Bringing Up Bebe (14 page)

Dr. Bitoun says that in his years of campaigning for breastfeeding, he’s found that French mothers generally aren’t won over by the health arguments involving IQ points and secretory IgA. What does persuade them to nurse, he says, is the claim that both they and the baby will enjoy it. “We know that the pleasure argument is the only thing that works,” he says.

Many French mothers would surely like to breast-feed longer than they do. But they don’t want to do it under moral duress or flaunt it at two-year-olds’ birthdays. Powdered milk may be worse for babies, but it no doubt makes the early months of motherhood a lot more relaxing for French moms.

French mothers
may be relaxed about not breast-feeding, but they aren’t relaxed about getting back in shape after they give birth. I’m shocked when I find out that the skinny waitress at the café where I go to write most days has a six-year-old. I had taken her for a twenty-three-year-old hipster.

When I tell her about the expression “MILF” (“Mom I’d Like to Fuck”), she thinks it’s hilarious. There’s no French-language equivalent. In France, there’s no a priori reason why a woman wouldn’t be sexy just because she happens to have children. It’s not uncommon to hear a Frenchman say that being a mother gives a woman an appealing air of
plenitude
(happiness and fullness of spirit).

Of course some American moms quickly shed their baby weight, too. But it’s easy to find role models urging women in the other direction. A “New-Mom Makeover” fashion spread in
American Baby
magazine shows three embarrassed, still slightly chubby women smiling un sen eovcomfortably in loose-fitting dresses. They’ve strategically positioned their toddlers in front of their hips. The text is unapologetic: “Giving birth changes your body, and becoming a mom changes your life,” it says, before singing the praises of drawstring pants.

For some American moms, there’s something morally righteous about committing to motherhood at the expense of their bodies. It’s like giving yourself over to a higher cause. A sports-marketing consultant from Connecticut, who has a six-month-old, tells me that a Frenchwoman showed up at her local playgroup recently and immediately asked the group, in what I imagine to be a charming Gallic accent, “Okay,
zo
how
eez
everyone losing
ze
weight?” According to the consultant, she and the other American mothers fell silent. This wasn’t something they usually discussed. Sure, they would have loved to snap their fingers and knock off twenty pounds. But none of them were losing much weight. It seemed selfish to take time away from their babies to tend to their fat or even to talk too much about it.

You won’t silence any rooms in Paris by asking how new mothers lose their baby weight. Just as there’s enormous social pressure for women not to gain too much weight while they’re pregnant, there’s similar pressure to shed the weight soon after they give birth.

The sister of the sports-marketing consultant is my American friend Nancy, who lives in Paris and has a son with her French boyfriend. The two sisters, who even look alike, are a kind of social experiment. Just by virtue of where they live and who their partners are, they’re facing opposite social pressures. Nancy, the sister in Paris, tells me that a few months after she gave birth, her French boyfriend began needling her to stop wearing sweatpants and to shed her spare tire. As an incentive, he offered to take her shopping for new clothes.

Nancy says she was both surprised and offended. Like her sister in Connecticut, she had imagined herself to be in a protected “mom zone,” where she got a pass on her appearance for a while so she could devote herself to looking after the baby. But Nancy’s French boyfriend was working from a different script. He still viewed her fully as a woman and felt entitled to the aesthetic benefits that go with that. He was equally surprised and bothered that she was willing to just give that up.

In France, three months seems to be the magic number: Frenchwomen of all ages keep telling me they “got back their
ligne
” (figure) by three months postpartum. Audrey, a French journalist, tells me over coffee that she got her figure back right away after both of her pregnancies—one of which was with twins. “Of course. It was natural,” she says. “You too, no?” (I was already sitting down when she arrived at the café.)

As a foreigner who’s not married to a Frenchman, I’ve excused myself from the three-month rule. I’m not sure I even heard about it until Bean was six months old. My body has charmingly decided to store its extra bulk around my belly and hips, giving the impression that I might be holding on to at least the placenta.

