Picnic in Provence (5 page)

French women can be notoriously hard to get to know, but childbearing seems to bring you into a sorority where otherwise off-limits personal topics are discussed with abandon. Juliette tucked her dark hair behind her ear and took a sip of her
blanche.
“No,” she said, “I didn’t breast-feed.
J’avais pas envie
. It just wasn’t for me,” she said casually. No guilt, no judgment.

“Tu fais la rééducation?”
she inquired earnestly, referring to the ten sessions of state-subsidized Kegels that are supposed to keep me from peeing on myself for the rest of my life and, more important, get me back to having sex with my husband in short order.

I’d heard about this from other Americans who’d had babies in France. How shall I put it?
La rééducation périnéale
is basically physical therapy for your vagina. You pick up an electric wand (not unlike a vibrator) at the pharmacy, find a way to discreetly slip it into your purse, then head to the
kiné
’s office—mine works in a nice converted apartment complete with fancy moldings and fireplace. Then, with a mix of electrical stimulation and exercises, the therapist shows you how to tighten all your interior muscles again. The sessions are completely free, and absolutely everyone does it.

Juliette checked a message on her phone. “Don’t wait too long to
faire l’amour,
” she whispered. “Six weeks is ideal.”

I must have looked stricken, or at least not appropriately ecstatic. “
Tu vas voir
. You’ll see,” she said, lightly squeezing my arm. “The day my children were born was the most beautiful day of my life.” She made it sound so simple: she was beautiful, it was beautiful. And that’s when it hit me. For the French, there is clearly no before and after. I was meant to be exactly the same woman, but with a reeducated vagina—and a kid.

N
o,” I grunted, my white-knuckled fingers gripping the footboard of the hospital bed. “I will. Not. Go. Downstairs. The nurse
promised
us a single room. I don’t care if I have this baby right here on the linoleum floor, I’m not going till it’s done.” Even in my slightly altered state, I’d been in France long enough to know that if we went down to the delivery room before this was taken care of, someone would forget, or make a mistake, or give the room away. Giving birth seemed to me a rather private process, and I didn’t relish the idea of spending the first week of motherhood in the same room with another hormonal human and her howling newborn.

Right up till the moment the first contractions hit, I had not made a decision about the epidural. I thought about toughing it out, not because I’m so attached to the cosmic authenticity of natural childbirth but because I was afraid the doctor might paralyze me. It was Friday the fourteenth of August, the eve of the biggest holiday weekend of the year. Surely all the truly competent doctors were on the beach in Saint-Tropez, not stuck here on call with me.

Also, I was in no rush to get downstairs because I knew it wasn’t going to be any cooler down there. The French air-condition their operating theaters, but that’s to keep the machines from overheating, not the people. Ask your average
homme
on the street, and he will tell you that air-conditioning is bad for your health—that it gives you colds, gout, acne, what have you. This idea seems to have its origin in a 1990s outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease spread through the ventilation system at the Hôpital Pompidou in Paris. Cooling systems never got over the bad press, and we pregnant women have been suffering the consequences ever since.

Because it was August, and all normal people were away, the hospital had taken the opportunity to rip up half a wing. A small window in the delivery room was missing its glass; the space was covered with a plastic sheet and sealed with duct tape. I could hear the jackhammers going on the other side. If air-conditioning wasn’t sterile, how about this?

I would tell you what happened next, but I dozed through almost the whole thing. In theory, there are lots of reasons I’d rather have been born in another century: I like chamber music, and I think I would have looked good in a bustle. But here we are in the twenty-first—so give me the drugs. French women seem to be casually pragmatic about this as well as other childbearing rituals. I think this is part of what they mean in France by women’s liberation. To most, natural childbirth is a bit like nineteenth-century dentistry; we’ve moved on.

In between naps, I appeared to be meeting with everyone’s approval. A doctor came in, took a look below the sheet, said, in classic French fashion, “Everything looks great, you don’t need me,” and promptly walked right out again.

The presence of the sheet brings us to the small but not inconsequential question of who looks where. (Add this to the list of things, like nipple cream and the dangers of kitty litter, that I never thought about before getting pregnant.) My gynecologist, who, like me, was a relative newcomer to France, said that when she had her first baby in Paris, her French obstetrician counseled that if—
if
—her husband was present for the birth, she should make sure he didn’t see exactly what was going on down below or he would never want to have sex with her again.

In the States, people put their birthing videos on YouTube, and a friend at a big law firm once got a sonogram picture from a colleague over the office intranet. I’m pretty sure that in the U.S., the privacy ship has sailed. The French take a more discreet tack.

