French Children Don't Throw Food (3 page)

Despite my doubts about Paris, I’m still pretty sure about Simon. I’ve become resigned to the fact that ‘swarthy’ inevitably comes with ‘messy’. And I’ve got better at reading his micro-expressions. A flicker of a smile means that he’s got the joke. The rare full smile suggests high praise. He even occasionally says ‘that was funny’ in a monotone.

I’m also encouraged by the fact that, for a curmudgeon, Simon has dozens of devoted, long-time friends. Perhaps it’s that, behind the layers of irony, he is charmingly helpless. He can’t drive a car, blow up a balloon or fold clothes without using his teeth. He fills our refrigerator with unopened tins of food. For expediency’s sake, he cooks everything at the highest temperature. (University friends later tell me he was known for serving drumsticks that were charred on the outside and still frozen on the inside.) When I show him how to make salad dressing using oil and vinegar, he writes down the recipe, and still pulls it out years later whenever he makes dinner.

Also to Simon’s credit, nothing about France ever bothers him. He’s in his element being a foreigner. His parents are anthropologists who brought him up all over the world and trained him from birth to delight in local customs. He’d lived in six countries (including a year in America) by the time he was ten. He acquires languages the way I acquire shoes.

I decide that, for Simon’s sake, I’ll give France a real go. We get married outside Paris at a thirteenth-century chateau,
which
is surrounded by a moat (I ignore the symbolism). In the name of marital harmony, we rent a larger apartment. I place a massive order with Ikea for bookshelves, and position spare-change bowls in every room. I try to channel my inner pragmatist instead of my inner neurotic. In restaurants, I start ordering straight from the menu, and nibbling at the occasional hunk of
foie gras
. My French starts to sound less like excellent Spanish and more like very bad French. Before long I’m almost settled: I have a home office, a book deadline, and even a few new friends.

Simon and I have talked about babies. We both want one. I’d like three, in fact. And I like the idea of having them in Paris, where they’ll be effortlessly bilingual and authentically international. Even if they grow up to be geeks, they can mention ‘growing up in Paris’ and be instantly cool.

I’m worried about getting pregnant. I’ve spent much of my adult life trying, very successfully, not to, so I have no idea whether I’m any good at the reverse. This turns out to be as whirlwind as our courtship. One day I’m Googling ‘How to get pregnant’. The next, it seems, I’m looking at two pink lines on a French pregnancy test.

I’m ecstatic. But alongside my joy comes a surge of anxiety. My resolve to become less Carrie Bradshaw and more Catherine Deneuve immediately collapses. This doesn’t seem like the moment to go native. I’m possessed by the idea that I’ve got to oversee my pregnancy, and do it exactly right. Hours after telling Simon the good news, I go online to scour English-language pregnancy websites. Then I rush to buy some
pregnancy
guides, at an English bookstore near the Louvre. I want to know, in plain English, exactly what to worry about.

Within days I’m on prenatal vitamins and addicted to BabyCentre’s ‘Is it safe?’ column. Is it safe to eat non-organic produce while pregnant? Is it safe to be around computers all day? Is it safe to wear high heels, binge on sweets at Halloween, or holiday at high altitudes?

What makes ‘Is it safe?’ so compulsive is that it creates new anxieties (Is it safe to make photocopies? Is it safe to swallow semen?) but then refuses to allay them with a simple yes or no. Instead, expert respondents disagree with each other and equivocate. ‘Is it safe to get a manicure while I’m pregnant?’ Well yes, but chronic exposure to the solvents used in salons isn’t good for you. Is it safe to go bowling? Well, yes and no.

The Anglophones I know also believe that pregnancy – and then motherhood – come with homework. The first assignment is choosing from among myriad parenting styles. Everyone I speak to swears by a different book. I buy many of them. But instead of making me feel more prepared, having so much conflicting advice makes babies themselves seem enigmatic and unknowable. Who they are, and what they need, seems to depend on which book you read.

Another consequence of this independent study is that we Anglophone mothers-to-be become experts in everything that can go wrong. A pregnant Englishwoman who’s visiting Paris declares, over lunch, that there’s a five in one thousand chance her baby will be stillborn. She says she knows that saying this is gruesome and pointless, but she can’t help
herself
. A Londoner I know, who unfortunately has a doctorate in public health, spends much of her first trimester cataloguing the baby’s risks of contracting every possible malady.

