Bringing Up Bebe (20 page)

Amid all this, we have to name the boys (the city of Paris gives you three days. By day two, an angry bureaucrat marches into your hospital room holding a clipboard). Simon asks only that “Nelson” is somewhere in the mix, after his hero Nelson Mandela. Mostly he’s worried about selecting the perfect nicknames. He wants to call one boy Gonzo and the other Chairman. I have a thing for contiguous vowels and am considering calling them both Raoul.

We settle on Joel—whom we’ll only ever call Joey—and Leo, who defies all attempts at nicknames. They’re the most fraternal twins I’ve ever seen. Joey looks like me, except with platinum-blond hair. Leo is a swarthy little Mediterranean man. If they weren’t exactly the same size and constantly together, you wouldn’t guess that they were related. I’ll later find that a good tip-off that someone has no interest in babies is if they ask whether the boys are identical.

After four long days,
we’re allowed to leave the hospital. Being at home with the boys is only marginally easier. In the early evenings, they wail for hours. Both wake up all thrakerough the night. Simon and I each pick a baby before we go to sleep and are responsible for that one the whole night. We each angle to pick the “better” baby, but who that is keeps changing. Anyway, we haven’t yet moved into the larger apartment, so we’re all sleeping in the same room. When one baby wakes up, everyone else does, too.

It still feels like there are more than two of them. I never thought I’d dress twins alike, but I’m suddenly tempted to do so just to create a little bit of order, at least visually, like making kids at a tough school wear uniforms.

Amazingly, I still find time to be neurotic. I’m obsessed with the idea that we’ve given the boys the wrong names, and that I should go back to the town hall and switch them. I spend my few leisure minutes ruminating on this.

Then comes the small matter of the circumcisions. Most French babies aren’t circumcised. Mostly, just Jews and Muslims do this. Because it’s August in Paris, even the mohels, who do ritual circumcisions, are on vacation. We wait for one who’s been recommended (a man who is reassuringly both a mohel and a pediatrician) to come back.

Unlike the birth, the circumcision isn’t two for the price of one. There isn’t even a package discount. Before the little ceremony, I confess to the mohel that I fear I’ve given the boys the wrong names and that I may need to switch them. He doesn’t offer me any spiritual advice. But being French, he explains that the bureaucracy I’d need to go through to do this would be labyrinthine and excruciating. Somehow this information, plus the consecration of the circumcisions, erases my doubt. After the ceremony, I never worry about their names again.

Thankfully, my mother has arrived from Miami. She, Simon, and I spend most of our time in the living room, holding the boys. One day a woman rings the doorbell. She explains that she’s a psychologist from the PMI office in our neighborhood. She says that she pays house calls to all mothers of twins, which I think is a tactful way of saying that she wants to make sure I’m not having a breakdown. A few days later, a midwife from the same PMI stops by and stands with me as I’m changing Joey’s diaper. His poop, she declares, is “excellent.” I take that to be the official view of the French state.

We’re able to put
some of what we’ve learned about French parenting to use on the boys. We slowly nudge them onto the national meal plan, with four feeds a day. From the time they’re a few months old, except for the
goûter
, they never snack.

Unfortunately, we don’t get to try out The Pause on them. Having newborn twins who don’t even have a room of their own—and an older child who’s just a few feet away—makes it difficult to try out anything.

So once again, we suffer. After about a month of almost no sleep, Simon and I are zombies. We fall back on our Filipina nanny and her network of cousins and friends. We eventually have four different women to help us, on shifts covering practically twenty-four hours a day. We’re bleeding cash, but at least we’re sleeping a bit. I start to view mothers of multiples as a persecuted minority, like Tibetans.

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Both boys have trouble breastfeeding. So I spend a lot of time upstairs in my bedroom, bonding with my electric breast pump. Bean eventually figures out that she can spend time alone with me if she sits with me while I pump. She learns to assemble the bottles and receptacles, as if she’s putting together a rifle. She does a great impression of the
wapa wapa
sound the pump makes.

Most of the time, I look like a stunned animal. I come downstairs to deliver my bottles of milk, or send Bean down with them and go back to sleep. There are so many babysitters around that I feel more like a supporting cast member than a lead actress. I’m convinced the boys don’t know that among all these women, I’m their mother. I must seem detached, because at one point a friend grabs me by the shoulders, stares me in the eye, and asks whether I’m okay. This isn’t easy for her; she’s quite a bit shorter than me.

“I’m okay, but I’m running out of money,” I say. I spend so much time singing “Silent Night” to the boys—more as a command than a lullaby—that one of the babysitters asks me if I’ve become a Catholic.

