Bringing Up Bebe (15 page)

There’s something in this text, and in Pailhas’s bearing, that reminds me of those French mothers who snub me in the park. In real life, they mostly aren’t prancing around in Christian Louboutin heels. But like Pailhas, they signal that while they are devoted mothers, they also think about stuff that has nothing to do with their kids and enjoy moments of guilt-free
liberté.

Pailhas of course shed her baby weight the instant her kids came out. But that inner life, which we glimpse in the photos, and which I see in those French moms at the crèche and in the park, is also required to keep her looking and feeling seductive.
⁷
Pailhas doesn’t look like a cartoonish MILF. She just looks like a sexy, relaxed woman. I can’t imagine her telling me that she’s only as happy as her least-happy child.

I consult my friend Sharon, who’s a Francophone Belgian literary agent married to a handsome Frenchman. She’s lived all over the world with him and their two kids. Sharon immediately homes in on another thing I’m seeing in the Pailhas pictures
and in the mothers all around me in Paris.

“For American women, the role of mom is very segmented, very absolute,” Sharon says. “When they wear the mom ‘hat,’ they wear the mom clothes. When they’re sexy, they’re totally sexy. And the kids can see only the ‘mom’ part.”

In France (and apparently in Belgium, too) the “mom” and “woman” roles ideally are fused. At any given time, you can see both.

Chapter 8

the perfect mother doesn’t exist

H
ere’s something you might not know: spending twelve hours a day at the computer, stress-eating chocolate M&Ms, does not promote weight loss.

It does, however, enable me to finish my book. And the mere presence of this book on Amazon.com jolts awake the “woman” in me. So does the book tour. I travel to New York,
sans
husband and child, to talk about the book to anyone who’ll listen, and stare lovingly at it in bookstores. (One salesman has seen this behavior before. He approaches me and asks, “Are you the author?”)

My real transformation happens when the book comes out in French. After years of having a semidetached presence in Paris, I’m suddenly thrust into the national conversation. The book is a journalistic study of how different cultures treat infidelity. (This was as far as I could get from financial writin vs ag, and it seemed like a salient topic to research from France.) Americans treated the book as a serious moral inquiry. The French assume that the book is meant to be amusing.

A talk show called
Le Grand Journal
invites me to come on and discuss it, live and in French. I’d vaguely noticed
Le Grand Journal
, which is broadcast five nights a week at 7:05
P.M.
My French publisher—a wizened woman in her fifties with a solid-gold Rolodex—explains that the show is a French institution. It’s a cross between
The Tonight Show
and
Meet the Press
. Host Michel Denisot is a legendary journalist. He and a panel of interviewers grill each guest. Everyone is witty but a bit savage. It’s like a posh French dinner party but broadcast on live TV.

My publisher is thrilled for the publicity, but she’s panicked about my French. She arranges for me to spend hours fielding practice questions in French from a businessman she knows. He seems nervous, too. He keeps reminding me that “
affaire
” in French doesn’t mean anything extramarital; for that I need to say
aventure
or
liaison
.

By the night of the show, I’m feeling immersed and ready. I have three cups of espresso and sit for hair and makeup. Then suddenly I’m standing behind two giant curtains. Michel Denisot says my name, and the curtains open. I descend the glossy white steps, Miss America–style, then walk to a large table where Denisot and the three-person panel are waiting for me.

I’m concentrating so hard on understanding the questions that I’m not even nervous. Fortunately, they’re mostly the questions I’ve practiced. How did I get the idea for the book? How does France compare with the United States? When one of the interviewers asks me if I was unfaithful myself while writing the book, I bat my eyes coquettishly and say that I’m a journalist, so of course I was
très professionnelle
. The interviewers—and the studio audience—love this.

On this high note, Denisot starts to wrap up the interview. He seems to be making a summary statement. I stop paying close attention. My brother, who watches a replay on the Internet, says at this point I look visibly relieved.

Then, suddenly, I hear my name again. Denisot is formulating another question for me. He can’t let it rest. It’s something about Moïse—French for Moses—and a blog. Moses had a blog? My brother says that when the camera cuts back to me, I look petrified. I have no idea what he’s asking me.

All at once I get it: Denisot isn’t saying “blog”; he’s saying “
blague
,” the French word for joke. He wants me to retell a joke from my book. It’s the one where Moses comes down from the mount and says, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I got him down to ten commandments. The bad news is, adultery is still in there.”

