French Twist (11 page)

Gulp.

“Not welcome” may seem a bit callous. Perhaps something was lost in translation. But, no, I don’t think so. From a French viewpoint, it is not harsh at all. In fact, I wish I’d heard about putting out the “not welcome” mat quite a while ago. In France, this is simply the arrangement
that everyone has been taught. Had I only introduced a similar concept early on, Mac and I wouldn’t feel like we won the lottery when we managed to get a few nighttime hours alone. Yet in many a French home, a little solitary time for wine-drinking, among other things, is a recognized right for parents. And dang if those French kids didn’t go right to sleep.

I’m obsessed with sleep and the countless studies on its relationship to everything from SAT scores to obesity (hey, breast milk, this sounds familiar!). Still, even on those rare occasions when I get my kids into bed by 8:00
P.M.
, there is always at least a half hour of consultation and adjustment that goes on. This can include anything from a simple request for water (both of my girls) to an urgent question about mammals (Oona) to the cryptic desire for a different set of jammies (Daphne) to the critical need of a leg massage (Daphne) to the sudden realization that I did not sing the right songs (Daphne)—ah, hell, the “Daphne” list could go on for pages. When we nip this bedtime thing in the bud, French-style—and we will!—my girls could clock up to four extra hours of sleep a week, which they are going to need when I get French on their schooling. Those are four hours that I could spend hanging out with my husband.
Gagnant-gagnant!
(That doesn’t really have the same ring as win-win, now, does it?)

Basically, at a fixed hour—among my French pals it seems to average around 8:30
P.M.
, but this varies a bit, especially among different ages—French children go to their beds. They don’t get up, because that’s
just not the
way it’s done
. I’m tempted to get that phrase tattooed on my forearm for inspiration, by the way. Who’s with me?

I’m sure I wanted the same for my nights, but I clearly did not get the message across to the team. In fact, I routinely allowed Daphne into our bed when she habitually woke up two hours after (finally) nodding off. Here are a few of the greatest hits in her brief history of bed-swapping:

Clearly—and I should know, because I regularly ended up in Daphne’s bed, since sharing with that kid, California king or no California king, is like sleeping with a rheumatic hyena, only more difficult—these complaints were all bogus. Her bed is delightful. But it is hers, and mine is mine, dammit. Daphne’s bed has a Care Bear, comforter and stuffed animals in it. Mine has my husband. So I was weak. Don’t make the same mistake. If you are a committed co-sleeper, God love you—but if not, don’t give an inch, because they’ll take you for miles.

Children have their designated spots for slumber in
the French home—and that’s not the only place they have their designated spot. Most definitely, kids are kids in France, not miniature adults who get to participate in rule-making. In my neck of the woods (and my sister’s on the other coast, and my friend’s smack in the middle of the country), we’ve replaced our children with tiny dictators who call the shots. We actually used to lovingly refer to Daphne as “Little Muss,” derived from Mussolini, due to her ability to always get what she wanted through volume and coercion. Cute?

She had ways of making us all kowtow to her will. I fear that my arm is permanently deformed from twisting it up and back to hold her hand while I was lying on the floor next to her bed—per her tiny command. French kids, by contrast, have rights—children’s rights. One of these is the right to learn from their parents how to be civil. The all-important boundaries are clearly drawn. So much so that if you wander the streets of Paris (on any weekday save Wednesdays, when there is no school), it will look as though children are banned from city streets. This, of course, isn’t true—I’m pretty sure, though never say never over there—but they are few and far between from 8:30
A.M.
to 4:00
P.M.
An American friend of mine living in Paris alleges that you can find kids in the seventh arrondissement during these hours, but I wasn’t able to confirm her claim. It is rather ritzy over there in seven, so perhaps it’s the nanny nerve center. I kept thinking about the town of Vulgaria in
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
, eerily absent of children, who are all captive in a drippy underground
cave, and found myself half-looking for a special French version of the child-catcher, with his creepy mustache and a beret in place of the top hat. Not to worry though: All the French kids are just safely tucked away at school,
maternelles
(early school for young students), or government-subsidized day cares known as
crèches
for the babies. A huge number of women go back to work after having kids in France. The French government makes it so flippin’ easy. I know of many American moms who quit their jobs to stay home with their kids, not because they necessarily wanted to but because it made more financial sense than paying the high price of child care. But there’s nothing to be gained from wallowing in things we can’t change.