I’m surrounded by this anxiety when we visit Simon’s family in London (I’ve decided to believe that his parents adore me). I’m sitting in a café when a well-dressed woman interrupts me to describe a new study showing that having a lot of caffeine increases the risk of miscarriage. To stress her credibility, she says she’s
married to a doctor
. I don’t care who her husband is. I’m just irritated by her assumption that I haven’t read that study. Of course I have; I’m trying to live on one cup a week.

With so much studying and worrying to do, being pregnant increasingly feels like a full-time job. I spend less and less time working on my book, which I’m supposed to hand in before the baby comes. Instead, I commune with other pregnant Anglophones in due-date-cohort chat rooms. Like me, these women are used to customizing their environments, even if it’s just to get soy milk in their coffees. And like me, they find the primitive, mammalian event happening inside their bodies to be uncomfortably out of their control. Worrying – like clutching the armrest during aircraft turbulence – at least makes us feel like it’s not.

The English-language pregnancy press, which I can easily access from Paris, seems to be lying in wait to channel this anxiety. It focuses on the one thing that pregnant women can definitely control: food. ‘As you raise fork to mouth, consider: “Is this a bite that will benefit my baby?” If it is, chew away …’
explain
the authors of
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
, the famously worrying – and bestselling – pregnancy manual.

I’m aware that the prohibitions in my books aren’t equally important. Cigarettes and alcohol are definitely bad, whereas shellfish, cold meat, raw eggs and unpasteurized cheese are only dangerous if they’ve been contaminated with something rare like listeria or salmonella. But to be safe, I take every prohibition literally. It’s easy enough to avoid oysters and
foie gras
. But – since I’m in France – I’m panicked about cheese. ‘Is the Parmesan on my pasta pasteurized?’ I ask flabbergasted waiters. Simon bears the brunt of my angst. Did he scrub the chopping board after cutting up that raw chicken? Does he really love our unborn child?

What to Expect
contains something called the Pregnancy Diet, which its creators claim can ‘improve fetal brain development’, ‘reduce the risk of certain birth defects’ and ‘may even make it more likely that your child will grow to be a healthier adult’. Every morsel seems to represent potential SAT points. Never mind hunger: if I find myself short of a protein portion at the end of the day, the Pregnancy Diet says I should cram in a final serving of egg salad before bedtime.

They had me at ‘diet’. After years of dieting to slim down, it’s thrilling to be ‘dieting’ to gain weight. It feels like a reward for having spent years thin enough to nab a husband. My online forums are filled with women who’ve put on forty or fifty pounds over the recommended limits. Of course we’d all rather resemble those compactly pregnant celebrities in designer gowns, or the models on the cover of
Fit Pregnancy
.
Some
women I know actually do. But a competing message says that we should give ourselves a free pass. ‘Go ahead and EAT’, says the chummy author of the
Best Friends’ Guide to Pregnancy
, which I’ve been cuddling up with in bed. ‘What other joys are there for pregnant women?’

Tellingly, the Pregnancy Diet says that I can ‘cheat’ with the occasional fast-food cheeseburger or glazed doughnut. In fact, pregnancy seems like one big cheat. Lists of pregnancy cravings read like a catalogue of foods that women have been denying themselves since adolescence: cheesecake, milk-shakes, macaroni and cheese and ice cream cake. I crave lemon on everything, and entire loaves of bread.

Someone tells me that Jane Birkin says she can never remember whether it was ‘
un
baguette’ or ‘
une
baguette’, so she just orders ‘
deux baguettes
’. I can’t find the quote. But whenever I go to the bakery, I follow this strategy. Then – surely unlike the twiggy Birkin – I eat them both.

I’m not just losing my figure. I’m also losing a sense of myself as someone who once went on dinner dates and worried about the Palestinians. I now spend my free time studying new-model buggies and memorizing the possible causes of colic. This evolution from ‘woman’ to ‘mum’ feels inevitable. A fashion spread in a pregnancy magazine that I pick up on a trip to New York shows big-bellied women in floppy shirts and men’s pyjama bottoms, and says that these outfits are worthy of wearing all day. Perhaps to get out of ever finishing my book, I fantasize about ditching journalism and training as a midwife.

