Alexandra adds: ‘It was good practice for the father to give a bottle at night. And I could sleep, and drink wine in restaurants. It wasn’t so bad for maman.’
Pierre Bitoun, a French paediatrician and long-time proponent of breastfeeding in France, says many French women think they don’t have enough milk. Dr Bitoun says the real problem is that French maternity hospitals often don’t encourage mothers to feed their newborns every few hours. That’s critical at the beginning to stimulate mothers to produce enough milk. If they don’t nurse very frequently, a recourse to formula starts to seem inevitable. ‘By day three the kid has lost 200 grams, and they say, “Oh you don’t have enough milk, let’s give him some formula, the kid is starving.” That’s what happens. It’s crazy.’
Dr Bitoun speaks often at French hospitals, to explain the science and the benefits of breastfeeding. ‘The culture is stronger than the science,’ he says. ‘Three-quarters of the people I work with in hospitals don’t believe that breast milk is healthier than formula. They think there’s no difference. They think artificial milk is fine, or at least that’s what they say to mothers.’
In fact, even though French children consume enormous amounts of formula, they beat American kids on nearly all measures of health. France ranks about six points above the developed-country average in Unicef’s overall health-and-safety ranking, which includes infant mortality, immunization rates until age two, and deaths from accidents and injury up to age nineteen. The United States ranks about eighteen points below the average, the UK ranks about two points below.
French parents see no reason to believe that artificial milk is terrible, or to treat breastfeeding as a holy rite. They assume that breast milk is far more critical for a baby born to a poor mother in sub-Saharan Africa than it is for one born to middle-class Parisians. ‘We look around and see that all the babies who drink formula are fine,’ says Christine, the journalist, who has two young kids. ‘We all drank formula too.’
I’m not so calm about it. In fact, I’m so panicked by my conversation with the breastfeeding consultant that, when I’m in the maternity hospital after Bean is born, I insist that she stays in the room with me round the clock. I wake up each time she whimpers, and barely get any rest.
This suffering and self-sacrifice just seems like the natural order to me. But after a few days, I realize I’m probably the only mother in the maternity ward who’s subjecting herself to this torture. The others, even the ones who are breastfeeding, hand their babies over to the nursery down the hall at night. They feel entitled to a few hours’ sleep.
I’m finally shattered enough to give this a try too, even though it feels enormously indulgent. I’m immediately won over by the system. And Bean doesn’t seem any the worse for it. Contrary to the rumours, the nurses and puéricultrices who work in the nursery are more than happy to wheel her to my room whenever she needs a feed, then take her away again.
France is probably never going to be ground-zero for breastfeeding. But it does have the Protection Maternelle et Infantile, the same agency that oversees the crèche. This government health service has offices all over Paris that give free check-ups and injections to all children until age six, even those who are in France illegally. Middle-class parents rarely use the PMI, because the government insurance plan covers much of the cost of their visits to private paediatricians. (The French government is the main insurer, but most French doctors are in private practice.)
I’m reluctant to use a public clinic. Will it be impersonal? Will it be clean? One crucial fact convinces me: it will be completely free. Our local PMI office is a ten-minute walk from our house. It turns out that we can see the same doctor each time we go. There’s a giant indoor playground in the immaculate waiting area. The PMI will send a puéricultrice to your house, to check on you and your baby when you get back from the hospital. If you get le baby blues, they’ve got an in-house shrink. All of this is free. It’s worth weighing that against an ounce of breast milk.
I’m not taking any chances about breastfeeding. The American Academy of Paediatrics says I should nurse for twelve months, so I do, practically to the day. I give Bean a final, valedictory feed on her first birthday. Sometimes I enjoy nursing. But often I find it irritating to interrupt whatever I’m doing to rush back home for feeds or – increasingly – for a date with my electric breast pump. Mostly I forge on because of everything I’ve read about the health benefits, and because I want to stick it to that lady in my playgroup.
