Since my only responsibility was the name, I felt doubly guilty months after her birth when not one person had said the following: “Bibi. That’s a nice name.” Instead we heard “Yeah, but what’s her real name?” or “Bay bay you mean?” As if I’d pronounced my own child’s name wrong.
When they’d ask, and invariably they did, we’d give them the long blurb that Bibi was a Scandinavian name, that Anaïs had always loved the Swedish actress Bibi Andersson, who played the bubbly counter to dreary Liv Ullmann in all those Bergman movies, “Whose movies?” being their usual response. Plus Bibi meant “sparkler of life,” we told them, which made sense considering how her hazel eyes flashed like high beams the first time I saw her in the maternité. Hazel, of course, would be her middle name.
But the main reason we loved the name Bibi was that you could pronounce it the same way in both English and French. It would facilitate things, we thought. And yet many Americans would insist on saying her name as bébé, like the French word for baby. These people saw Bibi’s name as a way to go the extra mile with French when it wasn’t necessary, just to show you how Francophile they really were. These people sucked, surely, but they weren’t as bad as the subset of French we’d cross who’d always cite the name of a popular French animation series called Bibi Phuck (Bibi the Seal) which in French is pronounced Bibi Fuck. Merci.
* * *
After a week or so, the three of us were back at our apartment, and within hours I was learning words on the fly I’d never used before, some of which were in English, such as le nesting and le baby phone. To make things more complicated, some terms were in English but were not used the same way. For example, onesy in French is called body (the French pronounce it “buddy”) and the word biberon doesn’t mean a bib, but baby bottle. I learned this, of course, the hard way, when Anaïs, bedridden, asked me to hand her Bibi’s biberon, and I tossed her a bib.
“I said biberon! Are you trying to be funny?”
“I just gave it to you!”
We needed help.
* * *
The dream of every young French parent is to score a place in the crèche (the local day-care center); so much so, it’s not uncommon for women three months pregnant to throw their name into the hat for a spot. When you tell people you’ve landed a space in a crèche they look at you as if you just won the lottery. And if you tell them you were denied, they look at you as if you’ve been diagnosed with lymphoma.
Unfortunately for us, Bibi was born during a mini Parisian baby boom, so the crèche was full. But this didn’t mean we were screwed. In France, you still have other options, one being an assistant maternelle, a child-care professional who watches your child along with a few others chez elle. Bibi’s assistant maternelle was Khadija, a French-Moroccan woman, who lived near us in Barbès. Each morning I’d drop off Bibi, where she’d spend the day with Khadija’s three-year-old son, Oman, and another couple’s baby, eating and sleeping and riding in a stroller to the park, where Khadija chatted with other assistantes maternelles. If Bibi was still asleep when I picked her up, Khadija and I would share a mint tea with her older daughter, Imen, on a large Moroccan couch, the kind that lines the entire wall of the apartment as if it were about to host a wedding reception.
I admit I hadn’t envisioned my initial experience of child care going this way, making the trek each day to public housing in the middle of the most densely populated Arabic neighborhood in Europe to drop off my three-month-old. And yet, as the days passed, I enjoyed passing all the tunics and bearded men in cafés playing dominos. Soon I was a regular with the local butcher, who knew I liked his halal lamb chops, and the sidewalk vendor next to him, who’d sell me a handful of freshly cut mint for ten centimes, which I’d then toss into Bibi’s stroller to make it smell better. Both loved the name Bibi. They told me it was an old-school Arabic name as well, one usually associated with women born in the twenties and thirties, which made me laugh only because it was funny to think of Bibi as the Arabic equivalent of Gertrude.
The following year, we made a horrible mistake by leaving Khadija, opting for a sort of coworking setup with neighbors called garde partagée, where you share a nanny with one or two other families, and each family’s apartment is used on a rotating basis. Since there were others with small children in our building, a garde partagée, on paper, seemed smart. It would cut down on the long hikes to Barbès (which I secretly loved), and it would allow us to see more of Bibi if we wanted. Garde partagée is ideal if you have a fixed schedule and you don’t work at home, which was the opposite of our situation. On weeks that it was our turn to host, our apartment would be trashed, transformed into a day-care center for five kids. If there was a train strike and the nanny couldn’t come, and since nobody else could leave work, we were expected to step up. Garde partagée gave me an upfront view of what salaried people really think of freelancers or artists—you’re either rich or you’re unemployed and you definitely have lots of free time. Not a week passed without a call coming from another parent in the afternoon beginning, “John, I’m stuck at a meeting. Do you mind taking Rio for an extra hour?” And it wasn’t just the different schedules. Everything was up for debate with these people: what park the nanny should take them to, menus, or the quality of the carrots. Snack allowance and metro fares were negotiated down to the last centime. Garde partagée is one of those instances where you become way too involved in the lives of your neighbors, and it not only ruins your friendship with them, it makes you want to move.
Mind you, in both cases (assistant maternelle and garde partagée) you’re paying a nounou a salary. Yes, you’re helped at the end of the year on your taxes, but it’s not free. The world outside France may think so, but it’s not true. What is true is that both manners of child care are indicative of a French way of doing things; finding similar people in the same boat, pooling your resources, and painfully working through differences in order to avoid what every Parisian parent dreads the most—being a stay-at-home mom or dad.
