French Children Don't Throw Food (2 page)

Yet somehow, the French have managed to be involved without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren’t at the constant service of their children, and that there’s no need to feel guilty about this. ‘For me, the evenings are for the parents,’ one Parisian mother tells me. ‘My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it’s adult time.’ French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not continually. While some Anglophone toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and pre-literacy training, French kids are – by design – just toddling around.

The French are getting lots of practice at being parents. While its neighbours are suffering from population declines, France is having a baby boom. In the European Union, only the Irish have a higher birth rate.
⁵
The French have all kinds of public services that surely make parenting more appealing and less stressful. French parents don’t have to pay for nursery school, worry about health insurance or save for university. Many get monthly allowances from the state – sent straight to their bank accounts – just for having kids.

But these public services don’t explain the differences I see. The French seem to have a whole different framework for raising kids. When I ask French parents how they discipline their children, it takes them a few beats just to understand
what
I mean. ‘Ah, you mean how do we
educate
them,’ they ask.
Discipline
, I soon realize, is a narrow, seldom-used term that refers to punishment, whereas
éducation
(which has nothing to do with school) is something they imagine themselves to be doing all the time.

For years now, headlines have been declaring the demise of the current style of Anglophone child-rearing. There are dozens of books in English offering helpful theories on how to parent differently.

I haven’t got a theory. What I do have, spread out in front of me, is a fully functioning society of good little sleepers, gourmet eaters and reasonably relaxed parents. I’m starting with that outcome and working backwards to figure out how the French got there. It turns out that to be a different kind of parent, you don’t just need a different parenting philosophy. You need a very different view of what a child actually is.

1

Are You Waiting for a Child?

IT’S TEN IN
the morning when the managing editor summons me to his office and tells me to get my teeth checked. He says my dental plan will end on my last day at the newspaper. That will be in five weeks, he says.

More than two hundred of us are laid off that day. The news briefly boosts our parent company’s stock price. I own some shares, and consider selling them – for irony rather than profit – to cash in on my own dismissal.

Instead I walk around lower Manhattan in a stupor. Fittingly, it’s raining. I stand under a ledge and call the man I’m supposed to see that night.

‘I’ve just been laid off,’ I say.

‘Aren’t you devastated?’ he asks. ‘Do you still want to have dinner?’

In fact, I’m relieved. I’m finally free of a job that – after nearly six years – I hadn’t had the guts to quit. I was a reporter for the foreign desk in New York, covering elections and financial crises in Latin America. I’d often be dispatched at a few hours’ notice, then spend weeks living out of hotels. For
a
while, my bosses were expecting great things from me. They talked about future editorships. They paid for me to learn Portuguese.

Only suddenly they aren’t expecting anything. And strangely, I’m OK with that. I really liked films about foreign correspondents. But actually being one was different. Usually I was all alone, shackled to an unending story, fielding calls from editors who just wanted more. I sometimes pictured the news as a mechanical rodeo bull. The men working the same beat as me managed to pick up Costa Rican and Colombian wives, who travelled around with them. At least they had dinner on the table when they finally slogged home. The men I went out with were less portable. And anyway, I rarely stayed anywhere long enough to reach the third date.

I’m relieved to be leaving the paper. But I’m unprepared for becoming socially toxic. In the week or so after the lay-offs, when I still come into the office, colleagues treat me like I’m contagious. People I’ve worked with for years say nothing, or avoid my desk. One workmate takes me out for a farewell lunch, then won’t walk back into the building with me. Long after I clear out my desk, my editor – who was out of town when the axe fell – insists that I return to the office for a humiliating debriefing, in which he suggests that I apply for a lower-ranking job, then rushes off to lunch.

I’m suddenly clear about two things: I don’t want to write about politics or money any more. And I want a boyfriend. I’m standing in my three-foot-wide kitchen, wondering what to do with the rest of my life, when Simon calls. We met six months
earlier
at a bar in Buenos Aires, when a mutual friend brought him to a foreign correspondents’ night out. He’s a British journalist who was in Argentina for a few days, to write a story about football. I’d been sent to cover the country’s economic collapse. Apparently we were on the same flight from New York. He remembered me as the lady who’d held up boarding when, already on the gangway, I realized that I’d left my duty-free purchase in the departure lounge and insisted on going back to fetch it. (I did most of my shopping in airports.)