This isn’t one of the questions I had practiced. On the spot, I can’t think of exactly how the joke goes, and certainly not how it goes in French. How do you say “mount”? How do you say “commandment”? All I manage to say is, “Adultery’s still in there!” The audience, gratefully, is still in a go {stiy od enough mood to laugh. And Denisot wisely moves on to the next guest.

Despite this incident, I’m grateful to be in the working world again. It puts me in sync with French society. That’s because, after boldly not breast-feeding, then reconditioning their minds and bodies, French mothers go back to work. College-educated mothers rarely ditch their careers, temporarily or permanently, after having kids. When I tell Americans that I have a child, they usually ask, “Are you working?” Whereas French people just ask, “What do you do?”

Back in the United States, I know lots of women who’ve stopped working to raise their kids. In France, I know exactly one. I have a vision of what my life as a stay-at-home mom would have been in France, when I ditch work one morning and take Bean to the park. Our local park was built in the nineteenth century on the site of the former palace of the Knights Templar (take that, Central Park). This may sound like
The Da Vinci Code
, but really it’s quite bourgeois. You’re more likely to dig up an abandoned pacifier there than a medieval relic. There’s a little lake, a forged-iron gazebo, and a playground that fills up as soon as school lets out.

Bean and I are in the gazebo when I’m jolted by the sound of American English, coming from a woman with two little kids. She and I are soon exchanging life stories. She tells me that she quit her job as a fact-checker to accompany her husband on his yearlong sabbatical in Paris. They agreed that he would do his research, while she soaked up the city and looked after the kids.

Nine months into the sabbatical, she doesn’t look like someone who’s been relishing the City of Light. She looks like someone who’s been schlepping two toddlers back and forth to the park. She stumbles over her words a bit, then apologizes, explaining that she doesn’t often speak to adults. She’s heard about the playgroups organized by English-speaking moms, but says she didn’t want to spend her precious time in France with other Americans. (I try not to take this personally.) She speaks excellent French, and had assumed that she’d meet some French moms and buddy around with them.

“Where are all the mothers?” she asks.

The answer, of course, is that they’re at work. French mothers go back to work, in part, because they can. The high-quality crèches, subsidized shared nannies, and other child-care options all make the transition logistically possible. It’s no accident that Frenchwomen are supposed to get their figures back in three months. That’s roughly when they go back to the office.

French mothers also go back to work because they want to. In a 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center, 91 percent of French adults said the most satisfying kind of marriage is one in which both husband and wife have jobs. (Just 71 percent of Americans and Britons said this.)
¹

Some college-educated women I know do “four-fifths,” in which they stay home with their kids on Wednesday, when there’s no preschool or primary school. But the mothers I meet say they hardly know any women who opt to stay home full-time. “I know one, and she is about to divorce,” sa {ivors ys my friend Esther, the lawyer. Esther recounts this woman’s story as a cautionary tale: She quit her job as a saleswoman to look after the kids. But then she was financially dependent on her husband and thus less entitled to voice her opinions.

“She was withholding her feelings and complaints, and therefore after a while the misunderstandings got worse and worse,” Esther explains. She goes on to say that there are circumstances when mothers can’t really work, such as when a third child arrives. But she says any break from work should be for a limited time, say until the youngest is two.

French professional women tell me that quitting work for even a few years is a precarious choice. “If tomorrow your husband is unemployed, what will you do?” asks my friend Danièle. Hélène, the engineer with three kids, says that she’d really prefer not to work and to rely on her husband’s salary. But she won’t quit. “Husbands can disappear,” she explains.

Frenchwomen work not just for financial security but also for status. Stay-at-home moms don’t have much, at least not in Paris. There’s a recurring French image of a housewife sitting sullenly at a dinner party because no one wants to talk to her. “I have two friends who don’t work. I feel like nobody is interested in them,” Danièle tells me. She’s a journalist in her early fifties with a teenage daughter. “When the kids are grown up, what is your social usefulness?”

Frenchwomen also openly question what their own quality of life would be if they looked after children all day. The French media has no problem describing this experience with cold-eyed ambivalence. One article I read says that for mothers “without a professional activity . . . the principal advantage is to see their kids grow up. But the fact of being an at-home mother brings inconveniences, notably isolation and solitude.”

