French Children Don't Throw Food (4 page)

‘These books can be useful to people who lack confidence, but I don’t think you can raise a child while reading a book. You have to go with your
feeling
,’ one Parisian mother says.

The French women I meet aren’t at all blasé about motherhood, or about their babies’ well-being. They’re awed, concerned, and aware of the immense life transformation that they’re about to undergo. But they signal this differently from
Anglophone
women. We typically demonstrate our commitment by worrying, and by showing how much we’re willing to sacrifice, even while pregnant. French women signal their commitment by projecting calm, and flaunting the fact that they haven’t renounced pleasure.

A photospread in
Neuf Mois
shows a heavily pregnant brunette in lacy ensembles, biting into pastries and licking jam from her finger. ‘During pregnancy, it’s important to pamper your inner woman,’ another article says. ‘Above all, resist the urge to borrow your partner’s shirts.’ A list of aphrodisiacs for mums-to-be includes chocolate, ginger, cinnamon and – this being France – mustard.

I realize that ordinary French women take these calls to arms seriously when Samia, a mother who lives in my neighbour hood, offers me a tour of her apartment. She’s the daughter of Algerian immigrants, and grew up in Chartres. I’m admiring her soaring ceilings and chandeliers, when she picks up a stack of photographs.

‘In this one I was pregnant, and here I was pregnant.
Et voilà
, the big belly!’ she says, handing me several pictures. It’s true, she’s extremely pregnant in the photographs. She’s also extremely topless.

I’m shocked, first of all, because we’ve been using the formal ‘
vous
’ with each other, and now she’s casually handed me naked pictures of herself. But I’m also surprised that the pictures are so glamorous. Samia looks like one of those lingerie models from the magazines,
sans
most of the lingerie.

Granted, Samia is always a bit dramatic. Most days she drops
off
her two-year-old at daycare looking like she just stepped out of a film noir: a beige trench coat clinched tightly at the waist, black eyeliner and a fresh coat of shiny red lipstick. She’s the only French person I know who actually wears a beret.

Nevertheless, Samia has merely embraced the conventional French wisdom that the forty-week metamorphosis into mother shouldn’t make you any less of a woman. French pregnancy magazines don’t just say that pregnant women can have sex; they explain exactly how to do it.
Neuf Mois
maps out ten different sexual positions including ‘horseback rider’, ‘reverse horseback rider’, ‘the greyhound’ (which it calls ‘
un grand classique
’) and ‘the chair’. ‘The oarsmen’ has six steps, concluding with ‘In rocking her torso back and forth, Madame provokes delicious frictions …’

Neuf Mois
also weighs in on the merits of various sex toys for pregnant women (yes to ‘geisha balls’, no to vibrators and anything electric). ‘Don’t hesitate! Everyone wins, even the baby. During an orgasm, he feels the “Jacuzzi effect” as if he was massaged in the water,’ the text explains. A father in Paris warns my husband not to stand at the ‘business end’ during the birth, to preserve my feminine mystique.

French parents-to-be aren’t just calmer about sex. They’re also calmer about food. Samia makes a conversation with her obstetrician sound like a vaudeville routine:

‘I said, “Doctor, I’m pregnant, but I adore oysters. What do I do?” He said, “Eat oysters!”’ she recalls. ‘He explained to me, “You seem like a fairly reasonable person. Wash things well. If you eat sushi, eat it in a good place.”’

The stereotype that French women smoke and drink through their pregnancies is very outdated. Most women I meet say that they had either the occasional glass of champagne, or no alcohol at all. I see a pregnant woman smoking exactly once, on the street. It could have been her once-a-month cigarette. I leave her alone.

The point isn’t that anything goes. It’s that women should be calm and sensible. The French mothers I meet distinguish between the foods and substances that are almost definitely damaging and those that are only dangerous if they’re contaminated. Another woman I meet in the neighbourhood is Caroline, a physiotherapist who’s seven months pregnant. She says her doctor never mentioned any food restrictions, and she never asked. ‘It’s better not to know!’ she says. She tells me that she eats steak
tartare
, and of course joined the family for
foie gras
over Christmas. She just makes sure to eat it in good restaurants, or at home. Her one concession is that when she eats unpasteurized cheese, she cuts off the rind.

