Picnic in Provence (24 page)

I
t began with a piece of cake. Or maybe it began earlier. Much earlier.

When Gwendal and I picked Alexandre up from the crèche today, he ran straight past me and threw himself into his father’s arms. Same old, same old. I tried to grab a hug as he ran by, but it was clear my arm was some kind of roadblock to him, a barrier he needed to get through.

The kid was famished, his 3:30
goûter
at the crèche a distant memory. But 6:00 p.m. is a funny time in France. Too late for a snack, too early for a family dinner. We hadn’t yet found a consistent solution.

When we got home Alexandre found the remains of my
palmier
on the kitchen table. A
palmier
is the French version of an elephant’s ear, puff pastry doused with just enough butter and sugar to give it a caramelized crackle. I broke off a piece and gave him the rest. But then I came back, and as one of Alexandre’s favorite Dr. Seuss stories might say, “That’s where my troubles began.” I chipped off a tiny bit of his half, a burned edge, and put it in my mouth.

Alexandre looked up at me in horror. “No broken,
pas
broken,” he said, staring at the crumbs on the table. Bright hot tears spilled over onto his cheeks. He’s almost three, and he understands both English and French, but he doesn’t say
mine
yet—when he’s feeling possessive, he uses the French:
à moi
.

“Gâteau à moi. À moi,”
he wailed. He pointed to my mouth, then lurched at me and tried to stick his finger down my throat, as if he could extract the not-quite-digested bite from my stomach.
“À moi. À moi!”

“I’m sorry, Alexandre, I thought it was to share.” In truth, I was just being greedy—I knew it annoyed him if I broke the crust off his toast or took a bit of broccoli off his plate. The volume increased; he scratched at my lips, still searching for his lost bit of cake.
“Gâteau à moi! Gâteau à moi!”

Alexandre is not a screamer. I can count on the fingers of one hand the tantrums he’s had since he was born, usually the product of hunger or extreme fatigue. But he was inconsolable. We did what we normally do in these situations: took him upstairs to his room to cry it out. Over the next fifteen minutes, I made three trips up the stairs. He wouldn’t let me past the baby gate. He worked himself into a fit, a kind of gasping, irrational rage that made his whole body tremble.

I came down again and stood with my back against the wall. I felt so weak.
How could I have this effect on him? Why is he so angry with me?

When Gwendal finally went up, Alexandre clung to his father like a baby monkey, blond head glued to his shoulder. I watched from the doorway. Gwendal spoke to him softly, their foreheads pressed together. I heard the
sniff-sniff-sniff
that marks the end of a crisis.

Five minutes later, we were at the table. He started to smile and asked for his own plate, then speared chunks of pork roast and couscous and squash. Somewhere in between, he ate the rest of the
palmier
. I hadn’t dared touch it. I decided this was not the time to make a fuss about eating dessert before dinner.

I picked up an asparagus—from my plate. “Would you like one?” He opened his mouth like a baby bird and gingerly bit off the tip. I crunched a bite and gave it back to him. We ate the rest of the asparagus this way, one bite for him, one for me. “See,” I said, a bit sheepishly, “sharing isn’t so bad.”

By bedtime, I was sure the worst was over. I loaded the dishwasher and wiped down the table while Gwendal read him a story. My limbs felt heavy. Somehow this had become our routine. Me down here, them up there.

When Gwendal came down, I decided to try my luck. I went up to Alexandre’s room, smoothed his hair back from his forehead.

“I’m sorry we had a disagreement about the cake. Can we make up and have a hug?”

He looked at me and nodded, so solemnly. This fascinates me. I often wonder how his little bilingual brain knows what it means to “make up.” How has he figured out these abstract emotional concepts when he sometimes looks at me blankly when I ask him to do something concrete, like put on his socks?

I wrapped him in my arms and stuck my nose into his neck. But instead of throwing his arms around me and laying his head on my shoulder, he kind of gingerly patted my back, the way he does when he comforts a younger child, and pulled away. I sucked in my breath.
Holy hell. I just got a pity hug from my son.

When I met Gwendal, I thought I was living the last great love story of my life. That all the hurt, the rejection, the insecurity was past. But there are moments when Alexandre simply…dissolves me. I remember my first broken heart. I never thought anyone would make me feel this way again.