The French system is comparatively a feminist one. According to a 2018 European Commission report on gender equality, the employment rate of women in France is above 65 percent (higher than most EU countries), and, surprisingly, 95 percent of children of those French working mothers (birth through school age) are in child care. (According to the Child Trends Data Bank, only 30 percent of U.S. children in this same group are in a center-based child-care program.) Not only is the French woman the most active working woman in Europe (well, second to Finland), France’s fertility rate is one of the highest in the EU (2.1 children per woman). All of this I found bizarrely progressive for a country where a married woman did not have the right to work or have her own bank account until 1965.
* * *
Luckily, by the end of that year, we received word that Bibi had been granted a space in the crèche. Before this, I’d never really bought into the crèche myth. Sure it was great, I told myself, but how great could anything be that’s free? This was the American in me talking, the one who’d never dare go to Times Square on New Year’s Eve or who finds those Whole Foods taste stands with the giveaway Havarti suspicious. I found myself eating my words my first day at the crèche, when I entered a wonderful oasis of carpets and stuffed animals, mini sinks and music, all topped off by Bibi’s name written in chalk over a small hook and cubby.
On a normal day, I’d lay Bibi on the padded carpet, roll around with her for five minutes, then watch as she crawled toward fifty-year-olds Jocelyne and Muriel and a team of understudies dressed in black and white striped work blouses, which made them look like human border collies. The scene was so enchanting, I’d stay on the carpet long after the other parents had left. Outside seemed rough and horrible. Why not chill in the crèche all day? The thing is, the crèche (like French school later) doesn’t want parents around. You get in the way and your shoes are dirty, and soon Muriel was waking me from my reverie with a “Monsieur (pointing at
her watch), c’est l’heure. [It’s time.] Don’t you have somewhere to go?”
Like the crèche, Bibi’s maternelle (nursery, pre-K, K) and elementary school was in our neighborhood and on the same block. There, I’d again drop Bibi off in the morning (as I would Otto later in life), and another border collie would take Bibi in her arms and shoo me away. But whereas the crèche was fairly lenient with arrival times, the maternelle quickly reminds you that the only way for this system to work on such a large scale is for everyone to be on time. Drop-off begins at 8:20 a.m. and ends at 8:30, at which point the doors close and there will be no excuses. I’ve seen parents yelling, “But I have a meeting at nine!” holding their kid in their arms as collateral, with Margaret, la gardienne, staring through them like fogged glass. And the school is right. There is no real excuse for being late. Every child who attends a Paris public maternelle and élémentaire lives within a football field’s distance of the establishment. And for that very reason, we always cut it close. More times than not, I’d find myself running out the door, yogurt still in one hand, a backpack in the other, carrying Bibi the entire way to make sure we arrived under the 8:30 wire.
Good parents will use the ten-minute grace period to chat with a teacher or sit at their child’s desk and draw with them or look through their work, slowly easing the child into the day without a brutal good-bye. Parents like me, on the other hand, arrived in a dead sprint at 8:29 a.m. Even if you arrive à l’heure (on time), the fact you’ve sprinted isn’t lost on Margaret. Bibi was often required to sit on the bench in the foyer, called by my friend Fred le banc de la honte (the bench of shame), waiting for her name to be called so she could eventually walk to her class in single file with the other late ones, all of them looking like a miniature prison road gang.
Starting in élémentaire (first grade), parents are no longer allowed to enter the establishment. The French system is happy if you want to volunteer for outings or school fairs, but they don’t want your input and don’t need your stress. If you want to be briefed, there’s a book every child takes home each day called le carnet de correspondance, a laminated journal, which updates parents on homework, planned sorties (class outings), school fund drives, and the unfortunate mot (translated literally as word from the teacher) that your child has been misbehaving. With the carnet de correspondance, the school is not asking you to do too much, just read it and if required, sign.
And I may add, I was good at the signing part. The kids knew this and would always mention they had a mot right when my guard was down. While I was on the phone, they’d hand me the carnet de correspondance as a corrupt lawyer would to an unwitting client: “Just sign here, Papa,” they’d whisper. “Here . . . and . . . here in the upper right corner. Thanks, Papa. You’re the best.” I’d mark my initials, having no idea what I’d just read, not knowing Otto was promising a donation on my behalf for the end-of-the-year school fair or catching the French messages marked in red felt-tip pen—“Otto continues to disrupt the class with his talking” or “Bibi was insolent . . . again.”
Just to show how low society has stooped, I recently learned these same carnets de correspondance have been used by thieves to rob apartments. The miscreants comb gyms or karate classes or anywhere kids may leave their backpacks unattended. Since apartment keys in that Eastpak backpack’s outer pocket match the houses identified by the carnet de correspondance, the robbers obtain both your address (which is written on the carnet de correspondance) and the keys. Your child brings back not only a mot, but a U-Haul van ready to empty your apartment.
Since learning this, I’ve erased our address on the carnet. “But, Papa, I’m not allowed,” Otto told me, worried.
