physically impossible.

  My doctor tells me that my cycle has become attenuated. She says the egg shouldn’t be sitting on the shelf so long before it breaks through to reach a possible mate. She prescribes Clomid, which makes me release more eggs, upping the odds that one will stay fit enough. Meanwhile, more friends call me with their wonderful news: they’re pregnant! I’m happy for them. Really, I am.

  After about eight months, I get the name of an acupuncturist who specializes in fertility. She has long black hair and an office in a low-end Parisian business district. (Most cities have one Chinatown. Paris has five or six.) The acupuncturist studies my tongue, sticks some needles in my arms, and asks about the length of my cycle.

  ‘That’s too long,’ she says, explaining that the egg is withering on the shelf. She writes me a prescription for a liquid potion that tastes like tree bark. I drink it dutifully. I don’t get pregnant.

  Simon says he’d be happy with just one kid. To be polite, I consider this possibility for about four seconds. Something primal is driving me. It doesn’t feel Darwinian. It feels like a carbohydrate high. I want more pizza. I go back to my doctor and tell her I’m ready to up the ante. What else has she got?

  She doesn’t think we need to go all the way to in-vitro fertilization. (The national insurance pays for up to six rounds of IVF, for women under age forty-three.) Instead, she teaches me to inject myself in the thigh with a drug that will force me to ovulate earlier, so the egg won’t have time to wither. For this to work, I have to take the shot on day fourteen of my cycle. And in a primitive twist, just after taking the shot, I must have sex.

  It turns out that at the next fourteen-day point, Simon will be in Amsterdam for work. For me, there’s no question of waiting another month. I book a babysitter for Bean and arrange to meet Simon in Brussels, about halfway between Amsterdam and Paris. We plan to have a leisurely dinner, and then retire to our hotel room. At the very least, it’ll be a nice escape. He’ll return to Amsterdam the next morning.

  On day fourteen, there’s a massive storm and a freak rail-service breakdown in western Holland. Just as I arrive at Brussels station around 6 pm, Simon calls to say that his train has been halted in Rotterdam. It’s unclear which trains – if any – will leave from there. He might not get to Brussels tonight. He’ll call me back. As if on cue, it starts to rain.

  I’ve carried the injection in a portable cooler, with a cold pack that only lasts a few hours. What if I get caught in a hot train? I dash into a convenience store at the station, buy a bag of frozen peas and shove them inside the cooler.

  Simon calls back to say there’s a train leaving Rotterdam for Antwerp. Can I meet him in Antwerp? On the giant overhead screen I see that there’s a train leaving Brussels for Antwerp in a few minutes. In a scene where The Bourne Identity meets Sex and the City, I grab my pea-wrapped syringe and bolt up to the platform.

  I’m in the rain, about to board the train to Antwerp, when Simon calls again. ‘Don’t get on!’ he shouts. He’s on a train bound for Brussels.

  I take a taxi to our hotel, which is cosy and warm, and decked out for Christmas with a giant tree. I should be grateful just to be there, but the first room the porter takes me to doesn’t quite have the conception vibe I’m looking for. He leads me to another room on the top floor, with a slanted ceiling. It seems like a better place to procreate.

  While I wait for Simon to arrive I take a bath, put on a robe, then calmly jab myself with the syringe. I realize I wouldn’t make a bad junkie. I hope, however, that I’ll make an even better mother of two.

  A few weeks later, I’m in London for work. I buy a pregnancy test at a pharmacy. Then I order a bagel at a deli, for the sole purpose of using the deli’s dingy basement bathroom to take the test (OK, I also ate the bagel). To my amazement, the test is positive. I call Simon while I’m pulling my suitcase to a meeting. He immediately starts choosing nicknames. Since the baby was conceived in Brussels, maybe we’ll call him Sprout?

  Simon comes with me to the ultrasound. I lie back on the table watching the screen. The baby looks wonderful: heartbeat, head, legs. Then I notice a dark spot off to the side.

  ‘What’s that?’ I ask the doctor. She moves the wand over a bit. Suddenly another little body pops on to the screen, with its own heartbeat, head and legs.

  ‘Twins,’ she says.

  This is one of the best moments of my life. I feel like I’ve been given an enormous gift: two pizzas. It also seems like a very efficient way for a woman in her late thirties to breed.

  When I turn to look at Simon, I realize that the best moment of my life may be the worst moment of his. He appears to be in shock. For once, I don’t want to know what he’s thinking. I’m giddy from the idea of twins. He’s blown over by the enormity of it.

  ‘I’ll never be able to go to a café again,’ he says. Already he foresees the end of his free time.

  ‘You could get one of those home espresso make
rs,’ the doctor suggests.

  My French friends and neighbours congratulate us on the news. They treat the reason I’m having twins as none of their business. The Anglophones I know are generally less discreet.

  ‘Were you surprised?’ a mother in my playgroup asks, when I announce the news. When I offer an unrevealing ‘yes’ she tries again: ‘Well, was your doctor surprised?’

  I’m too busy to be bothered. Simon and I have decided that what we really need isn’t a better coffee maker, it’s a larger apartment (our current one has just two small bedrooms). This seems even more urgent when we discover that the two babies are two little boys.

  I trek out to see several dozen apartments, all of which are either too dark, too expensive, or have long, scary hallways leading to tiny kitchens (apparently in the nineteenth century it wasn’t chic to smell food while the servants were cooking it). The estate agents are always boasting that the place I’m about to see is ‘very calm’. This seems to be a prized quality in both apartments and children.

  All the focus on real estate keeps me from worrying too much about the pregnancy. I think I’ve also absorbed the French idea that there’s no need to track the formation of each fetal eyebrow (though there are quite a few eyebrows to worry about in there). I do briefly indulge in some twin-specific angst, like about the babies being born prematurely. But mostly the health system does the worrying for me. Because it’s twins, I get extra doctor’s visits and ultrasound scans. At each visit, the handsome radiologist points out ‘Baby A’ and ‘Baby B’ on the screen, then makes the same bad joke: you’re not obliged to keep those names. I flash him my best micro-smile.

  This time around, it’s Simon who’s anxious – about himself, not the babies. He treats each cheese plate as if it’s his last. I revel in all the attention. Despite the free IVF, twins are still a novelty in Paris (I’m told that doctors often implant just one embryo). Within two months I’m visibly pregnant. By six months, it looks like I’m about to deliver. Even some maternity clothes are too tight. Soon it’s clear even to young children that there’s more than one baby in there.