French Children Don't Throw Food (20 page)

‘If your child is your only goal in life, it’s not good for the child,’ Danièle says. ‘What happens to the child if he’s the only hope for his mother? I think this is the opinion of all psychoanalysts.’

There’s the risk of taking this separation too far. When French Justice Minister Rachida Dati went back to work five days after giving birth to her daughter, Zohra, there was a collective gasp from the French press. In a survey by French
Elle
, 42 per cent of respondents described Dati as ‘too careerist’. (There was less controversy about the fact that Dati was a 43-year-old single mother, and that she wouldn’t name the father.)

When we Anglophones talk about work–life balance, we’re describing a kind of juggling, where we’re trying to keep all parts of our lives in motion without screwing up any of them too badly.

The French also talk about
l’équilibre
. But they mean it differently. For them, it’s about not letting any one part of your life – including parenting – overwhelm the rest. It’s more like a balanced meal, where there’s a good mix of proteins, carbohydrates, fruit, vegetables and sweet things. In that sense, the ‘careerist’ Rachida Dati had the same problem as stay-at-home mums: a life too heavily weighted towards one element.

Of course, for some French mothers
l’équilibre
is just an ideal. But at least it’s a calming ideal. When I ask my Parisian friend Esther, who works full time as a lawyer, to assess herself
as
a mother, she says something that I find breathtaking in its simplicity and lack of neurotic tension. ‘In general I don’t doubt whether I’m good enough, because I really think I am.’

Inès de la Fressange isn’t an ordinary French woman. In the 1980s she was Karl Lagerfeld’s muse and main model at Chanel. Then de la Fressange was asked to be the new face of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic, who appears on stamps and on busts in town halls. Past Mariannes have included Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve. She and Lagerfeld parted ways after she accepted. He allegedly said he didn’t want to ‘dress a monument’.

Now in her early fifties, de la Fressange is still a doe-eyed, languid brunette whose long legs don’t seem to fit under café tables. She’s had her own eponymous fashion label, and still occasionally struts the catwalk. In 2009, readers of
Madame Figaro
voted her the best embodiment of the Parisian woman.

De la Fressange is also a mother. Her two equally leggy and photogenic daughters – the teenaged Nine and tween-aged Violette – have already launched their own fashion and modelling careers. De la Fressange used to make light of her own charms by calling herself the ‘swarthy asparagus’. She says she’s an imperfect mother too. ‘I forget about morning yoga, and I always put on lip gloss and mascara in the car mirror. What’s important is to rid yourself of guilt over not being perfect.’

Obviously, de la Fressange isn’t typical. But she incarnates a certain French ideal about striking a balance. In an interview
with
Paris Match
she describes how, three years after her husband died, she met a man at a ski resort in the French Alps, where she was holidaying with her daughters.

She put off her suitor for a few months, explaining that she wasn’t ready. But as she tells
Paris Match
: ‘Finally, it was me who called him to say, “OK, I’m a mother and a working girl, but also a woman.” For the girls, I thought it was good to have a mother in love.’

9

Caca Boudin

WHEN BEAN IS
about three, she starts using an expression I’ve never heard before. At first I think it’s
caca buddha
, which sounds like it could be vaguely offensive to my Buddhist friends (as in English,
caca
is a French kid’s term for poo). But after a while I realize she’s saying
caca boudin
(pronounced boo-dah).
Boudin
means sausage. My daughter is going around shouting – if you’ll pardon my French – ‘poo sausage’ all the time.

Like all good curse words,
caca boudin
is versatile. Bean shouts it gleefully when she’s running through the house with her friends. She also uses it to mean ‘whatever’, ‘leave me alone’ and ‘none of your business’. It’s an all-purpose retort.

Me: ‘What did you do at school today?’

Bean: ‘
Caca boudin
.’ (snortle)

Me: ‘Would you like some more broccoli?’