Meanwhile, our renovations are under way. Between pumping sessions, I dash over to inspect the new apartment. I meet with the head of the building association, an economist in his sixties, to discuss whether we can leave our double stroller in the vestibule downstairs. He won’t commit.

“The previous owners were excellent neighbors,” he says.

“Excellent how?” I ask.

“They were very discreet,” he says.

The apartment itself is an enormous mess. I had approved the plans one night, while the boys were having a full-on fit of colic. It’s suddenly clear that I had no idea how to read them. Two-hundred-year-old doors and walls, which I had thought were fine, have been thrown away. They’ve been replaced with new, flimsy ones. It’s only when the renovations are done and we move in that I realize I’ve turned our nineteenth-century Parisian apartment into what looks like a high-rise condominium in Miami, but with mice. I didn’t understand quite how beautiful Paris is—the heavy doors, the intricate moldings—until I destroyed a small part of it, at enormous expense.

Now I spend a lot of time ruminating on this. “You know how Edith Piaf said, ‘
Je ne regrette rien?’”
(I regret nothing), I ask Simon. “Well, for me it’s ‘
je regrette tout’”
(I regret everything).

Occasionally our life shifts from expensive and exhausting to merely surreal. When the boys are a bit older, a single girlfriend of mine stops by before bedtime one night. She watches as the boys—in footed pajamas—silently pull themselves up and down the furniture, in a kind of Dadaist dance. Later they’ll march around silently while holding their toothbrushes aloft, like talismans. Simon watches them and pretends to narrate a documentary. “To these boys, in their culture, toothbrushes are these curious status symbols,” he explains.

Mostly our new life is full of extreme emotions. Simon mopes around in exhaustion and despair, taking little passive-aggressive snips at me. “Maybe in eighteen years I’ll get to have a cup of coffee,” he says. He describes the dread he feels when he approaches our house and hears the wailing from outside. Three kids under the age of three are a lot, even among our very fertile cohort.

Amid all the crying and complaining, there are hopeful moments. My whole mood lifts one afternoon when Leo is cheerful and calm for five whole minutes. The first night that he sleeps seven straight hours, Simon jumps around the house singing the Frank Zappa song “Titties and Beer.”

Even so, I still feel much as I did at the moment of the boys’ birth: that my attention is hopelessly divided. I ask my friend Hélène—who also has twins and a singleton—whether she’s considering having more. “I don’t think so; I’m at the limit of my competence,” she says. I know exactly what she means. Only I fear that I’ve surpassed my competence. Even my mother, who spent years begging for grandchildren, tells me not to have any more kids.

As if to cement my status, Bean comes home from school one day and announces that I’m a
maman crotte de nez.
I immediately type this into Google Translate. It turns out that she has called me a “mommy booger.” Given the circumstances, it’s a very good description.

Chapter 11

i adore this baguette

F
riends tell me that parents of twins have a high divorce rate. I’m not sure this is statistically true, but I can certainly understand how the rumor got started.

In the months after the twins are born, Simon and I bicker constantly. During one argument, he tells me that I’m “rebarbative.” I have to look up this word, too. The dictionary says, “unattractive and objectionable: a rebarbative modern building.” I march back to Simon.

“Unattractive?” I ask. Even in our current state, that’s a low blow.

“Okay, you’re just objectionable,” he says.

To remind myself to be civil, I tape up signs around the apartment that read Don’t Snap at Simon. There’s one on the bathroom mirror, in plain view of the babysitters. Simon and I are too tired to realize that we’re fighting because we’re tired. I no longer care what he’s thinking about, though it’s probably still Dutch football.

During rare moments of leisure, Simon likes to burrow in bed with a magazine. If I dare to interrupt him, he says, “There’s nothing you can say to me that’s more interesting than this article I’m reading in
The New Yorker
.”

One day I have a revelation. “I think we’re actually quite compatible,” I tell him. “You’re irritable, and I’m irritating.”

Apparently, we send off a scary vibe. A childless couple we know comes to visit from Chicago and concludes, after four days, that they don’t want kids after all. At the end of one weekend
en
famille
, Bean decides that she doesn’t want to have kids either. “Children are too difficult,” she says.

On a positive note for our relationship, we get spots in the crèche
for both boys (ev
en my mother is relieved to hear this). Twins are still uncommon enough in France that our application got priority status. The crèche
commit
tee took such pity on us that they assigned the boys to a tiny crèche two blocks from our new home, which I’d been told had no vacancies.

The crèche offers some hope for the future. But we st
ill have to survive as a family and, perhaps more dauntingly, as a couple until we hand the boys over in a few months. (We’ve decided to keep them at home until they’re a year old.)

