The fact that the French state provides and subsidizes child-care certainly makes life easier for French mothers. But when I get back to France, I’m struck by how French mothers make their own lives a lot easier too. The French equivalent of a ‘play date’ is that I drop off Bean at her friend’s house, then I leave. (My Anglophone friends assume I’ll stay the whole time.) French parents aren’t curt, they’re practical. They correctly assume that I have other stuff to do. I sometimes stay for a cup of coffee when I return to pick Bean up.
It’s the same at birthday parties. American and British mothers expect me to stick around and socialize, often for several hours. No one ever says it, but I think part of why we’re there is to make sure our kids are comforted and OK.
But from about three, French birthday parties are drop-offs. We’re supposed to trust that our kids will be OK without us. Parents are usually invited to come back at the end for a glass of champagne and some hobnobbing with the other mums and dads. Simon and I are thrilled whenever we get invitations: it’s free babysitting, followed by a cocktail party.
In France, there’s an expression for mothers who spend all their free time schlepping their kids around: ‘maman-taxi’. This isn’t a compliment. Nathalie, a Parisian architect, tells me that she hires a babysitter to take her three kids to all their activities on Saturday mornings. Then she and her husband go out to lunch. ‘When I’m there I give them 100 per cent, but when I’m off, I’m off,’ Nathalie tells me.
Virginie, my diet guru, gets together most mornings after school drop-offs with a group of mums from her son’s elementary school. I join the group at their café one morning, and mention extracurricular activities. The temperature at the table immediately rises. Virginie sits up and speaks for the group. ‘You have to leave kids alone, they need to be a bit bored at home, they must have time to play,’ she says.
Virginie and her friends aren’t slackers. They all have university degrees and good CVs. They’re devoted mothers. Their homes are full of books. Their kids take lessons in fencing, guitar, tennis, piano and wrestling (the latter is weirdly called ‘catch’ in French). But they don’t do all of these activities at once. Most choose just one per school term.
One of the mums at the café, a pretty, zaftig publicist (like me, she’s trying to ‘pay more attention’), says she stopped sending her kids to tennis lessons, or anything else, because she found the lessons ‘constraining’.
‘Constraining for whom?’ I ask.
‘Constraining for me,’ she says.
She explains: ‘You bring them, and you wait for an hour, then you have to go back and pick them up. For music you have to make them practise in the evenings … It’s a waste of time for me. And the children don’t need it. They have a lot of homework, they have the house, they have other games at the house, and there are two of them so they can’t get bored. They’re together. And we go away every weekend.’
I’m struck by how these small decisions and assumptions make daily life so different for French mothers. When they have moments to spare, French mothers pride themselves on being able to detach and relax. At the hairdresser, I tear out an article from an issue of French Elle in which a mother says that she loves taking her two boys to the old-fashioned merry-go-round near the Eiffel Tower.
‘While Oscar and Léon try to catch the wooden rings … I spend thirty minutes in pure relaxation. I usually turn off my cellphone and just space out while I’m waiting for them … it’s like a deluxe babysitter!’ I know that merry-go-round well. I usually spend my half-hour there waiting to wave at Bean each time she comes round.
It’s no coincidence that so many French mothers seem to parent this way. The let-him-be principle comes straight from Françoise Dolto, the patron saint of French parenting. Dolto very clearly argued for leaving a child alone, safely, to muddle about and figure things out for himself.
‘Why does a mother do everything for her child?’ Dolto asks in The Major Stages of Childhood, a collection of her remarks. ‘He’s so content to deal with things himself, to pass the morning getting dressed by himself, to put on his shoes, so happy to put on his sweater backwards, to get tangled up in his pants, to play, to rummage around in his corner. So he doesn’t go to the market with his mother? Well too bad, or even better!’
On Bastille Day, I take Bean for a picnic in the grassy field in our neighbourhood park. It’s filled with parents and their young kids. I’m not narrating Bean’s play but I don’t really expect to have a chance to read the three-week-old magazine that I’ve brought along for myself, along with a giant sack of books and toys for her. I spend a lot of the day helping her play with the toys and reading to her.
