French Children Don't Throw Food (18 page)

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”.’

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 mums in the crèche and the park, is also required to keep her looking and feeling seductive.
⁶
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 French man. 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 Anglophone women, the role of mum is very segmented, very absolute,’ Sharon says. ‘When they wear the mum “hat”, they wear the mum clothes. When they’re sexy they’re totally sexy. And the kids can only see the mum part.’

In France (and apparently in Belgium, too) the ‘mum’ and ‘woman’ roles ideally are fused. At any given time, you can see both.

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 behaviour 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 ‘semi-detached’ 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 had seemed like a salient topic to research from France.) Americans treated the book as a serious moral enquiry. 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 pm. My French publisher – a wizened woman in her fifties with a solid-gold Rolex – explains that the show is a French institution. 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 make-up. 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 questions I’ve practised. How did I get the idea for the book? How does France compare with the US? When one of the interviewers asks me if I was unfaithful myself while writing the book, I bat my eyelids coquettishly and say that I’m a journalist, so of course I was
très professionnelle
. The interviewers – and the studio audience – love it. On this high
note
, Denisot starts to wrap up the interview. He seems to be summing up. 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 have practised. 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, I’m thankful to hear, 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 synch with French society. That’s because, after boldly not breastfeeding, then reconditioning their minds and bodies, French mothers go back to work. University-educated mothers rarely ditch their careers, temporarily or permanently, to do childcare. When I tell
Britons
and Americans that I have a child, they usually ask, ‘Are you working?’ Whereas French people just ask, ‘What do you do?’

I know lots of Anglophone professional 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 mum 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 something out of
The Da Vinci Code
, but really it’s quite bourgeois. You’re more likely to dig up an abandoned dummy there than a medieval relic. There’s a little lake, a wrought-iron gazebo, and a playground that fills up as soon as school finishes for the day.

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 left her job as a magazine fact-checker to accompany her husband on his year-long sabbatical in Paris. They agreed that he would do his research while she soaked up the city and looked after the children.

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
mums, but says she didn’t want to spend her precious time in France with other Anglophones (I try not to take this personally). She speaks excellent French, and had assumed that she’d meet some French mums and befriend 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 childminders all make the transition logistically possible. It’s no accident that French women 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 per cent of French adults said the most satisfying kind of marriage is one in which both husband and wife have jobs
¹
(just 71 per cent of Americans and Britons said this).

Some university-educated women I know do ‘four-fifths’, which means they stay home with their kids on Wednesday, when there’s no nursery or primary school. But these mothers say they hardly know any women who stay home full-time by choice. ‘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 gave up 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 says that there are circumstances when mothers really can’t 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 giving up work for even a few years is a precarious choice. ‘If tomorrow your husband is unemployed, what will you do?’ says 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 do it. ‘Husbands can disappear,’ she explains.

French women work not just for financial security, but also for status. Stay-at-home mums 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?’

French women also openly question what their own quality of life would be if they looked after children all day. The French media have 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 mums in Paris, there also aren’t many weekday playgroups, story-telling
hours
or mummy-and-me classes. The ones that do exist are mostly by and for Anglophones. There’s one fully French kid in our neighbourhood 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 nappy bags, like we’re a bunch of exotic animals.

Anglophone parenting and its accoutrements – the baby flash cards and competition to get into nurseries – 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 playground, 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 so that toddlers can safely climb around and fall. A few nannies are sitting French-style on benches around the perimeter, chatting and watching their charges play.

Then a white, upper-middle-class mother walks in with her toddler. While she follows him around the miniature equipment, she keeps up a non-stop monologue. ‘Do you want to go on the froggy, Caleb? Do you want to go on the swing?’

Caleb ignores these questions. He evidently plans to just bumble around. But his mother tracks him, continuing to narrate his every move. ‘You’re stepping, Caleb!’ she says at one point.

I assume that Caleb just landed a particularly zealous mother. But then the next upper-middle-class woman walks through the gate, pushing a blond toddler in a black T-shirt. She immediately begins narrating all of her child’s actions too. When the boy wanders over to the gate to stare out at the lawn, the mother evidently decides this isn’t stimulating enough. She rushes over and holds him upside down.

‘You’re upside down!’ she shouts. Moments later, she lifts up her shirt to offer the boy a nip of milk. ‘We came to the park! We came to the park!’ she chirps while he’s drinking.

This scene keeps repeating itself with other mums and their kids. After about an hour I can predict with total accuracy whether a mother is going to do this ‘narrated play’ simply by the price of her handbag. What’s most surprising to me is that these mothers aren’t ashamed of how batty they sound. They’re not whispering their commentaries; they’re broadcasting them.
²

When I describe this scene to Michel Cohen, the French paediatrician in New York, he knows immediately what I’m talking about. He says these mothers are speaking loudly to flaunt what good parents they are. This practice of narrated play is so common that Cohen included a section in his parenting book called ‘stimulation’, which essentially tells mothers to cut it out. ‘Periods of playing and laughing should alternate naturally with periods of peace and quiet,’ Cohen writes. ‘You don’t have to talk, sing or entertain constantly.’