ALEXANDRE WAS FINALLY
asleep. I gently rearranged the covers over his bare feet. One arm was thrown carelessly over his head; his other hand clung to the trunk of the stuffed elephant he uses as a pillow. Over the past few months his baby fat has vanished; his knees are sharp and skinned, his blond hair hangs in uneven wisps, growing out from a bad haircut. I sat down on the edge of the bed. His toys and books were scattered at my feet:
The Sneetches,
and a pop-up dollhouse of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the cardboard bears and their tiny bowls of oatmeal long since lost at the bottom of the toy chest. There was a miniature plastic sword and, a few inches away, a knight in full battle regalia. I’ve always loved to watch Alexandre sleep. It’s the only time my relationship with my son is exactly the way I imagined it would be. The only time he lets me run my hand over his cheek without batting me away. When I can steal a kiss without a squirm.

Gwendal found me sitting on the edge of the bed. When he came in to give me his hand, I started to sniffle. He led me wordlessly out of the room and up the four or five creaky wooden stairs to our bed. After what seemed like hours of listening to Alexandre wail, it was my turn now. I started to sob, great heaving things, like a toddler myself. Tears rolled out of the corners of my eyes into the well of my ears. It took me almost as long as Alexandre to calm down. “He only ever wants to sit on your lap. And soon, he won’t want to sit on anyone’s lap at all.” I couldn’t speak, my voice was trapped somewhere in the pit of my stomach, and all that came out was a whispery croak. I barely know if I said it aloud:
And I’ll have missed everything.

GOD KNOWS I
didn’t want to discuss this with my mother. But I did it anyway, reflexively, instinctively. I figure she’s the only person who has to love me when I fail, and this one was a whopper. I was confused, mortified. I didn’t want to admit to her that I had somehow tanked at something so basic, so important. Worse, that I had done it almost without noticing. Worse yet, that she had called it, called it from the beginning. I had spent a good portion of my son’s early years standing on the outside looking in, not quite sure how to participate.

My mom hemmed and hawed, which she doesn’t do unless she is about to say something she knows I’m not going to like. “I’m just trying to find a way to say this.”
Great
. “I think you are finally realizing that you are going to have to put some time into this.”
Here it comes.
“Let’s be honest: you’d rather sit in your bed and read for an hour.”

I was silent on the other end of the phone.
And what if that’s true. Where is our other self—our selfish self—supposed to go when we have a baby? Does everyone else become a completely different person overnight? I can’t be the only one who’s having a hard time. Is everybody lying, or is nobody talking?
I was going to start crying again if I tried to say anything.

“Find an activity,” she said. “One every day. Maybe you can cook with him. Do you still have those cookie cutters?” I did. “Roll out some dough. Make meat loaf; I don’t care if you put parsley in the belly button.” I hadn’t thought about this in years. When I was little, even not so little, my mother and I would make meat loaf in the shape of a gingerbread man. She would give me slices of carrots for the eyes, black raisins for the buttons, and curly parsley for the hair. “But you have to enjoy it,” she continued, gathering momentum, “not feel like you’re putting in hard time. I don’t know what I would do if it didn’t come naturally to me, but I would do it. Whatever it was, I would do it.”

“I think I’m going to go talk to someone,” I said.

“I think that’s great,” she answered, sounding relieved. “You’ll find someone to help you. Maybe a play therapist.”

For him or for me?
That’s my mother, always looking for practical solutions. But what if it’s deeper than that? I was not about to tell her that while she was giving me cheery coping strategies for today, any French psychoanalyst worth his salt would probably go hunting around for what went wrong in my own childhood.

“Don’t worry,” she said.

“I’m not worried,” I blurted out. “I’m hurt. I feel so rejected. I don’t even know how to describe this feeling. It’s almost physical. Like getting slapped. It’s like I’m failing at this bond that everyone in the world says is completely natural. I just think I want something from him that I’m never going to have.”

When I express these anxieties to those around me, everyone has a different opinion. My husband tells me to go see an analyst; my mother says I have to work harder; and the lovely lady who runs the crèche simply says, “You are who you are.” What’s the answer? A? B? C? All of the above?