Unsure how to proceed, in the weeks before the delivery I decided to take an informal survey. I began with my friend Keria, a platinum-blond American also married to a Frenchman. Keria is a teacher by day, a jazz singer by night—and the mother of five-month-old Theo. She has the kind of split personality I love: consummately intelligent, cool under fire, but with a gift for high drama and the potty mouth to go with it. We sat down over cocktails one afternoon at a busy intersection near Jaurès, the alcohol carefully timed to fit between her breast-feedings. “Oh, yeah,” said Keria when I asked her where her husband was positioned during the birth. “That’s a big ten-four. I told Marco, ‘Eyes forward, mister.’ Nobody needs to see that shit.”

Frankly, I’m with her.

It may sound old-fashioned, but I like the idea of maintaining an aura of mystery, not to mention dignity, during childbirth. I think of it like this: When my parents were first married, my father made the mistake of offering my mother an automatic garage-door opener for Valentine’s Day. Forever after, practical gifts were outlawed in our house. No one wants to have sex with a garage-door opener.

AFTER
THE STRONG
epidural, the next few hours were mostly hurry-up-and-wait. I felt like I was meeting a train, the kind of big steam locomotive that makes a satisfying hiss when it pulls into the station and cuts the engine. I imagined myself in a long dress, a hat with a veil, a big bunch of roses in the crook of my arm. I was waiting for an honored guest—who just happened to be staying eighteen years. To make matters more interesting, we didn’t know exactly who would be stepping off onto the platform.

Since we’d decided we didn’t want to know the sex of the baby in advance, speculation these last few weeks had been intense.
“Alors, comment va le fiston?”
said the Tunisian man who sells me my melons at the Saturday market as he handed me a sweet juicy slice. He is sure that it is a boy. I agree. As the only daughter of a mother who is one of a pair of daughters, I always imagined myself as the mother of a tiara-obsessed little girl. But my life is already so different from what I imagined it would be—different country, different man, different vegetables—that I’ve learned to enjoy (okay,
tolerate
) the off-piste-ness of it all. If I can stand the suspense, life never gives me exactly what I want—it gives me something better.

After a mere six hours in the delivery room, the
sage-femme
laid the baby on my chest, curled up like a cat, warm and sleepy. I brushed my lips to a tuft of hair. “Is it a boy or a girl?”

“Oh,” said Gwendal, slightly dazed. “I forgot to look.”

Gwendal picked up the baby, long skinny legs dangling in the air. The melon man was right: it was our son.

AFTER A PERFECTLY
normal birth, Alexandre and I spent six days in the hospital, for free. I repeat: for free. I don’t know what that sounds like to the rest of the civilized world, but for an American, that’s like a week in Aruba. The single room I had huffed and puffed my way into was a whopping 367 euros extra on our private insurance. I doubt that amount would cover the cost of the rubbery chocolate pudding on my lunch tray in the States. Yes, you have to bring your own diapers. It seems a small price to pay for universal health care.

I like to think of that precious week as what the French call a
palier de décompression
—the time you take to decompress when you come up from scuba diving; if you go too fast, your head is going to explode. The nurses teach you how to bathe the baby, how to breast-feed. If you need extra help after you leave the hospital, you can arrange for home visits from a
sage-femme
. For a few days they let you float in a liminal space—senses are heightened. Somewhere between the girl you once were and the mother you are in the process of becoming.

I WANTED TO
get to the market early so I wouldn’t roll over too many toes with the stroller. Gwendal had gone back to work after his eleven-day paternity leave (another federally mandated Gallic perk) and Alexandre and I had some time to get to know each other one on one. I tend to do the bulk of my worrying in advance, so as soon as he arrived, most of my existential angst about motherhood evaporated, replaced with a sleepy routine of feeding and changing and napping and bathing.

I showed Alexandre Paris the way I would a tourist friend, albeit one who comes with a lot of excess baggage. Bouncing the stroller down two flights of spiral stairs was a challenge. Whether to leave the baby at the top of the stairs or the bottom while I performed this operation felt like a life-or-death decision. (I opted to leave Alexandre in his seat just outside our front door; at least anyone trying to snatch him would have to get through me first.)

After ten months of pasteurized cheese and a week of hospital food, one not inconsiderable pleasure of coming home was access to my own refrigerator, and the right to fill it with all the forbidden favorites I hadn’t tasted in almost a year. Friends rushed over to meet the baby bearing seasonally inappropriate treats: squat glass jars of foie gras and sweet golden Sauternes wine,
saucisson
marbled with fat. Watching the butcher weigh my half pound of chicken livers felt like catching Santa in the act. The good sushi place, the subject of so many midnight reveries these past few months, wouldn’t open for another ten days.