When it comes to thinking about how individuals fit into society, Americans couldn’t be more different from the French. The reason it is okay to reprimand someone else’s kid in France (unless, God help you, it is a wee American tourist) is that the French truly believe it takes a village to raise a child, whereas in the United States we are all about rejoicing in the individual. I’ll never forget being on a train out in Bonneville, France, when I discovered—two and a half hours into the ride—a two-year-old and a six-year-old seated three rows behind me. I had just awoken from a delightful afternoon nap when I saw them carefully and quietly making their way down the aisle with a man who I presume was their father. The trio was whispering in deference to the many sleeping passengers (again,
sleep is a huge priority
for the French), even though it was
about 3:00
P.M.
As they passed me, I was momentarily returned to the dream I’d been immersed in. Most of it had vanished, but I distinctly remembered a lot of whispering. Could it have been that these kids were able to speak softly for two and a half hours and their cute whispers had infiltrated my dream? I am a very light sleeper. This was a revelation, and I’ve since been trying to engender the same kind of regard for the needs of society in my kids. As it is, I can barely keep them quiet on Saturday morning to let their father “sleep in” until 8:00
A.M.
, so this is no small chore.

“It’s not all about you.” That’s a new phrase in my repertoire, which I would not have dared use a year ago. Raymonde Carroll tackles what this means, as far as raising children, in
Cultural Misunderstandings: The French–American Experience:
“When I raise my child in the French style, in a sense what I am doing is clearing a patch of ground, pulling out the weeds, cutting, planting, and so on, in order to make a beautiful garden which will be in perfect harmony with the other gardens. This means that I have in mind a clear idea of the results I want to obtain, and of what I must do to obtain them. My only difficulty will lie in the nature of the soil, given that I apply myself regularly to the task, that is. But when I raise my child American-style, it is almost as if I were planting a seed in the ground without knowing for sure what type of seed it was. I must devote myself to giving it food, air, space, light, a supporting stake if necessary, care, water—in short, all that the seed needs to develop as best it can.”

This is a fantastic analogy, and it has really stuck with me. Poignantly, one of my favorite spots for child-watching is Les Jardins du Luxembourg on the Left Bank of Paris (also great for crêpe-eating, and then crêpe regret—but that’s another story). There is a beautiful, old, rather rickety and soulful carousel in the middle of the park. This fabulous carousel, built in the nineteenth century by Charles Garnier, the architect of the Paris Opera House, is also famous for its brass-ring game, in which
les petits
riders are given a wand, and every time they go around they try to lance a brass ring held by the carousel operator. By the way, it seems as though they’ve been using the same sticks and brass rings since the very first ride. It is old-school fun at its finest.

One afternoon I witnessed the perfect distillation of extreme American vs. French parenting. It was about three o’clock, so very few kids were out. There were only two riders on the carousel, one American and one French—very French, as it turned out. Each was about four or five years old. The American parents were very attentive, and, every time their little prince came around the bend, they would cheer something along the lines of “You can get it, Toby!” Or: “You nailed that one!” Or, inevitably: “Good job, buddy!”

At one point, Toby tried to spit on the riderless horse next to him; his doting parents did not cheer then, nor did they reprimand him. Many French people have told me that in their estimation, when a child misbehaves, the stain is on the parent. That explains why the other people at the
carousel, a pair of French grandparents, were flinging daggers from their eyes toward Toby’s parents. When they were not looking completely disgusted with the Americans, this older French couple spoke quietly to each other and appeared to have only one interaction with their little charge during the ride: Namely,
la grand-mère
stood up to swat him on the hand for becoming (in her estimation, because I didn’t notice any horseplay) unruly. I might have audibly guffawed. Not very polite, I know, but it felt as though this comic, nearly slapstick performance was staged for my benefit.

On the one hand—especially from having spent so much time in France at that point—I was annoyed by the American parents’ overenthusiasm, and I felt a bit bad for Toby, who maybe even had started spitting to shift his parents’ focus from the damn brass ring. And my heart also went out to the French kid, who got thumped in the middle of a merry-go-round ride for no discernible reason. It dawned on me that perhaps the little French fella suffered the slap because his granny couldn’t punish the Yankee spitter yet she felt she had to do
something
. It was all too much for her ordered, rule-abiding, respectful French senses.