Actual sex is the final, symbolic domino to fall. Although it’s technically permitted, books like
What to Expect
presume that sex during pregnancy is inherently fraught. ‘What got you into this situation in the first place may now have become one of your biggest problems,’ the authors warn. They go on to describe eighteen factors that may inhibit your sex life, including ‘fear that the introduction of the penis into the vagina will cause infection’. If a woman does find herself having sex, they recommend a new low in multitasking: using the moment to do pelvic-floor exercises, which tone your birth canal in preparation for childbirth.

I’m not sure that anyone follows all this advice. Like me, they probably just absorb a certain worried tone and state of mind. Even from abroad, it’s contagious. Given how susceptible I am, it’s probably better that I’m far from the source. Maybe the distance will give me some perspective on parenting.

I’m already starting to suspect that raising a child will be quite different in France. When I sit in cafés in Paris, with my belly pushing up against the table, no one jumps in to warn me about the hazards of caffeine. On the contrary, they light cigarettes right next to me. The only question strangers ask, when they notice my belly, is
Vous attendez un enfant?
– are you waiting for a child? It takes me a while to realize that they don’t think I have a lunch date with a truant six-year-old. It’s French for ‘Are you pregnant?’

I am waiting for a baby. It’s probably the most important thing I’ve ever done. Despite my qualms about Paris, there’s
something
nice about doing this waiting in a place where I’m practically immune to other people’s judgements. Though Paris is one of the most cosmopolitan cities on earth, I feel like I’m off the grid. In French I don’t understand name-dropping, school histories and other little hints that, to a French person, signal someone’s social rank and importance. And since I’m a foreigner, they don’t know my status either.

When I packed up and moved to Paris, I never imagined that the move would be permanent. Now I’m starting to worry that Simon likes being a foreigner a bit too much. After living in all those countries while he was growing up, it’s his natural state. He confesses that he feels connected to lots of people and cities, and doesn’t need any one place to be his official home. He calls this style ‘semi-detached’, like a house in a London suburb.

Already, several of our Anglophone friends have left France, usually when their jobs changed. But our jobs don’t require us to be here. The cheese plate aside, we’re really here for no reason. And ‘no reason’ – plus a baby – is starting to look like the strongest reason of all.

2

Paris Is Burping

OUR NEW APARTMENT
isn’t in the paris of postcards. It’s off a narrow street in a Chinese garment district, where we’re constantly jostled by men hauling rubbish bags full of clothes. There’s no sign that we’re in the same city as the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame or the elegantly winding river Seine.

Yet somehow this new neighbourhood works for us. Simon and I stake out our respective cafés nearby, and retreat each morning for some convivial solitude. Here, too, socializing follows unfamiliar rules. It’s OK to banter with the staff, but generally not with the other patrons (unless they’re at the bar, and talking to the barman too). Though I’m off the grid, I do need human contact. One morning I try to strike up a conversation with another regular – a man I’ve seen every day for months. I tell him, honestly, that he looks like an American I know.

‘Who, George Clooney?’ he asks snidely. We never speak again.

I make more headway with our new neighbours. The
crowded
street outside our house opens on to a quiet cobblestone courtyard, where low-slung houses and apartments face each other. The residents are a mix of artists, young professionals, mysteriously underemployed people and elderly women who hobble precariously on the uneven stones. We all live so close together that they have to acknowledge our presence, though a few still manage not to.

It helps that my next-door neighbour, an architect named Anne, is due a few months before me. Though I’m caught up in my Anglophone whirlwind of eating and worrying, I can’t help but notice that Anne and the other pregnant French women I come to know handle their pregnancies very differently.

For starters, they don’t treat pregnancy like an independent research project. There are plenty of French parenting books, magazines and websites. But these aren’t required reading, and nobody seems to consume them in bulk. Certainly no Frenchwoman I meet is comparison-shopping for a parenting philosophy, or can refer to different techniques by name. There’s no new, must-read book, nor do the experts have quite the same sway.