It’s not always obvious that Simon and I will make it that long. It seems no coincidence that as “concerted cultivation” has become the de facto parenting style for the American middle-class, research shows that marital satisfaction has fallen
¹
and that mothers find it more pleasant to do housework than to take care of their kids.
²
American social scientists now pretty much take for granted that today’s parents are less happy than nonparents. Studies show that parents have higher rates of depression and that their unhappiness increases with each additional child
³
(or in Simon’s case, with merely seeing those additional children on an ultrasound).

Maybe we just need a date night? While I’ve been living in France, date nights have become the new penicillin for North American couples with kids. Hate your spouse? Have a date night! Want to strangle your kids? Go out to dinner! The Obamas go on date nights. Even social scientists now study them. A paper on middle-class Canadians
⁴
found that when couples got leisure time alone together, it “helped them tremendously as a couple, rejuvenated them personally, and re-inspired their parenting.” But the couples in the study rarely got this time. “Many [participants] felt pressured by the wider culture to always place the needs of the children above the needs of the partnership,” the authors conclude. One husband said that while speaking to his wife, “we would be interrupted on a minute-to-minute basis” by the children.

This is, of course, another consequence of “concerted cultivation,” which eats up leisure time and makes fomenting the child’s development the family’s overwhelming priority. I see this all around me when I visit the United States and the United Kingdom. An American cousin of mine—who’s a nurse with four kids—has family nearby who’d be willing to babysit. But after a week of getting everybody to school, gymnastics, track meets, and church, she and her husband—who works nights as a policeman—don’t even consider going out alone. They’re too tired. A schoolteacher from Manchester, m MurcEngland, tells me that she’s taking her toddler on her honeymoon, even though her mother has volunteered to watch him. “I’d just feel too bad leaving him behind,” she explains.

Every Anglophone mother I speak to has a cautionary tale about a mother in her social circle who refuses to leave her child with anyone. These moms aren’t urban myths; I frequently meet them. At a wedding I sit next to a stay-at-home mother from Colorado, who explains that she has a full-time babysitter, but never leaves the sitter alone with her three kids. (Her husband has skipped the wedding to look after them.)

An artist from Michigan tells me that she couldn’t bring herself to use a babysitter for her son’s whole first year. “He seemed so tiny, he was my first kid. I’m really pretty neurotic. The idea of handing him over to someone . . .”

Some American parents I meet have adopted such specific diets and discipline techniques that it’s hard for anyone else—even a grandparent—to take over and follow all the rules. A grandfather from Virginia says his daughter became livid when he pushed her baby’s stroller the “wrong” way over a bump. The baby’s mom had read that there’s a smaller chance of brain damage if babies go over bumps backward.

Obviously, Simon and I aren’t against babysitters. We’re currently employing half the Philippines. But since the boys were born, I haven’t spent more than a few hours away from home. Mostly I do what that mother from Colorado does: I use the babysitter as a kind of assistant who changes diapers and does the laundry. But I’m usually on the premises.

This system has the advantage of both depleting our savings and destroying our relationship, simultaneously. I feel rebarbative much of the time. I realize I’m losing my mind a little bit when—about fifteen minutes before one of our babysitters is supposed to arrive—my phone beeps, indicating that I have a new text message. I panic, fearing that the babysitter is late. In fact, it’s a message from a news service that I subscribe to, informing me that there’s been a deadly earthquake in South America. For an instant, I’m relieved.

Of course,
it’s easier to get along with your spouse if your baby sleeps through the night by three months old, your kids play by themselves, and you’re not constantly shuttling them from one activity to the next. It also helps that couples in France don’t have some of the big financial stressors, like high costs for child care, health care, and college.

In the short term, however, what seems to really help is that French couples view romance differently, even when they have young kids. I get an inkling of this when my gynecologist writes me a prescription for ten sessions of
rééducation périnéale
(perineal reeducation). She did this for the first time after Bean was born and again after the birth of the boys.

Before my first reeducation, I had only been vaguely aware that I had a perineum, or what exactly it is. It turns out to be the hammocklike pelvic-floor area, which often gets stretched out during pregnancy and birth. The stretching loosens the birth canal and can cause mothers to pee a little bit whenever they cougevelvic-fh or sneeze.

In the United States, doctors sometimes suggest that women tone their perineums with Kegel squeezes. But often they don’t suggest anything. Being a little slack and leaky is just a seldom-mentioned part of being an American mom.

In France, such troubles are
pas acceptable
. Friends tell me that their French obstetricians gauge whether a few sessions of perineal reeducation are needed by asking, “Is
monsieur
happy?”

