I also like the neutral, pragmatic French formulation “paying attention” over the value-laden American one, “being good” (and its guilt-ridden, demoralizing opposites: “cheating” and “being bad”). If you’ve merely stopped paying attention and had some cake, it seems easier to forgive yourself and to eat mindfully again at the next meal.
Virginie says this way of eating is an open secret among women in Paris. “Everyone you see who is thin”—she draws a kind of 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 for me: “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 says. Café crème is what Parisians call café au lait. It’s a cup of steaming milk poured onto 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 American coffee or tea is fine, too.) I scribble down Virginie’s suggestions—Drink more water! Climb the stairs! Go for walks!—as if I’m receiving revelation.
I’m not obese. Like my friend Nancy, I’m just sort of motherly. There’s no risk of Bean’s getting jabbed by a hip bone 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 kilograms. (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 centimeters. But I immediately know whether my weight in kilograms means I’ll fit into my jeans or not.)
• • •
Of course, French mothers aren’t just different because they’re thin. Not all of them are, anyway. And I meet American women who fit back into their pre-pregnancy jeans by the three-month mark, too. But I can spot these American mothers 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 different about French moms is that they get back their pre-baby identities, too. For starters, they seem 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 seesaw—all regular sights back in the United States and among Americans 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 one another (though not with me).
In American homes, every room in the house is liable to be overrun with toys. In one home I visited, the parents had 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 the living room. But plenty don’t. The children in these families have loads of playthings, but these don’t engulf the common spaces. At a minimum, the toys are put away at night. Parents see doing this as a healthy separation and a chance to clear their minds when the kids go to bed. Samia, my neighbor who during the day is the extremely 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 bad about that.5
American parenting books typically tack on reminders for mothers to have lives of their own. But I frequently hear American stay-at-home mothers say they never use babysitters because they consider all child care to be their job.
In Paris, even mothers who don’t work take for granted that they’ll enroll their toddlers in part-time child care in order to have some time alone. They grant themselves guilt-free windows to go to yoga class and to get their highlights retouched. As a result, even the most harried stay-at-home moms don’t show up at the park looking frazzled and disheveled, as if they’re part of a separate tribe.
French women don’t just permit themselves physical time off; they also allow themselves to mentally detach from their kids. In Hollywood films, you know instantly if a female character has kids. That’s often what the film is about. But 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 becomes ill. During the film, we’re vaguely aware that the schoolteacher has a daughter. But the little girl appears only briefly. Mostly, the movie is a love story, complete with steamy sex scenes. 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 afterward there’s another program, We’re Not Just Parents, which covers work, sex, hobbies, and relationships.
Of course some middle-class Frenchwomen 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,6 featuring the French actress Géraldine Pailhas. Pailhas, thirty-nine, is a real-life mother of two who’s posing as different types of moms. In one photograph she’s smoking a cigarette, pushing a stroller, and gazing into the distance. In another she’s wearing a blond 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 at her base the most simple 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, which, she assures us, ‘does not exist.’”
There’s something in this text, and in Pailhas’s bearing, that reminds me of those French mothers who snub me in the park. In real life, they mostly aren’t prancing around in Christian Louboutin heels. But like Pailhas, they signal that while they are devoted mothers, they also think about stuff that has nothing to do with their kids and enjoy moments of guilt-free liberté.
Pailhas of course shed her baby weight the instant her kids came out. But that inner life, which we glimpse in the photos, and which I see in those French moms at the crèche and in the park, is also required to keep her looking and feeling seductive.7 Pailhas doesn’t look like a cartoonish MILF. She just looks like a sexy, relaxed woman. I can’t imagine her telling me that she’s only as happy as her least-happy child.
I consult my friend Sharon, who’s a Francophone Belgian literary agent married to a handsome Frenchman. She’s lived all over the world with him and their two kids. Sharon immediately homes in on another thing I’m seeing in the Pailhas pictures and in the mothers all around me in Paris.
“For American women, the role of mom is very segmented, very absolute,” Sharon says. “When they wear the mom ‘hat,’ they wear the mom clothes. When
they’re sexy, they’re totally sexy. And the kids can see only the ‘mom’ part.”