Bean: ‘
Caca boudin!
’ (hysterical laughter)

Simon and I aren’t sure what to make of
caca boudin
. Is it rude or cute? Should we be angry or amused? We don’t understand the social context. To be safe, we tell her to stop saying
it
. She compromises by continuing to say it, but then adding, ‘We don’t say
caca boudin
. It’s a bad word.’

Bean’s budding French does have perks. When we go back to America for Christmas, my mother’s friends keep asking her to pronounce the name of her hairdresser, Jean-Pierre, with her Parisian accent. (Jean-Pierre has given Bean a pixie haircut that they coo is oh-so-French too.) Bean is happy to sing, on demand, some of the dozens of French songs she’s learned in school. I’m amazed the first time she opens a present and says, spontaneously,
oh là là
!

But it’s becoming clear that being bilingual is more than just a party trick, or a neutral skill. As Bean’s French improves, she’s starting to bring home not just unfamiliar expressions, but also new ideas and rules. Her new language is making her into not just a French speaker but a French person. And I’m not sure that I’m comfortable with that. I’m not even sure what a ‘French person’ is.

The main way that France enters our house is through school. Bean has started
école maternelle
, France’s free state nursery school. It’s all day, four days a week, and not on Wednesdays.
Maternelle
isn’t compulsory, and kids can go part-time. But pretty much every three-year-old in France goes to
maternelle
full-time, and has a similar experience there. It’s France’s way of turning toddlers into French people.

The
maternelle
has lofty goals. It is, in effect, a national project to turn the nation’s solipsistic three-year-olds into civilized, empathetic people. A booklet for parents from the
education
ministry explains that in
maternelle
kids ‘discover the richness and the constraints of the group that they’re part of. They feel the pleasure of being welcomed and recognized, and they progressively participate in welcoming their fellow students.’

Charlotte, who’s been a teacher at
maternelle
for thirty years (and still charmingly has the kids call her
maîtresse
– teacher or, literally, ‘mistress’), tells me that in the first year the kids are very egotistical. ‘They don’t realize that the teacher is there for everyone,’ she says. Conversely, the pupils only gradually grow to understand that when the teacher speaks to the group, what she’s saying is also intended for each of them individually. Kids typically do activities of their choosing in groups of three or four.

To me,
maternelle
seems like art school for short people. During Bean’s first year the walls of her classroom are quickly covered in the children’s drawings and paintings. Being able to ‘perceive, feel, imagine and create’ are goals of
maternelle
too. The children learn to raise their hands
à la française
, with one finger pointed up in the air.

I was worried about enrolling Bean. The crèche was a big playroom.
Maternelle
is more like school. The classes are big. And I’ve been warned that parents get very little information about what goes on there. One mum from my playgroup says she stopped asking her daughter’s teacher for feedback after the teacher eventually explained: ‘If I don’t say anything, that means she’s fine.’ Bean’s first-year teacher is a glum woman whose only comment about Bean, the entire year, is that she’s
‘very
calm’. (Bean adores this teacher, and loves her classmates.)

Despite all the artwork, there’s a lot of emphasis on learning to follow instructions. One morning during Bean’s first year there are twenty-five identical yellow stick figures with green eyes hanging up in the classroom. As someone who can’t write anything without a deadline, I recognize the need for some constraints. But seeing all those nearly identical pictures is unsettling. (Bean’s later work becomes more free-form.)

It takes me a while to realize that, in Bean’s first-year classroom, there isn’t even an alphabet on the wall, alongside all those paintings and drawings. At a meeting for parents, no one mentions reading. There’s more fuss about feeding lettuce to the classroom’s tank of
escargots
(tiny ones, not to be eaten).

In fact, as I’ll discover, kids aren’t taught to read in
maternelle
, which lasts until the year kids turn six. They just learn letters, sounds, and how to write their own names. I’m told that some kids pick up reading on their own, though I couldn’t say which ones, since their parents don’t mention it. Learning to read isn’t part of the French curriculum until the school year that kids turn seven.