I think my
monsieur
would be happy to have any access to my perineum. The region hasn’t exactly lain fallow in the year or so since the boys were born. But I wouldn’t say there’s any danger of overuse. For a while, as soon as Simon went anywhere near my breasts, it was like a fire alarm: they began spurting milk. Anyway, sleep is more of a priority for us. Though all three kids now technically “do their nights,” somehow I never seem to sleep more than six or seven straight hours.

I’m intrigued enough by perineal reeducation to give it a try. My first reeducator is a slim Spanish woman named Mónica, with an office in the Marais
neighborhood. Our introductory session begins with a forty-five-minute interview, during which she asks me dozens of questions about my bathroom habits and my sex life.

Then I disrobe from the waist down and lie on a padded table covered with crinkly paper. Mónica slips on surgical gloves and leads me in what I can best describe as assisted crunches for the crotch, in sets of fifteen (“and up, and release”). It’s a bit like Pilates for the below-the-belt region.

Afterward Mónica shows me a slender white wand that she’ll introduce in the next phase. It resembles a device you might see for sale in an adults-only shop. The wand will add electrostimulation to my mini sit-ups. By the tenth session we’ll be ready to try out a kind of video game, in which sensors on my groin measure whether I’m contracting the muscles enough to stay above a running orange line on the computer screen.

Perineal reeducation is at once extremely intimate and strangely clinical. Throughout the exercises, Mónica and I address each other using the formal
vous.
But she asks me to close my eyes, so I can better isolate the muscles where her hand is.

My doctor writes me a prescription for abdominal reeducation, too. She’s noticed that, more than a year after the twins are born, I still have a kind of bulge around my waist that’s part fat, part stretch, and part unknown substance. Frankly, I’m not sure what’s in there. I decide that it’s time to take action when I’m standing up on the Paris metro and a decrepit old woman offers me her seat. She thinks I’m pregnant.

Not all Frenchwomen do reeducation after they give birth. But many do. Why not? France’s national insurance picks up most or all of the cost, including the price of the white wand. The state even helps pay for some tummy tucks, usually when the mother’s belly hangs below her pubis, or when it’s inhibiting her sex life.

Of le somecourse, all this reeducation just gets mothers out of the starting gate. What do Frenchwomen do once their bellies and their pelvic floors are back in fighting shape?

Some do focus only on their kids. But unlike in the United States or Britain, the culture doesn’t encourage or reward this. Sacrificing your sex life for your kids is considered wildly unhealthy and out of balance. The French know that having a baby changes things, especially at first. Couples typically assume that there’s a very intense stretch after the birth, when it’s all hands on deck for the baby. After that, gradually, the mother and father are supposed to find their equilibrium as a couple again.

“There’s this fundamental assumption [in France] that every human being has desire. It never disappears for very long. If it does it means you’re depressed and you need to be treated,” explains Marie-Anne Suizzo, the University of Texas sociologist who studied French and American mothers.

The French mothers I meet talk about
le couple
in a whole different way from the American parents I know. “For me, the couple comes before the children,” says Virginie, the stay-at-home mom who taught me to “pay attention” to what I eat.

Virginie is principled, smart, and a devoted mother. She’s the only young Parisian I know who’s an observant Catholic. But she has no intention of letting her romantic life slacken just because she has three kids.

“The couple is the most important. It’s the only thing that you chose in your life. Your children, you didn’t choose. You chose your husband. So, you’re going to make your life with him. So you have an interest in it going well. Especially when the children leave, you want to get along with him. For me, it’s
prioritaire
.”

Not all French parents would agree with Virginie’s ranking. But in general, the question for French parents isn’t whether they’ll resume having full romantic lives again, but when. “No ideology can dictate the moment when the parents will feel truly ready to find each other again,” says the French psychosociologist Jean Epstein. “When conditions permit, and when they feel ready, the parents will give the baby his rightful place, outside their couple.”

American experts do sometimes mention that parents should take time for themselves. In
Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care
(which my friend Dietlind hands off to me before leaving Paris) there’s a two-paragraph section called Needless Self-sacrifice and Excessive Preoccupation. It says that today’s young parents tend to “give up all their freedom and all their former pleasures, not as a matter of practicality but as a matter of principle.” Even when these parents occasionally sneak off by themselves, “they feel too guilty to get full enjoyment.” The book urges parents to carve out quality time together, but only after making “all the necessary sacrifice of time and effort to your children.”

French experts don’t treat having quality time together as an afterthought; they’re adamant and unambiguous about it. That’s perhaps because they’re very sanguine and up-front about how hard babies can be on a marriage. “It isn’t for nothing that a gooingred number of couples separate in the first few years, or the first few months following the arrival of a child. Everything changes,” one article says.