Paris Was Ours (13 page)

Parenting, French-Style

A
NEW ZEALAND FRIEND
, a mother of three, recently texted me: “I am in the park and just saw a French mother kick her son hard, then go on talking to her friends while he cried. What is wrong with these people?”

A few days before that, sitting in a café near the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, which is unabashed baby central, with my (French) husband, I saw something even scarier. A tiny child, just walking, was trying to catch up with his chic and slender mother, who was furiously pushing the buggy deliberately too fast for the baby to get close to her.

The child was crying frantically, red in the face and holding up his tiny arms begging her to carry him. There was no way he could catch her. And she knew it. “Non, non, non,” she screeched in a high-pitched voice. She strolled ahead faster, leaving the baby in the dust.

“Don’t say it,” my husband warned seconds before I nearly said, “What is wrong with these people?” Instead I muttered, “Well, that kid will be in therapy for the rest of his life.”

I joke about these things, but it’s not altogether funny. One of the toughest things I have had to get used to in an otherwise
idyllic Paris is the huge gap between Anglo-Saxon (or Italian American in my case) parenting and parenting French-style. The French are certainly stricter. They shout more. They slap more. And they enforce manners.

But as a result, you find beautifully brought-up children, and many of my French friends who are parents will argue endlessly that instilling discipline and setting boundaries is the way to show the utmost love.

Dr. Caroline Thompson, a French child psychologist and family therapist who was educated in America until the age of eight and had a British father, agrees to some extent that children should not be completely indulged.

Although Thompson favors the early educational system in America, which is more loving than in France—where children start strict, all-day school at the age of three—she recently wrote a book entitled
La violence de l’amour
(the Violence of Love), about how dangerous it can be to make children the center of the universe.

She points out that in Anglo-Saxon cultures, certainly in American culture, children are generally thought of as being the center of the world, whereas in France, they are most certainly not.

It all starts from the cradle. In Britain, new mothers read the gentle and loving Penelope Leach; in America, they read the classic Dr. Spock. But in France, mothers read one of the gurus of French child development, Françoise Dolto. Dolto was an authoritarian who believed that children should be separate from their parents and live their own lives.

“Dr. Spock would be too lovey-dovey for a French parent,”
Thompson says with a laugh, adding that this all filters down to the educational system. “In France, it is not about blossoming. It’s about the transmission of knowledge.”

Which is not altogether a bad thing if you have spent time in America and observed the phenomenon of spoiled-rotten American children. I will never forget my husband’s horror when some visiting Upper West Siders I barely knew arrived at one of our dinner parties with their uninvited nine-year-old son.

That would have been fine, except that Seth was one of these precocious Manhattan kids who had to sit at the table with the adults. He completely took over the evening, interrupting adults’ conversations, and—to the delight of his besotted parents—performed a ten-minute hip-hop routine between courses.

In France, that would simply never have happened. The child would have been paraded out to say
bonsoir
and peck cheeks and then would have scurried back to his or her room to read or study.

“Children in France are seen but not heard,” says one American friend, Katherine, who is a mother of two. “Except on the playground, where the parents don’t get involved and then it becomes
Lord of the Flies
.”

Because I am accosted with a version of French parenting every day—I live in front of the Luxembourg Gardens and see the endless parade of mommies—I do an informal survey of my Anglo girlfriends in Paris on their view of French parenting. The response is staggering.

One friend writes, “What do I think of French mothers? Mean, mean, mean.” She tells of a mother of two whose
youngest child was in the hospital for a week. When he was released, the family immediately left on a beach holiday, along with a nanny the baby had not met before.

The mother wanted to go to the beach and instructed the nanny to feed him. When he would not eat with the stranger, the mother sent him to bed hungry and screaming. He ate when he woke up, ravenous, and this time, he let the nanny feed him. “That will teach him,” the mother said proudly. The boy was seventeen months old at the time. “This is a true story,” my friend writes.

Another American, Mary, also the mother of two, blames it on the French educational system, which does not encourage creative interpretation. She also believes that child rearing has not progressed beyond the 1950s.

“What has always puzzled me is why generation after generation of Frenchwomen raise French girls to become French-women—bitchy, competitive, antifraternal, unsmiling, the preternatural
froide
-ness.”

An English friend, Sophie, wrote of seeing a French child eating sand in the park. When she politely informed the mother, the woman—who was deep in a book—retorted, “Maybe she will get sick and it will be good for her. She will learn her lesson.”

Sophie’s explanation is that France has one of the highest percentages of working mothers in Europe. “I am amazed at how fast they dash back to work, leaving three-month-old babies in the crèche,” she adds.

But other friends rushed to the French mother’s defense. One Englishwoman, a mother of three who has lived in France for twenty years, said the hardest thing she had to get used to was
how schools and hospitals shut out parents. “You leave your children there, and voilà!” she says. “You don’t see them again.”

But she explains that it is purely a cultural difference. “You see, they firmly believe in institutions. So if you take your kid to school or the hospital, you have no say in the matter. It’s up to the teachers and doctors to decide what’s best, not you.

“That is why you see children alone in the hospital all the time. The mothers aren’t mean. They are just conditioned. It would do their heads in completely if they had to think out of the box.”

An American friend, Susan, who grew up in Paris and is the mother of three boys, explained: “It’s always shocking for Anglo-Saxons to hear the shrill ‘Ça suffit!’ that is the refrain of all French mothers. They speak with a sharpness that is alarming to the uninitiated.”

However, Susan does not see their behavior as mean. “They think they are doing their children a favor, which is to civilize them. Teaching your children proper behavior from the earliest age is of almost moral importance.”