Since there aren’t many middle-class stay-at-home moms in Paris, there also aren’t many weekday playgroups, story-telling hours, or mommy-and-me classes. The ones that do exist are mostly by and for Anglophones. There’s one fully French kid in our neighborhood playgroup, but he comes with his nanny. His mother, a lawyer, apparently wants the boy to be exposed to English. (I don’t hear him actually speak it.) The mother shows up once, when it’s her turn to host. She has raced back from the office, wearing high heels and a business suit. She looks at us Anglophone mothers, with our sneakers and bulging diaper bags, like we’re a bunch of exotic animals.

American-style parenting
and its accoutrements—the baby flash cards and competitive preschools—are by now clichés. There’s been both a backlash and a backlash to the backlash. So I’m stunned by what I see at a playground in New York City. It’s a special toddler area with a low-rise slide and some bouncy animals, separated from the rest of the park by a high metal gate. The playground is designed for toddlers to safely climb around and fall. A few nannies are sitting French-style on benches around the perimeter, chatting and watching their charges play.

Then a white, upper-middle-class mother walks in with her toddler. She follows him around the miniature equipment, while keeping up a nonstop monologue. “Do you want to go on the froggy, Caleb {frooll? Do you want to go on the swing?”

Caleb ignores these questions. He evidently plans to just bumble around. But his mother tracks him, continuing to narrate his every move. “You’re stepping, Caleb!” she says at one point.

I assume that Caleb just landed a particularly zealous mother. But then the next upper-middle-class woman walks through the gate, pushing a blond toddler in a black T-shirt. She immediately begins narrating all of her child’s actions, too. When the boy wanders over to the gate to stare out at the lawn, the mother evidently decides this isn’t stimulating enough. She rushes over and holds him upside down.

“You’re upside down!” she shouts. Moments later, she lifts up her shirt to offer the boy a nip of milk. “We came to the park! We came to the park!” she chirps while he’s drinking.

This scene keeps repeating itself with other moms and their kids. After about an hour I can predict with total accuracy whether a mother is going to do this “narrated play” simply by the price of her handbag. What’s most surprising to me is that these mothers aren’t ashamed of how batty they sound. They’re not whispering their commentaries; they’re broadcasting them.

When I describe this scene to Michel Cohen, the French pediatrician in New York, he knows immediately what I’m talking about. He says these mothers are speaking loudly to flaunt what good parents they are. The practice of narrated play is so common that Cohen included a section in his parenting book called Stimulation, which essentially tells mothers to cut it out. “Periods of playing and laughing should alternate naturally with periods of peace and quiet,” Cohen writes. “You don’t have to talk, sing, or entertain constantly.”

Whatever your view on whether this intensive supervision is good for kids, it seems to make child care less pleasant for mothers.
²
Just watching it is exhausting. And it continues off the playground. “We might not stay up nights worried about how to keep our whites whiter, but you can bet we’re losing sleep over why little Jasper isn’t yet out of diapers,” Katie Allison Granju writes on babble.com. She describes a mother she knows with an MA in biology who spent the previous week—the
whole
week—teaching her child to use a spoon.

That biologist surely questioned her own sanity, too. We American mothers know that parenting this intensively has it
s costs. But like the parents who asked Piaget the American Question—how can we speed up the stages of a child’s development?—we believe that the pace at which our kids advance hinges on the choices we make and on how actively we engage with them. So the cost of not spoon training or narrating a trip down the slide seems unacceptably high, especially when others are doing it.

The standard for how much middle-class mothers should engage with their kids seems to have risen. Narrated play and intensive spoon training are expressions of the “concerted cultivation” that the sociologist Annette Lareau observed among white and African American middle-class parents.
³

These parents “see their children as a project,” Lareau explains. “They seek to develop their talents and skills through a series of organized activities, through an
intensive process of reasoning and language development, and through close supervision of their experiences in school.”

My decision to live in France is arguably one giant act of concerted cultivation. My project is to make my kids bilingual, international, and lovers of fine cheese. But at least in France, I have other role models, and there are no gifted kindergartens. In America, doing “concerted cultivation” doesn’t feel like a choice. To the contrary, the demands seem to have crept upward. A friend of
mine, who works full-time, complained to me that she’s not just expected to go to her daughter’s soccer games; she’s also supposed to attend
the practices
.
⁴