I don’t actually witness any pregnant women eating oysters. If I did, I might have to throw my enormous body over the table to stop them. They’d certainly be surprised. It’s clear why French waiters are baffled when I interrogate them about the ingredients in each dish. French women generally don’t make a fuss about this.

The French pregnancy press doesn’t dwell on unlikely worst-case scenarios.
Au contraire
, it suggests that what mothers-to-be need most is serenity. ‘Nine months of spa’ is the headline in one French magazine.
The Guide for New
Mothers
, a free booklet prepared with support from the French health ministry, says its eating guidelines favour the baby’s ‘harmonious growth’, and that women should find ‘inspiration’ from different flavours. ‘Pregnancy should be a time of great happiness!’ it declares.

Is all this safe? It sure seems like it. France trumps the US and Britain on nearly every measure of maternal and infant health. The infant mortality rate is 29 per cent lower in France than it is in the UK, and the under-five mortality rate is 50 per cent lower in France.
¹
According to Unicef, about 6.6 per cent of French babies have a low birth weight, compared to about 7.5 per cent of American babies.

What really drives home the French message that pregnancy should be savoured isn’t the statistics or the pregnant women I meet. It’s the pregnant cat. She’s a slender, grey-eyed cat who lives in our courtyard and is about to deliver. Her owner, a pretty painter in her forties, tells me that she plans to have the cat spayed after the kittens are born. But she couldn’t bear to neuter the cat before she had gone through a pregnancy. ‘I wanted her to have that experience,’ she says.

Of course French mothers-to-be aren’t just calmer than we are. Like the cat, they’re also skinnier. Some pregnant French women do get fat. In general, body-fat ratios seem to increase the further you get from central Paris. But the Parisians I see all around me look alarmingly like those celebrities on the red carpet. They have basketball-sized baby bumps, pasted on to
skinny
legs, arms and hips. Viewed from the back, you usually can’t tell they’re expecting.

Enough pregnant women have these proportions that I stop gawking when I pass one on the street or in the supermarket. This French norm is strictly codified. English-language pregnancy calculators tell me that – with my height and build – I should gain up to 35 pounds during my pregnancy. But French calculators tell me to gain no more than 26.5 pounds (by the time I see this, it’s too late).

How do French women stay within these limits? Social pressure helps. Friends, sisters and mothers-in-law openly transmit the message that pregnancy isn’t a free pass to gorge. (I’m spared the worst of this because I don’t have French in-laws.) Audrey, a French journalist with three kids, tells me that she confronted her German sister-in-law, who had started out tall and svelte.

‘The moment she got pregnant she became enormous. And I saw her and I found it monstrous. She told me, “No, it’s fine, I’m entitled to relax. I’m entitled to get fat. It’s no big deal,” et cetera. For us, the French, it’s horrible to say that. We would
never
say that.’ She adds a jab disguised as sociology: ‘I think the Americans and the Northern Europeans are a lot more relaxed than us when it comes to aesthetics.’

Everyone in France takes for granted that pregnant women should battle to keep their figures intact. While my podiatrist is working on my feet, she suddenly announces that I should rub sweet almond oil on my belly, to avoid stretch marks (I do this dutifully, and get none). Parenting magazines run long
features
on how to minimize the damage that pregnancy does to your breasts (don’t gain too much weight, and take a daily jet of cold water to the chest).

French doctors treat the weight-gain limits like holy edicts. Anglophones in Paris are routinely shocked when their obstetricians scold them for going even slightly over. ‘It’s just the French men trying to keep their women slim,’ a British woman married to a Frenchman huffed, recalling her pre-natal appointments in Paris. Paediatricians feel free to comment on a mother’s post-pregnancy belly when she brings her baby for a check-up. (Mine will just cast a worried glance.)

The main reason that pregnant French women don’t get fat is that they are very careful not to eat too much. In French pregnancy guides, there are no late-night binges on egg salad, or instructions to eat way past hunger in order to nourish the fetus. Women who are ‘waiting for a child’ are supposed to eat the same balanced meals as any healthy adult. One guide says that if a woman is still hungry, she should add an afternoon snack consisting of, for instance, ‘a sixth of a baguette’, a piece of cheese and a glass of water.