Simon was exactly my type: swarthy, stocky and smart. (Though he’s of average height, he later adds ‘short’ to this list, since he grew up in Holland among blond giants.) Within a few hours of meeting him, I realized that ‘love at first sight’ just means feeling immediately and extremely calm with someone. Though all I said at the time was, ‘We definitely must not sleep together.’

I was smitten, but wary. Simon had just fled the London property market to buy a cheap apartment in Paris. I was commuting between South America and New York. A long-distance relationship with someone on a third continent seemed a stretch. After that meeting in Argentina, we exchanged occasional emails. But I didn’t let myself take him too seriously. I hoped that there were swarthy, smart men in my time zone.

Fast-forward seven months. When Simon calls out of the blue and I tell him that I’ve been sacked, he doesn’t emote or treat me like damaged goods. On the contrary, he seems pleased that I suddenly have some free time. He says he feels
that
we have ‘unfinished business’, and that he’d like to come to New York.

‘That’s a terrible idea,’ I say. What’s the point? He can’t move to America because he writes about European football. I don’t speak French, and I’ve never considered living in Paris. Though I’m suddenly quite portable myself, I’m wary of being pulled into someone else’s orbit before I have one of my own again.

Simon arrives in New York wearing the same beaten-up leather jacket he wore in Argentina, and carrying the bagel and smoked salmon that he’s picked up at the deli near my apartment. A month later I meet his parents in London. Six months later I sell most of my possessions and ship the rest to France. My friends all tell me that I’m being rash. I ignore them, and walk out of my fixed-rent studio apartment in New York with three giant suitcases and a box of South American coins, which I give to the Pakistani driver who takes me to the airport.

And poof, I’m a Parisian. I move into Simon’s two-room bachelor pad, in a former carpentry district in eastern Paris. With my unemployment cheques still arriving, I ditch financial journalism and begin researching a book. Simon and I each work in one of the rooms during the day.

The shine comes off our new romance almost immediately, mostly because of interior-design issues. I once read in a book about
feng shui
that having piles of stuff on the floor is a sign of depression. For Simon, it just seems to signal an aversion to shelves. He has cleverly invested in an enormous unfinished
wooden
table that fills most of the living room, and a primitive gas-heating system, which ensures that there’s no reliable hot water. I’m especially irked by his habit of letting spare change from his pockets spill on to the floor, where it somehow gathers in the corners of each room. ‘Get rid of the money,’ I plead.

I don’t find much comfort outside our apartment either. Despite being in the gastronomic capital of the world, I can’t figure out what to eat. Like most Anglophone women I know, I arrive in Paris with extreme food preferences (I’m an Atkins-leaning vegetarian). Walking around, I feel besieged by all the bakeries and meat-heavy restaurant menus. For a while I subsist almost entirely on omelettes and goat’s-cheese salads. When I ask waiters for ‘dressing on the side’, they look at me like I’m nuts. I don’t understand why French supermarkets stock every American cereal except my personal favourite, Grape-Nuts, and why cafés don’t serve fat-free milk.

I know it sounds ungrateful not to swoon over Paris. Maybe I find it shallow to fall for a city just because it’s so good-looking. The cities I’ve had love affairs with in the past were all a bit, well, swarthier: São Paulo, Mexico City, New York. They didn’t sit back and wait to be admired.

Our part of Paris isn’t even that beautiful. And daily life is filled with small disappointments. No one mentions that ‘springtime in Paris’ is so celebrated because the preceding seven months are overcast and freezing (I arrive, conveniently, at the beginning of this seven-month stretch). And while I’m convinced that I remember my year of schoolgirl French,
Parisians
have another name for what I’m speaking: Spanish.