My first stop at the market was the fishmonger. The team greeted Alexandre like he was a long-lost nephew; one of the men dangled a sardine over the carriage in welcome. I chose two whole sea bass, slick and glistening in the early September light, and some dark meaty tuna steaks—I would make tartare to tide us over until the chirashi got back from vacation.

Personally, I love dinner that stares back. Gutting my first fish in Paris was an initiation on par with losing my virginity—who knew there was such a dangerous, bloodthirsty individual hiding behind this neo-Victorian facade?

I’ve also been practicing my fifteen-minute meals, because as much as I love to putter around the kitchen, my time there is likely to be reduced in the coming months (and I would hate to fall asleep standing at the stove). Whole fish doesn’t sound like fast food, but it is. You put in the time later, boning it at the table (which is better for digestion and conversation). I know most Americans don’t like to work for their food, but deconstructing a whole fish is one of my favorite culinary activities. It looks so decadent on the plate—you feel you are playing a game (Operation comes to mind). The protective skin makes quick methods like broiling a real option; there’s no risk of dry, charred flesh. The eyeball is basically like one of those Purdue self-timers—when it pops, chances are it’s done.

My Tunisian friend gave me an extra melon for the baby, gratified to know his prediction was correct. I weaved between the morning shoppers, past the roasting chickens and sizzling potatoes, past the last blackberries and the ripening figs, to my cheese monger, Madame Richard.

Madame Richard must be nearing seventy; she wears her hair in a bleached-blond pixie cut and has an affection for hot-pink parkas. She took a motherly interest in my pregnancy. In fact, I’ve found the relationship between a woman and her cheese monger to be one of the more intimate in French life. They know if you buy quite a lot that you are having important guests or your in-laws are in town. They know if you buy just a little that you are on a diet or your husband has a problem with his cholesterol. They know your moods, your desires. They know if you’re feeling brave enough for a sharp blue or need to hibernate with the rich drippy comfort of a Mont d’Or so ripe you could serve it with a spoon.

Madame Richard was among the first people in Paris to find out I was pregnant. Sometime in February, I rolled up with my red polka-dot granny cart and said I had a friend coming for dinner who was expecting and couldn’t eat raw-milk cheese. The next Saturday, my poise and creativity somehow deserting me, I tried the same lame excuse. No doubt she had seen this look on the faces of a thousand women, cheeks flushed with excitement, nerves, and the genuine regret of knowing they will spend the next nine months without a single mouthful of pungent Camembert. Madame Richard smiled knowingly and gently ushered me toward all things pasteurized.

When she spotted me with the stroller, Madame Richard quickly handed the change to her previous client and bounced out from behind the counter.
“Félicitations,”
she said, kissing me on both cheeks.
“Coucou, toi,”
she said, leaning to get a good look.

While she was staring adoringly at Alexandre, I was staring adoringly at the cheese. I chose the drippiest, moldiest, smelliest one I could find—an Époisses soaked in marc (a kind of grappa made from the leftovers of Bordeaux grapes). I tucked the round of red-and-white-checkered waxed paper into the basket of the stroller and rolled down the hill toward home.

SO THIS IS
the supermom challenge: Two of the most important events of my life—the birth of my son and the publication of my first book—are happening right around the same time. My editor in New York called only once, just as I was going into labor. When I arrived home, I reviewed the galleys of
Lunch in Paris
with two-week-old Alexandre asleep in my lap.

I was sitting at my desk wearing a hands-free breast pump: a 1980s-Madonna-esque contraption engineered, at the suggestion of a very organized American friend, by cutting two holes in an old sports bra to hold the suction cups in place. Three weeks in, I was getting antsy, bored, nutty. There seems to be a dearth of vocabulary for describing these feelings. The modern cult of motherhood has left women with very few options; the only acceptable emotions are pure joy and/or jocular exhaustion. I was turning in circles—dying to get out of the house, but loath to leave the cocoon, the safe little triangle between the café, the market, and the corner
boulangerie
.

As my first real outing, I’d decided to accept an invitation to the new-members cocktail party of the Association of American Wives of Europeans. Putting myself into smiley networking mode was a bigger production than it used to be. I stared into my closet, eventually choosing a black Donna Karan dress with an Empire waist that I thought was fairly flattering. But even as I took it off the hanger, I wavered. In the English tradition, Empire waists are associated with ballroom scenes in Jane Austen novels, but in France, there’s something about a seam underneath your bust that just screams
Lactating over here!