“Just tell the teacher to send me a mot, okay?” The case has been closed.
* * *
Compared to the American school day, the French one is a long slog. Once you start collège (sixth through ninth grades) days can begin as early as 8:00 and finish as late as 6:00. That may not sound too crazy, but since Otto and Bibi have extracurricular sports after school on certain days, it’s not abnormal for them to leave the house around 7:00 a.m. and return home as late as 8:00 p.m., both looking like exhausted tiny waiters just off their shift. On other days, it’s possible they’ll have a trou (hole), a three-hour break in the middle of the day, where it will fall on them to do homework in a local Starbucks before their final class and before they take the subway to sports across town, in both cases, alone. If the Americans can be critiqued for their helicopter parenting, the French should have to answer for this raised by wolves style. One of the reasons the days are so long, though, is that the French school week is spread over four and a half days, not five. On Wednesdays, school is only in the morning, while the afternoon is reserved for such extracurricular activities as dance, soccer, capoeira, or le cirque (circus).
Often, parents negotiate with their employer for what’s called a 4/5ieme, which enables them to take Wednesday afternoon off. If that’s not possible, grandparents are often flown in like the Army Corps of Engineers. On any given Wednesday, Paris is full of gray-haired people schlepping kids around the city and on the subway, holding fencing swords and tutus, backpacks and scooters, as their grandchildren hike from one activity to another. Neither the grandparent nor the child looks happy, by the way. I’ve always found it interesting that in France, where every group has its cause and every profession eventually goes on strike, grandparents never make a peep. And they should, considering how exploited they are. Some clean apartments. Some cook and shop. And none are ever paid! I’ve told Bibi or Otto that should they ever have children and try this with me, I will take them to the Prud’hommes (labor arbitration court)—and that I’ll charge them up the wazoo.
Since so much is compacted into a normal French school day, kids, parents, and teachers need a two-week break every six weeks. With all this time to fill, parents often sign their children up for stages (translated as internship), which sounds funny when someone tells you their seven-year-old is interning. If parents are cruel, they’ll sign their kid up for a Mandarin stage or English stage, but in general, stages are a two-week complement to whatever extracurricular activity the child is already practicing during the year. Stages also are often chosen (shockingly) because of their proximity to les grandparents.
During these “fake vacations” (as I call them), we’d often pass on the stage system, in order to take advantage of a Paris without children. And there is a difference. Traffic is thinner, you don’t have to book tables for lunch. There are fewer lines in the boulangeries. And we were the only ones with kids! During these periods Anaïs, Bibi, Otto, and I would hit the Pompidou Center or take a rare stroll along the Seine, or find ourselves at the Musée de l’Histoire Naturelle in the Fifth, inside its celebrated Grande Galerie de l’évolution (the Parisian equivalent of the New York Museum of Natural History’s “whale room”), looking at the stuffed elephants and lions, sipping on chocolats chauds. And during these excursions, I caught a glimpse of what it must be like to raise your child in a livable Paris. It was stunning, sure, and made me feel like a good parent. How couldn’t I be? My children were skipping in their leather shoes near the Jardin des Plantes looking like an ad for Dior. Unfortunately, this Paris would expire at the strike of 6:00 p.m. on the last Sunday of fake vacances, when all of Paris’s children would again descend upon the city, led by their white-haired sentries, looking like the army of the dead from Game of Thrones.
I trace Bibi’s love of animals to those Sunday rainy excursions to the Grande Galerie de l’évolution. As a toddler, she’d go full actors’ studio when imitating animals, outlasting friends who’d long moved on to puzzles or drawings. It was as if she’d enter a trance sometimes in public: She’d go to the other side of our local pool and imitate a lion growling and stretching out her paws. The lifeguard would look at me, then watch Bibi leaning her head into the pool to drink like a big cat. This trait still sticks today. I’ll watch
sixteen-year-old Bibi in the large garden of our house in the countryside, galloping like a horse, the lawn chairs strewn in a circle as obstacles. She says she’s practicing mentally for her riding competition, and perhaps it’s why she wins so often. She and the horse have become blurred.
* * *
If Bibi was a porcelain figurine at birth, Otto looked more like a shirtless boatswain. The moment I first saw him, there was no covered couveuse. It was too small. Instead Otto’s massive hulk hung over the sides of a wheeled tray looking like a hooked tarpon, his hands the size of oven mitts. We’d been hesitating between two names if the baby was a boy, Gustave and Otto, and now the choice seemed obvious. “Otto done gone blotto” would be his rallying cry. There would be no demimeasures with this one. He’d either be a notorious art dealer or a notorious arms dealer.
Like Bibi, Otto started his career with Khadija, but he stayed with her until he scored a space in the crèche. After that, he’d attend school down the block where he’d have the same teachers, the same curriculum, and since his parents never learned from their errors, he’d find himself on the same bench of shame that Bibi had endured. With Otto, we felt less anxious because we’d been through the process before. The only thing that worried us was that the boy refused to speak English. This was normal, I was told, for a child whose mother was French and whose father wasn’t French—he was just confused.
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