There are many appealing things about Paris. I like it that the doors of the Métro open a few seconds before the train actually stops, suggesting that the city treats its citizens like adults. I also like it that, within six months of my arrival, practically everyone that Simon and I know in Britain and America comes to visit, including people I’d later learn to categorize as ‘Facebook friends’. We eventually develop a strict admissions policy and rating system for houseguests. (Hint: If you stay a week, leave a gift.)

I’m not bothered by the famous Parisian rudeness. At least that’s interactive. What gets me is the indifference. No one but Simon seems to care that I’m there. And he’s often off nursing his own Parisian fantasy, which is so uncomplicated it has managed to endure. As far as I can tell, Simon has never visited a museum. But he describes reading the newspaper in a café as an almost transcendent experience. One night at a neighbourhood restaurant, he swoons when the waiter sets down a cheese plate in front of him.

‘This is why I live in Paris!’ he declares. I realize that, by the transitive property of love and cheese, I must live in Paris for that smelly plate of cheese too.

To be fair, I’m starting to think that it’s not Paris: it’s me. New York likes its women a bit neurotic. They’re encouraged to create a brainy, adorable, conflicted bustle around themselves –
à la
Meg Ryan in
When Harry Met Sally
, or Diane Keaton in
Annie Hall
. Despite having nothing more serious than man troubles, many of my friends in
New
York were spending more on therapy than on rent.

That persona doesn’t fly in Paris. The French do like Woody Allen’s movies. But in real life, the ideal
Parisienne
is calm, discreet, a bit remote and extremely decisive. She orders from the menu. She doesn’t blather on about her childhood or her diet. If New York is about the woman who’s ruminating about her past screw-ups and fumbling to find herself, Paris is about the one who – at least outwardly – regrets nothing. In France ‘neurotic’ isn’t a self-deprecating half-boast; it’s a clinical condition.

Even Simon, who’s merely British, is perplexed by my self-doubt, and my frequent need to discuss our relationship.

‘What are you thinking about?’ I ask him periodically, usually when he’s reading a newspaper.

‘Dutch football,’ he invariably says.

I can’t tell if he’s serious. I’ve realized that Simon is in a state of perpetual irony. He says everything, including ‘I love you’, with a little smirk. And yet he almost never actually laughs, even when I’m attempting a joke. (Some close friends don’t know that he has dimples.) Simon insists that not smiling is a British habit. But I’m sure I’ve seen Englishmen laugh. And anyway, it’s demoralizing that when I finally get to speak English with someone, he doesn’t seem to be listening.

This not-laughing also points to a wider cultural gulf between us. As an American, I need things to be spelled out. On the train back to Paris after a weekend with Simon’s parents, I ask him whether they liked me.

‘Of course they liked you, couldn’t you tell?’ he asks.

‘But did they
say
they liked me?’ I demand to know.

In search of other company, I trek across town on a series of ‘friend blind dates’, with friends of friends from back home. Most are expatriates too. None seems thrilled to hear from a clueless new arrival. Quite a few seem to have made ‘living in Paris’ a kind of job in itself, and an all-purpose answer to the question, ‘What do you do?’ Many show up late, as if to prove that they’ve gone native. (I later learn that French people are typically on time for one-to-one meetings. They’re only fashionably late for group events, including children’s birthday parties.)

My initial attempts to make French friends are even less successful. At a party, I hit it off reasonably well with an art historian who’s about my age, and who speaks excellent English. But when we meet again for tea at her house, it’s clear that we observe vastly different female bonding rituals. I’m prepared to follow the Anglo-American model of confession and mirroring, with lots of comforting ‘me too’s. She pokes daintily at her pastry and discusses theories of art. I leave hungry, and not even knowing whether she has a boyfriend.

The only mirroring I get is in a book by Edmund White,
¹
an American writer who lived in France in the 1980s. He’s the first person who affirms that feeling depressed and adrift is a rational response to living in Paris. ‘Imagine dying and being grateful you’d gone to heaven, until one day (or one century) it dawned on you that your main mood was melancholy, although you were constantly convinced that happiness lay just around the next corner. That’s something like living in
Paris
for years, even decades. It’s a mild hell so comfortable that it resembles heaven.’