All the peer pressure among Anglophones to breastfeed does serve a public-health purpose: it gets breast milk into our babies’ mouths. But it also makes us a little crazy. French women can see that steamroller of anxiety and guilt coming from a few kilometres away, and they’re at least trying to resist it.
Dr Bitoun says that in his years of campaigning for breastfeeding, he’s found that French mothers generally aren’t won over by the health arguments, involving IQ points and secretory IgA, which boosts immunity. What does persuade them to nurse, he says, is the claim that both they and the baby will enjoy it, because of the physical closeness, the emotional connection, or the physical sensation. ‘It’s the pleasure of breastfeeding and the nice comfort that comes from breastfeeding, that’s what convinces mothers,’ Dr Bitoun says. ‘We know that the pleasure argument is the best – the mother’s pleasure and the baby’s pleasure.’
Many French mothers would surely like to breastfeed longer than they do. But they don’t want to do it under moral duress; and they don’t flaunt it to each other. Powdered milk may be worse for babies, but it no doubt makes the early months of motherhood a lot more relaxing for French mums.
French mothers may be relaxed about not breastfeeding, but they aren’t relaxed about getting back in shape after they give birth. I’m shocked when I find out that the skinny waitress at the café where I go to write most days has a six-year-old. I had taken her for a 23-year-old hipster.
When I tell her about the expression ‘MILF’ (‘Mother I’d Like to Fuck’) she thinks it’s hilarious. There’s no French-language equivalent. In France, there’s no a priori reason why a woman wouldn’t be sexy just because she happens to have children. It’s not uncommon to hear a French man say that being a mother gives a woman an appealing air of plénitude – happiness and fullness of spirit (not of body).
Of course some British and American mums quickly shed their baby weight too. But it’s easy to find role models urging women in the other direction. I happen upon a depressing ‘New Mum Makeover’ fashion spread in one English-language magazine. It shows three embarrassed, still slightly chubby women smiling uncomfortably in loose-fitting dresses. They’ve strategically positioned their toddlers in front of their hips. The text is unapologetic: ‘Giving birth changes your body, and becoming a mum changes your life,’ it says, before singing the praises of drawstring trousers.
For some Anglophone mums, there’s something morally righteous about committing to motherhood at the expense of their bodies. It’s like giving yourself over to a higher cause. ‘Why is it that when so many women become mothers they turn into boring frumps with one-track conversational minds that rarely stray from the oh-so-fascinating subjects of nurseries, nappies and (lactating) nipples,’ a columnist writes in the Daily Mail.3
Among Anglophones, there can actually be peer pressure to stay frumpy. A mother in Cambridge says that when she told the women in her mums’ group that she was on a diet, they got angry. If she lost her baby weight, the rest of them would look fat.
A sports-marketing consultant from Connecticut, who has a six-month-old, tells me that when a French woman showed up at her local playgroup, the woman immediately asked the group, in what I imagine to be a charming Gallic accent, ‘OK, zo how eez everyone losing ze weight?’ According to the consultant, she and the other American mothers fell silent. This wasn’t something they usually discussed. It seemed selfish to take time away from their babies to tend to their fat, or even to talk too much about it.
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br /> You won’t silence any rooms in Paris by asking how new mothers lose their baby weight. Just as there’s enormous social pressure for women not to gain too much weight while they’re pregnant, there’s similar pressure to shed the weight soon after they give birth.
The sister of that sports-marketing consultant is an American named Nancy who lives in Paris, and has a son with her French boyfriend. The two sisters, who even look alike, are a kind of social experiment. Just by virtue of where they live and who their partners are, they’re facing opposite social pressures. Nancy tells me that a few months after she gave birth, her French boyfriend began needling her to stop wearing tracksuit bottoms and shed her spare tyre. As an incentive, he offered to take her shopping for new clothes.