On the next blanket over is a French mother. She’s a thin, auburn-haired woman who’s chatting with a girlfriend while her year-old daughter plays with, well, not much of anything. The mother seems to have brought just one ball to amuse her daughter for the entire afternoon. They have lunch, and then the little girl plays with the grass, rolls around a bit, and checks out the scene. Meanwhile her mother, from the look of it, is having a full adult conversation with her friend.
It’s the same sun, and the same grass. But I’m having an Anglo picnic and – voilà – she’s having a French one. Not unlike those mothers back in New York, I’m trying to cheer Bean on to the next stage of development. And I’m willing to sacrifice my own pleasure to do that. The French mum – who looks like she could buy a fancy handbag if she wanted to – seems content to let her daughter ‘awaken’ all by herself. And her little girl evidently doesn’t mind at all.
All this goes a long way towards explaining the mysteriously calm air of the French mothers I see all around me. But it still doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s a crucial missing piece. That ghost in the French mothering machine is, I think, how French mothers cope with guilt.
Today’s Anglophone mothers spend much more time on childcare than parents did in 1965.6 To do this, they have cut back on housework, relaxing and even sleeping. Even so, today’s Anglophone parents believe they should be spending even more time with their kids.
The result is enormous guilt. I see this when I visit Emily, who lives in Atlanta with her husband and their eighteen-month-old daughter. After I’ve been with Emily for a few hours, it dawns on me that she has said ‘I’m a bad mother’ a half-dozen times. She says it when she caves in to her daughter’s demand for extra milk, or when she doesn’t have time to read her more than two books. She says it again when she’s trying to make the little girl sleep on a schedule, and to explain why she occasionally lets her cry a bit at night.
I hear other British and American mums say ‘I’m a bad mother’ too. The phrase has become a kind of verbal tic. Emily says ‘I’m a bad mother’ so often that – though it sounds negative – I realize that she must find the phrase soothing.
For Anglophone mothers, guilt is an emotional tax we pay for going to work, not buying organic vegetables, or plopping our kids in front of the television so we can surf the web or make dinner. If we feel guilty, then it’s easier to do these things. We’ve ‘paid’ for our lapses.
Here too, the French are different. French mothers absolutely recognize the temptation to feel guilty. They feel as overstretched and inadequate as we Anglophones do. After all, they’re working while bringing up small children. And like us, they often aren’t living up to their own standards as either workers or parents.
The difference is that French mothers don’t valorize this guilt. On the contrary, they consider it unhealthy and unpleasant, and they try to banish it. ‘Guilt is a trap,’ says my friend Sharon, the literary agent. When she and her Francophone girlfriends meet for drinks, they reassure each other that ‘The perfect mother doesn’t exist.’
The standards are certainly high for French mums. They’re supposed to be sexy, successful, and have a home-cooked meal on the table each night. But they try not to add guilt to their burden. My friend Danièle, the French journalist, co-authored a book
called La mère parfaite, c’est vous (The Perfect Mother Is You).
Danièle still remembers dropping her daughter off at crèche at five months old. ‘I felt sick to leave her, but I would have felt sick to stay with her and not work,’ she explains. She forced herself to face down this guilt, and then let it go. ‘Let’s just feel guilty and go on living,’ she told herself. Anyway, she adds, reassuring both of us, ‘The perfect mother doesn’t exist.’
What really fortifies French women against guilt is their belief that it’s unhealthy for mothers and children to spend all their time together. They believe there’s a risk of smothering kids with attention and anxiety, or of developing the dreaded relation fusionnelle, where a mother’s and a child’s needs are too intertwined. French children – even babies and toddlers – get to cultivate their inner lives without a mother’s constant interference.
‘If your child is your only goal in life, it’s not good for the child,’ Danièle says. ‘What happens to the child if he’s the only hope for his mother? I think this is the opinion of all psychoanalysts.’