In the French view, a pregnant woman’s food cravings are a nuisance to be vanquished. French women don’t let themselves believe – as I’ve heard Anglophone women claim – that the fetus wants cheesecake. The French
Guidebook for Mothers to Be
says that instead of giving in to a craving, women should distract their bodies by eating an apple or a raw carrot.

This isn’t all as austere as it sounds. French women don’t see pregnancy as a free pass to overeat, in part because they
haven’t
been denying themselves the foods they love – or secretly bingeing on those foods – for most of their adult lives. ‘Too often, American women eat on the sly, and the result is much more guilt than pleasure,’ Mireille Guiliano explains in her intelligent book
French Women Don’t Get Fat
. ‘Pretending such pleasures don’t exist, or trying to eliminate them from your diet for an extended time, will probably lead to weight gain.’

About halfway through my pregnancy, I hear that there’s a support group in Paris for English-speaking parents. I immediately recognize that these are my people. Members of the group, called Message, will tell you where to find an English-speaking therapist, or buy longed-for foods like English bacon, Marmite, and something called Frazzles.

Message members find a lot to like about France. In online forums, they marvel at the fresh bread, the cheap prescription drugs, and their toddlers’ demands for Camembert after a meal. One member chuckles that her five-year-old plays ‘going on strike’ with his Playmobil figures.

But the group is also a bulwark against what are seen as the darker parts of French parenting. Members exchange the phone numbers of English-speaking birth assistants, sell each other breastfeeding pillows, and commiserate about French medicine’s penchant for giving kids suppositories. One member I know was so reluctant to subject her daughter to a French state nursery school that she enrolled her in a brand-new Montessori, where the little girl was – for quite a while – the only student.

Like me, these women see being pregnant as an excuse to bond, worry, shop and eat. They fortify each other against the social pressure to lose their baby weight. ‘At some point I’ll get around to it,’ one new mother writes. ‘I’m not going to waste precious time weighing out lettuce leaves now.’

The salient dilemma, among pregnant Message members and other Anglophones I know, is
how
to give birth. I meet an American in Rome who delivered her baby in an Italian wine vat (filled with water, not Pinot Grigio). A friend in Miami read that the pain of childbirth is just a cultural construct, so she trained to birth her twins using only yoga breaths. In our Message-sponsored parenting class, there’s a woman who plans to fly home to Sydney for an authentic Australian delivery.

Birth, like most everything else, is something we try to customize. My obstetrician says she once received a four-page birth plan from an English-speaking patient, instructing her to massage the woman’s clitoris after the delivery. The uterine contractions from the woman’s orgasm were supposed to help expel the placenta. Interestingly, this woman’s birth plan also specified that both of her parents should be allowed in the delivery room. (‘I said, “No way.” I didn’t want to be arrested,’ my doctor recalls.)

Amid all this talk about giving birth, I don’t hear anyone mention that the last time the World Health Organization ranked healthcare systems, France’s was first, while Britain’s was eighteenth (America’s was thirty-seventh).
²
Instead, we Anglos focus on how the French system is over-medicalized and hostile to the ‘natural’. Pregnant Message members fret
that
French doctors will induce labour, force them to have epidurals, then secretly bottle-feed their newborns so they won’t be able to breastfeed. We’ve all been reading the English-language pregnancy press, which emphasizes the most minute risks of epidurals.

Those among us who deliver ‘naturally’ strut around like war heroes. An English mother tells me that when she asked for an epidural back in Brighton, ‘the midwife asked, “Why do you want an epidural? Are you afraid?” They treated me like a pansy.’ A top British midwife has called for more women to experience the full pain of childbirth, in part to prepare them for looking after an infant.
³

Despite being the birthplace of natural-birth guru Dr Fernand Lamaze, epidurals are now extremely common in France. In Paris’s top maternity hospitals and clinics, about 87 per cent of women have epidurals,
⁴
on average (not counting C-sections). In some hospitals it’s 98 or 99 per cent.

Very few women make a fuss about this. French mums often ask me where I plan to deliver, but never how. They don’t seem to care. In France, the way you give birth doesn’t situate you within a value system or define the sort of parent you’ll be. It is, for the most part, a way of getting your baby safely from your uterus into your arms.