In France (and apparently in Belgium, too) the “mom” and “woman” roles ideally are fused. At any given time, you can see both.
Chapter 8
the perfect mother doesn’t exist
Here’s something you might not know: spending twelve hours a day at the computer, stress-eating chocolate M&Ms, does not promote weight loss.
It does, however, enable me to finish my book. And the mere presence of this book on Amazon.com jolts awake the “woman” in me. So does the book tour. I travel to New York, sans husband and child, to talk about the book to anyone who’ll listen, and stare lovingly at it in bookstores. (One salesman has seen this behavior before. He approaches me and asks, “Are you the author?”)
My real transformation happens when the book comes out in French. After years of having a semidetached presence in Paris, I’m suddenly thrust into the national conversation. The book is a journalistic study of how different cultures treat infidelity. (This was as far as I could get from financial writing, and it seemed like a salient topic to research from France.) Americans treated the book as a serious moral inquiry. The French assume that the book is meant to be amusing.
A talk show called Le Grand Journal invites me to come on and discuss it, live and in French. I’d vaguely noticed Le Grand Journal, which is broadcast five nights a week at 7:05 P.M. My French publisher—a wizened woman in her fifties with a solid-gold Rolodex—explains that the show is a French institution. It’s a cross between The Tonight Show and Meet the Press. Host Michel Denisot is a legendary journalist. He and a panel of interviewers grill each guest. Everyone is witty but a bit savage. It’s like a posh French dinner party but broadcast on live TV.
My publisher is thrilled for the publicity, but she’s panicked about my French. She arranges for me to spend hours fielding practice questions in French from a businessman she knows. He seems nervous, too. He keeps reminding me that “affaire” in French doesn’t mean anything extramarital; for that I need to say aventure or liaison.
By the night of the show, I’m feeling immersed and ready. I have three cups of espresso and sit for hair and makeup. Then suddenly I’m standing behind two giant curtains. Michel Denisot says my name, and the curtains open. I descend the glossy white steps, Miss America–style, then walk to a large table where Denisot and the three-person panel are waiting for me.
I’m concentrating so hard on understanding the questions that I’m not even nervous. Fortunately, they’re mostly the questions I’ve practiced. How did I get the idea for the book? How does France compare with the United States? When one of the interviewers asks me if I was unfaithful myself while writing the book, I bat my eyes coquettishly and say that I’m a journalist, so of course I was très professionnelle. The interviewers—and the studio audience—love this.
On this high note, Denisot starts to wrap up the interview. He seems to be making a summary statement. I stop paying close attention. My brother, who watches a replay on the Internet, says at this point I look visibly relieved.
Then, suddenly, I hear my name again. Denisot is formulating another question for me. He can’t let it rest. It’s something about Moïse—French for Moses—and a blog. Moses had a blog? My brother says that when the camera cuts back to me, I look petrified. I have no idea what he’s asking me.
All at once I get it: Denisot isn’t saying “blog”; he’s saying “blague,” the French word for joke. He wants me to retell a joke from my book. It’s the one where Moses comes down from the mount and says, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I got him down to ten commandments. The bad news is, adultery is still in there.”
This isn’t one of the questions I had practiced. On the spot, I can’t think of exactly how the joke goes, and certainly not how it goes in French. How do you say “mount”? How do you say “commandment”? All I manage to say is, “Adultery’s still in there!” The audience, gratefully, is still in a good enough mood to laugh. And Denisot wisely moves on to the next guest.
Despite this incident, I’m grateful to be in the working world again. It puts me in sync with French society. That’s because, after boldly not breastfeeding, then reconditioning their minds and bodies, French mothers go back to work. College-educated mothers rarely ditch their careers, temporarily or permanently, after having kids. When I tell Americans that I have a child, they usually ask, “Are you working?” Whereas French people just ask, “What do you do?”
Back in the United States, I know lots of women who’ve stopped working to raise their kids. In France, I know exactly one. I have a vision of what my life as a stay-at-home mom would have been in France, when I ditch work one morning and take Bean to the park. Our local park was built in the nineteenth century on the site of the former palace of the Knights Templar (take that, Central Park). This may sound like The Da Vinci Code, but really it’s quite bourgeois. You’re more likely to dig up an abandoned pacifier there than a medieval relic. There’s a little lake, a forged-iron gazebo, and a playground that fills up as soon as school lets out.