Nancy says she was both surprised and offended. Like her sister in Connecticut, she had imagined herself to be in a protected ‘mum zone’ where she got a pass on her appearance for a while so she could devote herself to looking after the baby. But Nancy’s boyfriend was working from a different script. He still viewed her fully as a woman, and felt entitled to the aesthetic benefits that go with that. He was equally surprised and bothered that she was willing to just give that up.
In France, three months seems to be the magic number: French women of all ages keep telling me they ‘got back their ligne’ – their figure – by three months post-partum. Audrey, a French journalist, tells me over coffee that she got her figure back right away after both of her pregnancies – one of which was with twins. ‘Of course. It was natural,’ she says. ‘You too, no?’ (I was already sitting down when she arrived at the café.)
As a foreigner who’s not married to a Frenchman, I’ve excused myself from the three-month rule. I’m not sure I even heard about it until Bean was six months old. My body has charmingly decided to store its extra bulk around my belly and hips, giving the impression that I might be holding on to at least the placenta.
I’d surely be skinnier if I had French in-laws to needle me. It seems that just as obesity spreads through social networks, so does thinness. If everyone around you assumes that they’re going to drop the extra pounds, you’re more likely to actually do it. (It’s also easier to lose weight if you haven’t gained too much.)
To lose their baby weight, French women seem to do a slightly more intensified version of what they do the rest of the time.
‘I pay a lot of attention,’ is how my friend Virginie, a svelte mother of three, explains it to me over lunch one day, as I gorge on a giant bowl of Cambodian noodle soup. Virginie says she never goes on a diet, known in French as a régime. She just pays a lot of attention, some of the time.
‘What do you mean?’ I ask Virginie between slurps.
‘No bread,’ she says, firmly.
‘No bread?’ I repeat, incredulous.
‘No bread,’ Virginie says, with steely, calm conviction.
Virginie doesn’t mean ‘no bread’ ever. She means ‘no bread’ during the week, from Monday to Friday. On the weekends, and on the occasional night out during the week, she says she eats whatever she wants.
‘You mean whatever you want in moderation, right?’ I ask.
‘No, I eat whatever I want,’ she says, with that conviction again.
This is similar to what Mireille Guiliano prescribes in French Women Don’t Get Fat. (Guiliano suggests taking just one day off, and even then not overdoing it too much.) But it’s inspiring to see someone who’s actually implementing this, evidently with great success. I also like the neutral, pragmatic formulation ‘paying attention’ rather than the guilt-laden English ‘being good’ (and its opposites: ‘cheating’ and ‘being bad’).
Virginie says this way of eating is an open secret among women in Paris. ‘Everyone you see who is thin’ – she draws an imaginary line down her small frame – ‘pays very close attention’. When Virginie feels like she’s put on a few pounds, she pays closer attention still. (My friend Christine, the French journalist, later sums up this system very succinctly: ‘Women in Paris don’t eat very much.’)
Over lunch, Virginie looks me up and down, and evidently decides that I have not been paying attention.
‘You drink café crème, don’t you?’ she asks. ‘Café crème’ is a cup of steaming milk poured on to a shot of espresso, without the foam that would make it a cappuccino.
‘Yes, but I use fat-free milk,’ I say, weakly. I do this when I’m at home. Virginie says that even fat-free milk is hard to digest. She drinks café allongé – lengthened coffee – which is espresso diluted with boiling water. (Filtered coffee or tea is fine too.) I scribble down Virginie’s suggestions – Drink more water! Climb the stairs! Go for walks! – like I’m receiving revelation.
I’m not obese. Like my friend Nancy, I’m just sort of motherly. There’s no risk of Bean getting jabbed by a hipbone when I bounce her on my lap. I have skinny aspirations, though. I’ve promised myself that I won’t think of getting pregnant again until I finish my book and reach my target number of kilos. (After years in France, I still don’t know whether to wear a sweater when I hear the temperature in Celsius, or how tall someone is when they give their height in centimetres. But I immediately know whether my weight in kilos means I’ll fit into my jeans or not.)
