French Children Don't Throw Food (22 page)

I acquire much of my new French vocabulary not just from Bean, but from the many French kids’ books we somehow end up owning, thanks to birthday parties, impulse purchases and neighbours’ garage sales. I’m careful not to read to Bean in French if there’s a native speaker within earshot. I can hear my foreign accent, and the way I stumble over the odd word.
Usually
I’m trying so hard not to mispronounce anything too egregiously that I only grasp the storyline on the third reading.

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
. They’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.