There’s the risk of taking this separation too far. When French Justice Minister Rachida Dati went back to work five days after giving birth to her daughter, Zohra, there was a collective gasp from the French press. In a survey by French Elle, 42 per cent of respondents described Dati as ‘too careerist’. (There was less controversy about the fact that Dati was a 43-year-old single mother, and that she wouldn’t name the father.)
When we Anglophones talk about work–life balance, we’re describing a kind of juggling, where we’re trying to keep all parts of our lives in motion without screwing up any of them too badly.
The French also talk about l’équilibre. But they mean it differently. For them, it’s about not letting any one part of your life – including parenting – overwhelm the rest. It’s more like a balanced meal, where there’s a good mix of proteins, carbohydrates, fruit, vegetables and sweet things. In that sense, the ‘careerist’ Rachida Dati had the same problem as stay-at-home mums: a life too heavily weighted towards one element.
Of course, for some French mothers l’équilibre is just an ideal. But at least it’s a calming ideal. When I ask my Parisian friend Esther, who works full time as a lawyer, to assess herself as a mother, she says something that I find breathtaking in its simplicity and lack of neurotic tension. ‘In general I don’t doubt whether I’m good enough, because I really think I am.’
Inès de la Fressange isn’t an ordinary French woman. In the 1980s she was Karl Lagerfeld’s muse and main model at Chanel. Then de la Fressange was asked to be the new face of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic, who appears on stamps and on busts in town halls. Past Mariannes have included Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve. She and Lagerfeld parted ways after she accepted. He allegedly said he didn’t want to ‘dress a monument’.
Now in her early fifties, de la Fressange is still a doe-eyed, languid brunette whose long legs don’t seem to fit under café tables. She’s had her own eponymous fashion label, and still occasionally struts the catwalk. In 2009, readers of Madame Figaro voted her the best embodiment of the Parisian woman.
De la Fressange is also a mother. Her two equally leggy and photogenic daughters – the teenaged Nine and tween-aged Violette – have already launched their own fashion and modelling careers. De la Fressange used to make light of her own charms by calling herself the ‘swarthy asparagus’. She says she’s an imperfect mother too. ‘I forget about morning yoga, and I always put on lip gloss and mascara in the car mirror. What’s important is to rid yourself of guilt over not being perfect.’
Obviously, de la Fressange isn’t typical. But she incarnates a certain French ideal about striking a balance. In an interview with Paris Match she describes how, three years after her husband died, she met a man at a ski resort in the French Alps, where she was holidaying with her daughters.
She put off her suitor for a few months, explaining that she wasn’t ready. But as she tells Paris Match: ‘Finally, it was me who called him to say, “OK, I’m a mother and a working girl, but also a woman.” For the girls, I thought it was good to have a mother in love.’
9
Caca Boudin
WHEN BEAN IS about three, she starts using an expression I’ve never heard before. At first I think it’s caca buddha, which sounds like it could be vaguely offensive to my Buddhist friends (as in English, caca is a French kid’s term for poo). But after a while I realize she’s saying caca boudin (pronounced boo-dah). Boudin means sausage. My daughter is going around shouting – if you’ll pardon my French – ‘poo sausage’ all the time.
Like all good curse words, caca boudin is versatile. Bean shouts it gleefully when she’s running through the house with her friends. She also uses it to mean ‘whatever’, ‘leave me alone’ and ‘none of your business’. It’s an all-purpose retort.
Me: ‘What did you do at school today?’
Bean: ‘Caca boudin.’ (snortle)
Me: ‘Would you like some more broccoli?’
Bean: ‘Caca boudin!’ (hysterical laughter)
Simon and I aren’t sure what to make of caca boudin. Is it rude or cute? Should we be angry or amused? We don’t understand the social context. To be safe, we tell her to stop saying it. She compromises by continuing to say it, but then adding, ‘We don’t say caca boudin. It’s a bad word.’
