French Children Don't Throw Food (25 page)

Not all French women do re-education after they give birth. But many do. Why not? France’s national insurance picks up most or all of the cost of re-education, including the price of the white wand. The state even helps pay for some tummy tucks, usually when the mother’s belly hangs below her pubis, or when it’s inhibiting her sex life.

Of course, all this re-education just gets mothers out of the starting gate. What do French women do once their bellies and their pelvic floors are back in fighting shape?

Some do focus only on their kids. But unlike in the US or Britain, the culture doesn’t encourage or reward this. Sacrificing your marriage and your sex life for your kids is considered wildly unhealthy and out of balance.

The French know that having a baby changes things, especially at first. Couples typically assume that there’s a very intense stretch after the birth, when it’s all-hands-on-deck for the baby. After that, gradually, the mother and father
are
supposed to find their equilibrium as a couple again.

‘There’s this fundamental assumption [in France] that every human being has desire. It never disappears for very long. If it does it means you’re depressed and you need to be treated,’ explains Marie-Anne Suizzo, the University of Texas sociologist who studied French and American mothers.

The French mothers I meet talk about ‘
le couple
’ in a wholly different way from the Anglophone parents I know. ‘For me, the couple comes before the children,’ says Virginie, the skinny stay-at-home mum who taught me to ‘pay attention’ to what I eat.

Virginie is principled, smart, and a devoted mother. But she has no intention of letting her romantic life slacken just because she has three kids.

‘The couple is the most important. It’s the only thing that you choose in your life. Your children you didn’t choose. You chose your husband. So, you’re going to make your life with him. So you have an interest in it going well. Especially when the children leave, you want to get along with him. For me, it’s
prioritaire
.’

Not all French parents would agree with Virginie’s ranking. But in general, the question for French parents isn’t whether they’ll resume having full romantic lives again, but when. ‘No ideology can dictate the moment when the parents will feel truly ready to find each other again,’ says the French psycho-sociologist Jean Epstein. ‘When conditions permit, and when they feel ready, the parents will give the baby his rightful place, outside their couple.’

Anglophone experts do sometimes mention that parents should take time for themselves. In
Dr Spock’s Baby and Child Care
(which my friend Dietlind hands over to me before leaving Paris) there’s a two-paragraph section called ‘Needless self-sacrifice and excessive preoccupation’. It says that today’s young parents tend to ‘give up all their freedom and all their former pleasures, not as a matter of practicality but as a matter of principle’. Even when these parents occasionally sneak off by themselves, ‘They feel too guilty to get full enjoyment.’ The book urges parents to carve out quality time together, but only after making ‘all the necessary sacrifice of time and effort to your children’.

French experts don’t treat having quality time together as an afterthought; they’re adamant and unambiguous about it. That’s perhaps because they’re very sanguine and up-front about how having a baby can strain a marriage. ‘It isn’t for nothing that a good number of couples separate in the first few years, or the first few months following the arrival of a child. Everything changes,’ one article says.

Le couple
doesn’t just get a cursory mention in the French parenting books I read; it’s treated as a central topic. Some French parenting websites sometimes have as many articles on ‘
le couple
’ as they do on pregnancy. ‘The child must not invade the parents’ whole universe … for family balance, the parents also need personal space,’ writes Hélène de Leersnyder, the paediatrician. ‘The child understands without a clash, and always very young, that his parents need time that’s not about work, the house, shopping, children.’

Once French parents emerge from the initial cocooning period, they take this call to coupledom seriously. There is actually a time of day in France known as ‘adult time’ or ‘parent time’. It’s when the kids go to sleep. Anticipation of ‘adult time’ helps explain why – once the fairy tales are read and the songs are sung – French parents are strict about enforcing bedtime. They treat ‘adult time’ not as an occasional, hard-won privilege but as a basic human need. Judith, an art historian in Brittany with three young kids, explains that all three are asleep by 8 or 8:30, because ‘I need a world for myself’.