“Please don’t give up,” my mother said softly. “If you give up now, you’re saying it’s his fault. You’re the adult. You’re the one who can fix it.” Suddenly, I felt a thud of recognition. She’s right: I don’t react like an adult in these situations. Alexandre has found a way to bring out the kid in me—she’s scared and selfish, and so much more fragile than I’d like to admit.

When I got off the phone I resented my mother so badly. The only person I resented more than my mother was my son. How could I possibly have to work at this? My mom was a natural. My husband was a natural. Why not me?

I went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table, the marble cool under my hands. I thought about my own mother. How much did I really know about the person she was before she became my mom? I’ve seen photos of a toothy toddler; a buxom teen in a blue taffeta prom dress; a beautiful young married woman in a red evening gown, her jet-black hair tumbling over her shoulders. But I don’t know what that woman was thinking, feeling. All I know is what she was to me. Everything. Alexandre doesn’t care if I’m fulfilled, or depressed, or confused. All he knows about me is what I am to him, and what I am at the moment is unavailable.

My whole life, I’ve run from anything that didn’t come easy. Anything I wasn’t naturally gifted at—adding fractions, reading music, driving a car—I just walked away. I have a whole life, a lovely life, built around sidestepping everything I’m not good at. It’s a crappy strategy—and you’d be surprised how long you can get away with it. But I couldn’t, I wouldn’t, sidestep my son.

I NEEDED A
plan.

The first thing we decided to do was shorten his day at the crèche. Nine to six was too much. He was exhausted, starving, the time between school and bedtime too compressed. I would pick him up at five, and that hour would be ours to fill however he wanted.

How to fill an hour, just the two of us? I realized now how few tools I had at my disposal. Maybe I should have read some books after all. I didn’t know what was going on in my son’s head. The only thing I could think of was to ask him to make dinner with me.

“Want me to go with you?” Gwendal asked on the first day. My love, my gentle enabler. “No,” I said emphatically. “I’ll go.”

When I arrived at the crèche Alexandre was sitting on a tricycle reading a book about bananas. When I finally got him to look up at me, the first thing he did was ask for his father. “Papa?” he said. I took a deep breath.

“Papa’s working,” I answered. Gwendal and Rod were clearing the cellar, setting up a test lab where the wine bottles used to be.

“Papa?”

“Alexandre, would you like to go to the
boulangerie
and buy some bread?” Distraction was my friend.

“Oui.”

He took my hand as we walked through the parking lot and across the street to the bakery.

Inside, I lifted him up to scan the cases. “What would you like for your
goûter?
” He pointed to a
brioche au sucre
. He left clutching the end of the white waxed-paper bag in one hand. He seemed relaxed; the early hour made him calmer, less hysterical to eat.

We had a little talk on the way back from the crèche. “Alexandre,” I said, working up my courage. “Would you like it if Mommy picked you up early from the crèche every day, and we went home and cooked together? Would you like to help Mommy cook?”

“Yah,” he said with a smile.
Yah
was the Germanesque combo of “yes” and “yeah” that he was using lately to express casual enthusiasm when something pleased him. Encouraged, I continued. “Mommy’s writing a whole new book and there are lots of recipes to try. Will you be my assistant chef”—I stopped, searching, struggling to locate the fun, preschool word—“will you be my little helper?”

Behind the post office, Alexandre bent to examine the gravel at the foot of the public fig tree. Even after two years of village life, I found it difficult to slow my pace.
We have nowhere to be,
I said slowly to myself, flexing my fingers,
nowhere to be
. We walked slowly up the hill. He hid himself around the corner; I tiptoed up behind him and then popped out with a giant “Boo!”

These were the longest days of the year. The sun was still high, and five o’clock felt like noon. “Would you like to sit outside?” I asked, perching myself on the stone steps in front of the house. I went inside to get Alexandre a napkin, and when I got back, it looked like little mice had been at the brioche. He’d nibbled all the sugar off the top in tiny bites and was just starting in on the sides. I smiled, thinking of my special childhood method for unscrewing an Oreo cookie. Why had I never noticed these details before?