Bean’s budding French does have perks. When we go back to America for Christmas, my mother’s friends keep asking her to pronounce the name of her hairdresser, Jean-Pierre, with her Parisian accent. (Jean-Pierre has given Bean a pixie haircut that they coo is oh-so-French too.) Bean is happy to sing, on demand, some of the dozens of French songs she’s learned in school. I’m amazed the first time she opens a present and says, spontaneously, oh là là!
But it’s becoming clear that being bilingual is more than just a party trick, or a neutral skill. As Bean’s French improves, she’s starting to bring home not just unfamiliar expressions, but also new ideas and rules. Her new language is making her into not just a French speaker but a French person. And I’m not sure that I’m comfortable with that. I’m not even sure what a ‘French person’ is.
The main way that France enters our house is through school. Bean has started école maternelle, France’s free state nursery school. It’s all day, four days a week, and not on Wednesdays. Maternelle isn’t compulsory, and kids can go part-time. But pretty much every three-year-old in France goes to maternelle full-time, and has a similar experience there. It’s France’s way of turning toddlers into French people.
The maternelle has lofty goals. It is, in effect, a national project to turn the nation’s solipsistic three-year-olds into civilized, empathetic people. A booklet for parents from the education ministry explains that in maternelle kids ‘discover the richness and the constraints of the group that they’re part of. They feel the pleasure of being welcomed and recognized, and they progressively participate in welcoming their fellow students.’
Charlotte, who’s been a teacher at maternelle for thirty years (and still charmingly has the kids call her maîtresse – teacher or, literally, ‘mistress’), tells me that in the first year the kids are very egotistical. ‘They don’t realize that the teacher is there for everyone,’ she says. Conversely, the pupils only gradually grow to understand that when the teacher speaks to the group, what she’s saying is also intended for each of them individually. Kids typically do activities of their choosing in groups of three or four.
To me, maternelle seems like art school for short people. During Bean’s first year the walls of her classroom are quickly covered in the children’s drawings and paintings. Being able to ‘perceive, feel, imagine and create’ are goals of maternelle too. The children learn to raise their hands à la française, with one finger pointed up in the air.
I was worried about enrolling Bean. The crèche was a big playroom. Maternelle is more like school. The classes are big. And I’ve been warned that pa
rents get very little information about what goes on there. One mum from my playgroup says she stopped asking her daughter’s teacher for feedback after the teacher eventually explained: ‘If I don’t say anything, that means she’s fine.’ Bean’s first-year teacher is a glum woman whose only comment about Bean, the entire year, is that she’s ‘very calm’. (Bean adores this teacher, and loves her classmates.)
Despite all the artwork, there’s a lot of emphasis on learning to follow instructions. One morning during Bean’s first year there are twenty-five identical yellow stick figures with green eyes hanging up in the classroom. As someone who can’t write anything without a deadline, I recognize the need for some constraints. But seeing all those nearly identical pictures is unsettling. (Bean’s later work becomes more free-form.)
It takes me a while to realize that, in Bean’s first-year classroom, there isn’t even an alphabet on the wall, alongside all those paintings and drawings. At a meeting for parents, no one mentions reading. There’s more fuss about feeding lettuce to the classroom’s tank of escargots (tiny ones, not to be eaten).
In fact, as I’ll discover, kids aren’t taught to read in maternelle, which lasts until the year kids turn six. They just learn letters, sounds, and how to write their own names. I’m told that some kids pick up reading on their own, though I couldn’t say which ones, since their parents don’t mention it. Learning to read isn’t part of the French curriculum until the school year that kids turn seven.
This relaxed attitude goes against my most basic American belief that earlier is better. But even the most upwardly mobile parents of Bean’s schoolfriends aren’t in any rush. ‘I prefer that they don’t spend time learning to read now,’ Marion, who’s herself a journalist, tells me. She and her husband say that at this stage it’s much more important for children to learn social skills, how to organize their thoughts, and how to speak well.
French Children Don't Throw Food Page 15