This short ride underscored yet again just how differently from the French we Americans approach parenting. In fact, I’ve asked and asked, but I have yet to find a word in French that translates to “parenting.” There is certainly no French word that takes on the same strain, strength, and stress—or bookstore real estate. I once popped into a
Fnac (an entertainment retail chain in France with a huge book section) and I am almost certain that the section housing philosophy books for young readers—like tweens—was bigger than the sector (table, really) devoted to child-rearing. When it comes to a concept of “parenting” as we know it, the French are more likely to favor a word like
l’éducation
. It explains a lot, as the French are educating their children to make it in an adult world, while American parents are always looking for a way to survive in our children’s world.

For me, life in the “adult world” was fugitive at best post-childbirth. Starting the moment I first became a mother (and ending recently—
merci
, French ways!), such a place was a taunting Elysium, often within sight but usually out of reach. I’ve always been haunted by a feeling I experienced the first Friday afternoon following my return to work after Oona was born. Rushing to the subway to get home to
my baaaaaby
, sporting clogs and a breast-pump briefcase, I was slowed down by the stoplight at a busy intersection. Waiting there for the signal to change, it hit me: Never again would I be rushing off to meet friends for Friday-night happy hour after work. The thought was so somber and distressing that those sensible shoes would not move, and I stood there like a big sack, being jostled by a regular mob of New Yorkers at rush hour—me silently and sadly taking leave of my old self, the image of a margarita fading away. Soon enough, my anguish transformed into guilt (a sensation now in regular rotation) for even indulging such tormented thoughts while my helpless infant
was waiting at home. What a troll! Here I was, pissing away sacred time with my baby, thinking about myself. I then sprinted (as best as one can in wooden-soled footwear) the last two blocks to my subway stop.

This memory marks the beginning of some chemical shift in my brain where it was determined that I had to spend as much time as possible with my kids. I did. And I don’t recommend it.

While in France, I went out dancing with my friend Sylvie. The fact that Sylvie, the mother of a ten-month-old, could go to a disco on a weekend was impressive enough to me, but more awe-inspiring was that her husband, Karim, had taken their daughter with him to his Moroccan hometown for two weeks to visit his family. Two weeks! I kept asking her if she was freaking out and heartsick for her baby. “No, not really. Do you think I should be?”

Well, no. But my American self could not fathom any other way.

I’ve spent so much time and soul-sapping energy caught up in drama with my daughters, and I am certainly not the only American mom who suffers through this guilt-riddled dynamic. In fact, journalist Judith Warner wrote an excellent book,
Perfect Madness
, about the root of this problem, which she terms the “Mommy Mystique.” My children aren’t particularly clingy when measured next to their American peers, but compared to French children they’re like Glenn Close in
Fatal Attraction
, minus the butcher knife.

Although I often longed for real time off from Oona and Daphne, I regularly felt too bad about leaving them.
This has affected not only my sanity but also my career, my social life, and even my marriage. The first time my husband and I were bold enough to leave the kids for more than a handful of hours was our tenth wedding anniversary. Pretty pathetic when you consider that we’d started having kids five years after we got hitched. We had always talked about spending a week in Paris (my Francophilia rears its beret-topped head), but when the anniversary arrived, we dared only to go as far as New Orleans—for about thirty-eight hours, including the flight. Yet it took enormous effort, which I recently relived by reading over an email I’d sent to my brother Ben and his wife, Penny, who stayed with the girls while we were gone. I was tempted to include the message, but that would about double the length of this book. Okay, not really, but we are talking many,
many
bullet points. At four and six, my girls were capable of speech—they could have told their minders where to locate extra pants, and I suppose Ben and Penny didn’t need to know that the kindergarten teacher gives out stickers. I managed to put together this novella for the babysitters, yet I remember being so pressed for time that I forgot my own toiletries. Even more ridiculous: Ben and Penny had lived with us on and off for years. Of course, the reason I went into manic mode was that I was utterly plagued with guilt for leaving my babies (who, by the way, were so not babies any longer).