French parents don’t just think these separations are good for parents. They also genuinely believe that they’re important for kids, who must understand that their parents have their own pleasures. ‘Thus the child understands that he is not the centre of the world, and this is essential for his development,’ the French parenting guide
Your Child
explains.

French parents don’t just have their nights to themselves. After Bean starts school, we are confronted with a seemingly endless series of mid-term two-week holidays. During these times I can’t even arrange a play date. Most of Bean’s friends have been dispatched to stay with their grandparents in the countryside or the suburbs. Their parents use this time to work, travel, have sex and just be alone.

Virginie says she takes a ten-day holiday alone with her husband every year. It’s non-negotiable. Her kids, aged four to fourteen, stay with Virginie’s parents in a little village about two hours by train from Paris. Virginie says guilt doesn’t enter
into
her holiday planning. ‘What you build between the two of you when you’re away for ten days has to be good for the kids too,’ she says. She says that kids occasionally need space from their parents too. When they all reunite after the trip, it’s very sweet.

The French parents I meet seem to grab adult time whenever they can. Caroline, the physiotherapist, tells me without a trace of guilt that her mother is picking up her three-year-old son from
maternelle
on Friday afternoon, and looking after him until Sunday. She says that on their weekend off, she and her husband plan to sleep late and go to the movies.

French parents even get pockets of ‘couple time’ when their kids are home. A 42-year-old with three kids aged three to six tells me that on weekend mornings, ‘The kids don’t have the right to enter our room until we open the door.’ Until then, miraculously, they’ve learned to play by themselves. (Inspired by her story, Simon and I eventually try this. To our amazement, it mostly works. Though we have to re-teach it to the kids every few weeks.)

I have trouble explaining the concept of ‘date night’ to my French colleagues. For starters, there’s no ‘dating’ in France. Here, when you start going out with someone, it’s automatically supposed to be exclusive. To my French friends, a ‘date’ sounds too tentative, and too much like a job interview, to be romantic. It’s the same once a couple lives together. ‘Date night’, with its implied sudden switch from sweatpants to stilettos, sounds contrived to my French friends. They take issue with the implication that ‘real life’ is unsexy and
exhausting
, and that they should schedule romance like it’s a trip to the dentist.

When the American movie
Date Night
comes to France, it’s renamed
Crazy Night
. The couple in the film are supposed to be typical suburbanites with kids. American and British reviewers have no trouble relating to them. A writer for the Associated Press describes the pair as ‘tired, ordinary but reasonably content’. In an opening scene, they’re awoken in the morning when one of their children pounces on their bed. French critics are horrified by such scenes. A reviewer for
Le Figaro
describes the kids in the film as ‘unbearable’.

Despite having kids who don’t pounce on them in the morning, French women would seem to have more to complain about than American women do. They lag behind Britons and Americans in key measures of gender equality, such as the percentage of women in the legislature and heading large companies. And they have a bigger gap than we do between what men and women earn.
⁵

French inequality is especially pronounced at home. French women spend 89 per cent more time than men doing household work and looking after children.
⁶
In America, women spend 31 per cent more time than men on household activities, and 25 per cent more time on childcare.
⁷

Despite all this, my British and American girlfriends with kids seem a lot angrier at their husbands and partners than my French girlfriends are. ‘I am fuming that he doesn’t bother to be competent about a whole slew of stuff that I ask him to do,’
my
friend Anya writes to me in an e-mail about her husband. ‘He’s turned me into a shrewish nag and once I get mad, it’s hard for me to cool back down.’
⁸
American friends – or even acquaintances – regularly pull me aside at dinner parties to grumble about something their husbands have just done. Whole lunches are devoted to complaints about how, without them, their households would have no clean towels, living plants or matching socks.

Simon gets many points for effort. He gamely takes Bean across town one Saturday, to get some American-sized passport photos. She sets off looking completely normal, but somehow returns with photos that make her look like a five-year-old psychopath having a bad-hair day.