I’d surely be skinnier if I had French in-laws to needle me. It seems that just as obesity spreads through social networks, so does thinness. If everyone around you a s arws ssumes that they’re going to drop the extra pounds, you’re more likely to actually do it. (It’s also easier to lose weight if you haven’t gained too much.)

To lose their baby weight, Frenchwomen seem to do a slightly more intensified version of what they do the rest of the time.

“I pay a lot of attention,” is how my friend Virginie, a svelte mother of three, explains it to me over lunch one day, as I gorge on a giant bowl of Cambodian noodle soup. (Any country that France has occupied or colonized is overrepresented in cheap, delicious ethnic restaurants in Paris.)

Virginie says she never goes on a diet, known in French as a
régime
. She just pays a lot of attention, some of the time.

“What do you mean?” I ask Virginie between slurps.

“No bread,” she says, firmly.

“No bread?” I repeat, incredulous.

“No bread,” Virginie says, with steely, calm conviction.

Virginie doesn’t mean no bread ever. She means no bread during the week, from Monday to Friday. On the weekends, and on the occasional night out during the week, she says she eats whatever she wants.

“You mean ‘whatever you want’ in moderation, right?” I ask.

“No, I eat whatever I want,” she says, with that conviction again.

This is similar to what Mireille Guiliano prescribes in
French Women Don’t Get Fat.
(Guiliano suggests taking just one day “off,” and even then not overdoin
g it too much.) It’s inspiring to see someone who’s actually implementing this, evidently with great success.

Paying attention may be another example of Frenchwomen intuitively following the best science. Researchers have found that the best way to lose weight and keep it off is to carefully monitor yourself—for instance, by keeping a food diary and weighing yourself daily.
³
They have also discovered that people have more willpower when they don’t rule out ever eating certain foods but rather tell themselves that they will eat those foods later
⁴
(such as, presumably, during the weekend).

I also like the neutral, pragmatic French formulation “paying attention” over the value-laden American one, “being good” (and its guilt-ridden, demoralizing opposites: “cheating” and “being bad”). If you’ve merely stopped paying attention and had some cake, it seems easier to forgive yourself and to eat mindfully again at the next meal.

Virginie says this way of eating is an open secret among women in Paris. “Everyone you see who is thin”—she draws a kind s drini of imaginary line down her small frame—“pays very close attention.” When Virginie feels like she’s put on a few pounds, she pays closer attention still. (My friend Christine, the French journalist, later sums up this system very succinctly for me: “Women in Paris don’t eat very much.”)

Over lunch, Virginie looks me up and down, and evidently decides that I have not been paying attention.

“You drink
café crème
, don’t you?” she says.
Café crème
is what Parisians call café au lait. It’s a cup of steaming milk poured onto a shot of espresso, without the foam that would make it a cappuccino.

“Yes, but I use fat-free milk,” I say, weakly. I do this when I’m at home. Virginie says that even fat-free milk is hard to digest. She drinks
café allongé—
lengthened coffee—which is espresso diluted with boiling water. (Filtered American coffee or tea is fine, too.) I scribble down Virginie’s suggestions—Drink more water! Climb the stairs! Go for walks!—as if I’m receiving revelation.

I’m not obese. Like my friend Nancy, I’m just sort of motherly. There’s no risk of Bean’s getting jabbed by a hip bone when I bounce her on my lap. I have skinny aspirations, though. I’ve promised myself that I won’t think of getting pregnant again until I finish my book and reach my target number of kilograms. (After years in France, I still don’t know whether to wear a sweater when I hear the temperature in Celsius or how tall someone is when they give their height in centimeters. But I immediately know whether my weight in kilograms means I’ll fit into my jeans or not.)