This relaxed attitude goes against my most basic American belief that earlier is better. But even the most upwardly mobile parents of Bean’s schoolfriends aren’t in any rush. ‘I prefer that they don’t spend time learning to read now,’ Marion, who’s herself a journalist, tells me. She and her husband say that at this stage it’s much more important for children to learn social skills, how to organize their thoughts, and how to speak well.

And indeed, while reading isn’t taught at
maternelle
, speaking definitely is. In fact, it turns out that the main goal of
maternelle
is for kids of all backgrounds to perfect their spoken French. That booklet for parents says this French should be ‘rich, organized, and comprehensible to others’ (that is, they need to speak it much better than I do). Charlotte, the teacher, tells me that the children of immigrants typically enter
maternelle
in September speaking bare-bones French, or none at all. By March, she says, they’re usually competent if not fluent.

The French logic seems to be that if children can speak clearly, they can also think clearly. In addition to polishing their spoken grammar, the government’s booklet says French kids learn to ‘observe, ask questions, and make their interrogations increasingly rational. He learns to adopt a point of view other than his own, and this confrontation with logical thinking gives him a taste of reasoning. He becomes capable of counting, of classifying, ordering, and describing …’ All those philosophers and intellectuals I see pontificating on evening television in France apparently began their analytical training in nursery school.

I’m grateful for the
maternelle
. I haven’t forgotten that my friends in London are battling for places in public or private nurseries. But France is far from perfect. Teachers effectively have tenure, whether they’re any good or not. There are chronic funding problems, and the occasional shortage of places. Bean’s class has twenty-five kids, which feels like quite a lot but isn’t even the maximum. (There’s a teacher’s assistant
who
helps with supplies, trips to the bathroom and small disputes.)

On the plus side,
maternelle
is free (lunch is on a sliding scale ranging from 13 centimes to five euros per day, based on parents’ income). It’s an eight-minute walk from our house. And the
maternelle
makes it very easy for mothers to work. It lasts from 8:20 to 4:20, four days a week. For another small fee there’s a ‘leisure centre’ on the premises that can look after kids until the early evening, and all day on Wednesdays. The centre is also open on most school holidays and much of the summer, when they take the kids to parks, on picnics and on visits to museums. Bean recently spent the whole day on a farm.

Maternelle
is clearly a big part of what’s turning my little Anglo-American girl into a French person. It’s even making me more French. Unlike at the crèche, the other parents immediately take an interest in Bean, and by association in me. They now seem to view our family as part of the cohort that they’ll be travelling all through school with (whereas after the crèche the kids scattered to different schools). A few of the mothers from Bean’s class have little babies and are on maternity leave. When I pick up Bean from school and take her to the park across the street, I sit with some of these mothers while our kids play. Gradually, we’re even invited over to their homes for birthday parties, afternoon
goûters
, and dinners.

While the
maternelle
brings us all more into French life, it also makes us realize that French families observe social codes that
we
don’t. After we finish dinner at the home of my friend Esther and her husband, who have a daughter Bean’s age, Esther becomes agitated when her daughter won’t come out of her room to say goodbye to us. She finally marches into the girl’s room and drags her out.

‘
Au revoir
,’ the four-year-old finally says, meekly. Esther is soothed.

Of course I’d been making Bean say the ‘magic words’ please and thank you. But it turns out that in French there are four magic words: please, thank you,
bonjour
(hello) and
au revoir
(goodbye). Please and thank you are necessary, but not nearly sufficient.
Bonjour
and
au revoir
– and
bonjour
in particular – are crucial. I hadn’t realized that learning to say
bonjour
is a central part of becoming French.

‘Me, my obsession is that my children know to say
merci, bonjour, bonjour madame
,’ Audrey Goutard, a French journalist with three kids, tells me. ‘From the age of one, you can’t imagine, I said it to them fifteen times a day.’

For some French parents, a simple
bonjour
isn’t enough. ‘They should say it with confidence, it’s the first part of a relationship,’ another mother tells me. Virginie, the skinny stay-at-home mum, demands that her kids heighten the politeness by saying ‘
Bonjour, monsieur
’ and ‘
Bonjour, madame
.’