Since the boys were born, Simon’s incompetence seems less charming. I no longer find it adorably mystifying when he breaks the second hands on all his watches, or reads our expensive English-language magazines in the shower. Some mornings, our whole marriage seems to hinge on the fact that he doesn’t shake the orange juice before he pours it.

For some reason, we mostly fight about food. (I put up a ‘Don’t Snap at Simon’ sign in the kitchen.) He leaves his beloved cheeses unwrapped in the refrigerator, where they quickly dry out. When the boys are a bit older, Simon gets a phone call when he’s in the middle of brushing Leo’s teeth. I take over, only to discover that Leo has an entire dried apricot in his mouth. When I complain, Simon says he feels disempowered by my ‘elaborate rules’.

When I get together with my Anglophone girlfriends, it’s
just
a matter of time before we start venting about our men. At one dinner in Paris, three of the six women at the table discover – in a ricochet of me-too’s – that their husbands all retreat to the bathroom for a long session, just when it’s time to put the kids to bed. Their complaining is so intense, I have to remind myself that these are women in solid marriages; they’re not on the verge of divorce.

When I get together with French women, this type of complaining doesn’t happen. When asked, French women acknowledge that they sometimes have to prod their husbands to do more around the house. Most say they’ve had their sulky moments, when it felt like they were carrying the whole household, while their husbands lay on the couch.

But somehow, in France, this imbalance doesn’t lead to what a writer in the bestselling American anthology
The Bitch in the House
calls ‘the awful, silent process of tallying up and storing away and keeping tabs on what he helped out with and what he did not’. French women are no doubt tired from playing mother, wife and worker simultaneously. But they don’t reflexively blame their husbands for this, or at least not with the venom that Americans women often do.

Possibly, French women are just more private. But even the French mothers I get to know well don’t seem to be secretly boiling over with the belief that the life they have isn’t the one they deserve. Their unhappiness doesn’t manifest as rage against their partners.

Partly, this is because French women don’t expect men to be their equals. They view them as a separate species, which by
nature
isn’t good at booking babysitters, buying tablecloths, or remembering to schedule check-ups with the paediatrician. ‘I think French women accept more the differences between the sexes,’ says Debra Ollivier, author of
What French Women Know
. ‘I don’t think that they expect men to step up to the plate with the same kind of meticulous attention and sense of urgency.’

When the French women I know mention their partners’ inadequacies, it’s to laugh about how adorably inept the men are. ‘They’re just not capable, we’re superior!’ jokes Virginie, as her girlfriends chuckle. Another mother breaks into peals of laughter when she describes how her husband blow-dries her daughter’s hair without brushing it first, so the little girl goes to school looking like she’s just stuck her finger in an electric socket.

This outlook creates a virtuous cycle. French women don’t harp on men about their shortcomings or mistakes. So the men aren’t demoralized. They feel more generous towards their wives, whom they praise for their feats of micromanagement and their command of household details. This praise – instead of the tension and resentment that tends to build in Anglophone households – seems to make the inequality easier to bear. ‘My husband says, “I can’t do what you do,”’ another Parisian mum, Camille, proudly tells me. None of this follows the Anglophone feminist script. But it seems to make things go more smoothly.

Fifty-fifty equality just isn’t the gold standard for the Parisian women I know. Maybe this will change one day. But for now, the mothers I meet care more about finding a balance
that
works. Laurence, a management consultant with three kids, has a husband who works long hours during the week (she has switched to part-time). The couple used to fight all weekend about who does what. But lately Laurence has been urging her husband to go to his Aikido class on Saturday mornings, since he’s more relaxed afterwards. She’d rather do a bit more childcare, in exchange for a spouse who’s cheerful and calm.

French mothers also seem better at giving up some control, and lowering their standards, in exchange for more free time and less stress. ‘You just have to say, I’m going to come home and there’s going to be a week’s worth of laundry in a pile,’ Virginie tells me, when I mention that I’m taking Bean to visit my family for a week, and leaving Simon in Paris with the boys.
⁹