Of course,
French mothers aren’t just different because they’re thin.Not all of them are, anyway. And I meet American women who fit back into their pre-pregnancy jeans by the three-month mark, too. But I can spot these American mothers from a distance in the park just by their body language. Like me, they’re hunched over their kids, setting out toys on the grass while scanning the ground for choking hazards. They’re transparently given over to the service of their children.

What’s different about French moms is that they get back their pre-baby identities, too. For starters, they seem more physically separate from their children. I’ve never seen a French mother climb a jungle gym, go down a slide with her child, or sit on a seesaw—all regular sights back in the United States and among Americans visiting France. For the most part, except when toddlers are just learning to walk, French parents park themselves on the perimeter of the playground or the sandbox and chat with one another (though not with me).

In American homes, every room in the house is liable to be overrun with toys. In one home I visited, the parents had taken all the books off the shelves in their living room and replaced them with stacks of kids’ toys and games.

Some French parents store toys in the living room. But plenty don’t. The children in these families have loads of playthings, but these don’t engulf the comm
on spaces. At a minimum, the toys are put away at night. Parents see doing this as a healthy separation and a chance to clear their minds when the kids go to bed. Samia sto at, my neighbor who during the day is the extremely doting mother of a two-year-old, tells me that when her daughter goes to bed, “I don’t want to see any toys . . . Her universe is in her room.”

It’s not just the physical space that’s different in France. I’m also struck by the nearly universal assumption that even good mothers aren’t at the constant service of their children, and that there’s no reason to feel bad about that.
⁵

American parenting books typically tack on reminders for mothers to have lives of their own. But I frequently hear American stay-at-home mothers say they never use babysitters because they consider all child care to be
their
job.

In Paris, even mothers who don’t work take for granted that they’ll enroll their toddlers in part-time child care in order to have some time alone. They grant themselves guilt-free windows to go to yoga class and to get their highlights retouched. As a result, even the most harried stay-at-home moms don’t show up at the park looking frazzled and disheveled, as if they’re part of a separate tribe.

French women don’t just permit themselves physical time off; they also allow themselves to mentally detach from their kids. In Hollywood films, you know instantly if a female character has kids. That’s often what the film is about. But in the French romantic dramas and comedies I occasionally sneak out to watch, the fact that the protagonist has kids is often irrelevant to the plot. In one typical French film,
Les Regrets
, a small-town schoolteacher rekindles a love affair with her former boyfriend, who comes back to town when his mother becomes ill. During the film, we’re vaguely aware that the schoolteacher has a daughter. But the little girl appears only briefly. Mostly, the movie is a love story, complete with steamy sex scenes. The protagonist isn’t supposed to be a bad mother; it’s just that being a mother isn’t part of the story.

In France, the dominant social message is that while being a parent is very important, it shouldn’t subsume one’s other roles. Women I know in P
aris express this by saying that mothers shouldn’t become “enslaved” to their children. When Bean is born, one of the main television channels runs a talk show most mornings called
Les Maternelles
, in which experts and parents dissect all aspects of parenting. Right afterward there’s another program,
We’re Not Just Parents
, which covers work, sex, hobbies, and relationships.

Of course some middle-class Frenchwomen lose themselves in motherhood, just as some American mothers manage not to. But the ideals in each place are very different. I’m struck by a fashion spread in a French mothers’ magazine,
⁶
featuring the French actress Géraldine Pailhas. Pailhas, thirty-nine, is a real-life mother of two who’s posing as different types of moms. In one photograph she’s smoking a cigarette, pushing a stroller, and gazing into the distance. In another she’s wearing a blond wig and reading a biography of Yves Saint Laurent. In a third, she’s wearing a black evening gown and impossibly high feathered stilettos, while pushing an old-fashioned pram.

The text describes sxt cigPailhas as an ideal of French motherhood: “She is at her base the most simple expression of female liberty: happy in her role as mother, avid and curious about new experiences, perfect in ‘crisis situations,’ and always attentive to her children, but not chained to the concept of perfect mother, which, she assures us, ‘does not exist.’”