She recalls taking her five-year-old son to the park and telling him repeatedly not to do something. An elderly woman was eavesdropping and suddenly reached over and pinched the boy’s ear until he squealed. “Listen to your mother!” she said sternly, in French.

Susan was not offended. “I know she, and every other French grandmother, would think that is for the good of the child. Anglo-Saxons tend to see children as charmingly thick savages who can be taught manners in a superficial way. The French grasp the deeper meaning of civilized behavior as soon as they can speak, and drill it into them.”

My son’s godmother, who is French, also believes in discipline (though she is a highly loving and supportive mother and godmother). She says, “There is something called
l’heure de l’adulte
. That is when they go away and leave us alone.” Children, she says, have to learn boundaries. “The big difference is that the French believe strongly in creating those divisions. And it works. Look how well behaved French children are, compared to American children.”

I have to say, she has a point. When I see my six little French nieces and nephew, lined up neatly with braids, scrubbed freckled faces and pinafores, parroting, “Bonjour, tante Janine,” and “Merci, tante Janine,” and going off to their violin and piano lessons, I know she has a valid point.

But the hippie earth mother part of me still wonders about originality, creativity, and freethinking. (There is no such thing as an earth mother here; it is simply not chic.) I worry that all this repression and enforced manners will kill any creative drive.

But then I think about Seth, the kid from the Upper West Side who invaded my living room and destroyed my dinner party. On that note, I am very happy to live in France and follow the French model. Slightly.

Deal With It

T
HERE ARE NO
tryouts in Paris kitchens. That American ritual of trailing another cook during the service just to see how things are done doesn’t exist. It doesn’t matter what your place is in the hierarchy of cooks, the process is the same. You’re thrown in. Deal with it. A late delivery, bunched-up orders, a cook’s cut hand—pretty much anything can slow a kitchen’s pace and lead to an apoplectic, screaming
maître d’hôtel
. When you’re a kitchen minion in Paris, you get used to going from calmly nursing an espresso at a nearby café to French bedlam with little if any transition. If you pull through it as a young person, you’re a cook. If you pull through it as a foreigner, you’re also a Parisian.

When I came to the role, there was a lot to simplify: child of expatriates, born in Spain, my childhood a messy jumble of countries. I grew up in a postromantic expatriate world where everyone had gotten over the idea of being Zelda Fitzgerald or Hemingway’s Jake Barnes but had decided to stay on in Europe anyway. I have pictures of my parents hamming it up on the quays of the Île Saint-Louis under a gun gray Parisian sky in what I realize now was an attempt at reconciliation. Years later, Paris for me became the Gare d’Austerlitz, where I, like the
Moroccan workers heading home, started journeys in crowded trains that went down through France and then Spain. My father lived in Spain; my mother, in Ireland. As a teenager I often felt that this crowded station represented my own strange version of the innocuous transfer points where divorced parents pass a child between them. When I returned to Paris at nineteen after dropping out of Trinity College, Dublin, I was ready to stop.

The phrase “learning to cook in Paris” is so vague—I write it down without quite knowing what it means. Are you learning to cook when you buy your first knives at Dehillerin? Have you learned to cook when you’re trusted to send out a dish? To me the decisive moment is not culinary at all; it’s when the cooks accept you, with a quick
salut
and a handshake, as one among them. Kitchen crews everywhere develop unit cohesion, but in Paris they’re battling not just the nightly onslaught but the demands of the city itself. Cooks live like outsiders in many of the arrondissements where they work. They cannot afford the seventh, eighth, sixteenth, or seventeenth, and they’ll soon be priced out of the ninth and the fifteenth —
even in the hin
terlands behind Montparnasse. Thus the cooks of Paris start their days waiting not at Métro stations but at the platforms of RER stations, the train system that links the City of Light to its not so glamorous suburbs. In outlying towns like Créteil, people say they work
sur
Paris, “on” but not “in” Paris. The language chosen, hinting at distaste, describes their fraught relationship with the city. Meanwhile, to the inhabitants of the leafy seventh, sixteenth, and seventeenth arrondissements, towns like Créteil and Antony sound like the punch line to a joke.

Within the kitchen itself, the learning of cooking in Paris has a simple trajectory: you go from the cold stations to the hot ones. The arc may not be concluded in any one restaurant; in fact, it probably won’t. Speed is important to them all, as is delicacy of movement: ladling too much vinaigrette can ruin a salad as quickly as burning shallots in a hot pan during a quick deglazing. But heat does add to the tension, increasing the opportunities for matters to head quickly south and for a young cook’s nascent self-confidence to be wiped out by a torrent of invective. There are any number of people in a kitchen who can let you have it. The chef, of course, for whom it’s a seigneurial right, but also the old-timer who has perfected the movements of his station and for whom you—a note-taking, flop-sweating mass—are an annoyance. Then there’s the culinary up-and-comer who will be damned if you make him look bad in front of the chef, on whom he depends for a good word to get his next position.

The atmosphere is always conflicted. On the one hand, if you don’t put out your food with dispatch, you’ll be screamed at; on the other hand, you are one of them, you are included in the round of handshakes that all cooks must perform when they enter the kitchen. You learn to separate the worlds. Just because you received a “bordel de merde” rant for your abject failures at lunch doesn’t mean you won’t find yourself with that very person, playing pinball at the local café in the drawn-out hours between lunch and dinner—interminable hours in a Paris winter—when the city is heading home and you must gather energy from somewhere deep in your being to face a manic second shift.