Of course, the secret of French mothers isn’t simply being thin. Not all of them are, anyway. And I meet Brits and Australians who fit back in their pre-pregnancy jeans by the three-month mark too. But I can still spot them from a distance in the park, just by their body language. Like me they’re hunched over their kids, setting out toys on the grass while scanning the ground for choking hazards. They’re transparently given over to the service of their children.
What’s also different about French mums is that they get back their pre-baby identities too. For starters, they are more physically separate from their children. I’ve never seen a French mother climb a jungle gym, go down a slide with her child, or sit on a see-saw – all regular sights back in the US, and among Anglos visiting France. For the most part, except when toddlers are just learning to walk, French parents park themselves on the perimeter of the playground or the sandbox and chat with each other (though not with me).
In Anglophone homes, every room in the house is liable to be overrun with toys. In one home I visit in London, the parents have taken all the books off the shelves in their living room, and replaced them with stacks of kids’ toys and games.
Some French parents store toys in their living room. But plenty don’t. The children in these families have loads of toys and games, but these playthings don’t engulf the common spaces. At a minimum, the toys are put away at night. Parents see this as a healthy separation, and a chance to clear their minds when the kids go to bed. Samia, my neighbour who during the day is the doting mother of a two-year-old, tells me that when her daughter goes to bed, ‘I don’t want to see any toys … Her universe is in her room.’
It’s not just the physical space that’s different in France. I’m also struck by the nearly universal assumption that even good mothers aren’t at the constant service of their children, and that there’s no reason to feel badly about that.4
English-language parenting books typically tack on reminders for mothers to have lives of their own. But I frequently hear Anglophone stay-at-home mothers say they never use babysitters, since they consider all childcare to be their job.
In Paris, even mothers who don’t work take it for granted that they’ll enrol their toddlers in part-time childcare, even for just a few hours a week, in order to have some time alone. They grant themselves guilt-free windows to go to yoga class and get their highlights retouched. As a result, even the most harried stay-at-home mums don’t show up at the park looking frazzled and dishevelled, as if they’re part of a separate tribe.
French women don’t just permit themselves physical time off; they allow themselves to mentally detach from their kids. In Hollywood films, you know instantly if a female character has children. That’s often what the film is about. B
ut in the French romantic dramas and comedies I occasionally sneak out to watch, the fact that the protagonist has kids is often irrelevant to the plot. In one typical French film, Les Regrets, a small-town schoolteacher rekindles a love affair with her former boyfriend, who comes back to town when his mother is taken ill. During the film, we’re vaguely aware that the schoolteacher has a daughter. But the little girl only appears briefly. Mostly, the movie is a love story, complete with steamy scenes in bed. The protagonist isn’t supposed to be a bad mother; it’s just that being a mother isn’t part of the story.
In France, the dominant social message is that while being a parent is very important, it shouldn’t subsume one’s other roles. Women I know in Paris express this by saying that mothers shouldn’t become ‘enslaved’ to their children. When Bean is born, one of the main television channels runs a talk show most mornings called Les Maternelles, in which experts and parents dissect all aspects of parenting. Right afterwards there’s another programme, We’re Not Just Parents, which covers work, sex, hobbies and relationships.
Of course some French women lose themselves in motherhood, just as some American mothers manage not to. But the ideals in each place are very different. I’m struck by a fashion spread in a French mothers’ magazine,5 featuring the French actress Géraldine Pailhas. Pailhas, thirty-nine, is a real-life mother of two. In one photograph she’s smoking a cigarette, pushing a buggy and gazing into the distance. In another she’s wearing a blonde wig and reading a biography of Yves Saint Laurent. In a third, she’s wearing a black evening gown and impossibly high feathered stilettos, while pushing an old-fashioned pram.
The text describes Pailhas as an ideal of French motherhood: ‘She is fundamentally the simplest expression of female liberty: happy in her role as mother, avid and curious about new experiences, perfect in crisis situations and always attentive to her children, but not chained to the concept of perfect mother, who, she assures us, “does not exist”.’
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