Bean and I are in the gazebo when I’m jolted by the sound of American English, coming from a woman with two little kids. She and I are soon exchanging life stories. She tells me that she quit her job as a fact-checker to accompany her husband on his yearlong sabbatical in Paris. They agreed that he would do his research, while she soaked up the city and looked after the kids.
Nine months into the sabbatical, she doesn’t look like someone who’s been relishing the City of Light. She looks like someone who’s been schlepping two toddlers back and forth to the park. She stumbles over her words a bit, then apologizes, explaining that she doesn’t often speak to adults. She’s heard about the playgroups organized by English-speaking moms, but says she didn’t want to spend her precious time in France with other Americans. (I try not to take this personally.) She speaks excellent French, and had assumed that she’d meet some French moms and buddy around with them.
“Where are all the mothers?” she asks.
The answer, of course, is that they’re at work. French mothers go back to work, in part, because they can. The high-quality crèches, subsidized shared nannies, and other child-care options all make the transition logistically possible. It’s no accident that Frenchwomen are supposed to get their figures back in three months. That’s roughly when they go back to the office.
French mothers also go back to work because they want to. In a 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center, 91 percent of French adults said the most satisfying kind of marriage is one in which both husband and wife have jobs. (Just 71 percent of Americans and Britons said this.)1
Some college-educated women I know do “four-fifths,” in which they stay home with their kids on Wednesday, when there’s no preschool or primary school. But the mothers I meet say they hardly know any women who opt to stay home full-time. “I know one, and she is about to divorce,” says my friend Esther, the lawyer. Esther recounts this woman’s story as a cautionary tale: She quit her job as a saleswoman to look after the kids. But then she was financially dependent on her husband and thus less entitled to voice her opinions.
“She was withholding her feelings and complaints, and therefore after a while the misunderstandings got worse and worse,” Esther explains. She goes on to say that there are circumstances when mothers can’t really work, such as when a third child arrives. But she says any break from work should be for a limited time, say until the youngest is two.
French professional women tell me that quitting work for even a few years is a precarious choice. “If tomorrow your husband is unemployed, what will you do?” asks my friend Danièle. Hélène, the engineer with three kids, says that she’d really prefer not to work and to rely on her husband’s salary. But she won’t quit. “Husbands can disappear,” she explains.
Frenchwomen work not just for financial s
ecurity but also for status. Stay-at-home moms don’t have much, at least not in Paris. There’s a recurring French image of a housewife sitting sullenly at a dinner party because no one wants to talk to her. “I have two friends who don’t work. I feel like nobody is interested in them,” Danièle tells me. She’s a journalist in her early fifties with a teenage daughter. “When the kids are grown up, what is your social usefulness?”
Frenchwomen also openly question what their own quality of life would be if they looked after children all day. The French media has no problem describing this experience with cold-eyed ambivalence. One article I read says that for mothers “without a professional activity . . . the principal advantage is to see their kids grow up. But the fact of being an at-home mother brings inconveniences, notably isolation and solitude.”
Since there aren’t many middle-class stay-at-home moms in Paris, there also aren’t many weekday playgroups, story-telling hours, or mommy-and-me classes. The ones that do exist are mostly by and for Anglophones. There’s one fully French kid in our neighborhood playgroup, but he comes with his nanny. His mother, a lawyer, apparently wants the boy to be exposed to English. (I don’t hear him actually speak it.) The mother shows up once, when it’s her turn to host. She has raced back from the office, wearing high heels and a business suit. She looks at us Anglophone mothers, with our sneakers and bulging diaper bags, like we’re a bunch of exotic animals.
• • •
American-style parenting and its accoutrements—the baby flash cards and competitive preschools—are by now clichés. There’s been both a backlash and a backlash to the backlash. So I’m stunned by what I see at a playground in New York City. It’s a special toddler area with a low-rise slide and some bouncy animals, separated from the rest of the park by a high metal gate. The playground is designed for toddlers to safely climb around and fall. A few nannies are sitting French-style on benches around the perimeter, chatting and watching their charges play.
Bringing Up Bébé Page 15
