Have Mother, Will Travel

by Claire Fontaine

  “I know, believe me, you’re absolutely right. It was wrong of me, and I was, and am, really sorry.”

  “Okay, fine, but forget about me for now, what does not telling me about the rejections have to do with you moving?”

  “Well, here I was in my late forties, still renting in an apartment. Literally a few hours after Stacey called about our fifty-first rejection, our friends Tom and Kelly called raving about the phenomenal home deals in Florida. We went online, found articles from the New York Times saying our historic area was the hottest in the country. Coincidentally, Paul had just gotten some really big, long-term clients in Florida, it was like the universe was saying, Claire! Move to Florida!”

  “Well, I don’t know what universe that might be,” I tell her, “because the Claire I know lives in a universe in which Florida’s so hot half the year you can hardly leave your house. And you despise being cooped up. And what about screenwriting? If the book didn’t sell, why wouldn’t you have just stayed in L.A. and gone back to film?”

  “What can I say? I panicked, I lost faith in myself as a writer and thought maybe it was time to make a big change. Real estate in Florida was booming, Dad had great connections with some of the biggest developers; I thought, It’ll be great! We’ll move! I’ll change careers!”

  “Mom,” I groan. “Thank God the proposal sold—you’d have been miserable. If someone cooked up every single thing you hate—small talk, all things domestic, stretching the truth—and stirred it into a job, voilà, a real estate agent! Can you picture yourself discussing flower beds and paint trim?”

  “You should have seen me in the licensing course trying to do the math—I was hopeless, even with a calculator. Can we eat now, please? I’m starving.”

  I nod, reach into our bag for the baguette with the neat little chunk chewed out of it, and hand my mom the goat’s-milk Brie and an apricot to slice up. I’m still processing all of this, because it’s the polar opposite of what I had imagined; I saw the move as a healthy, positive decision, not the insecurity-driven result of a panic attack. I guess I should have seen the fixer-upper that never got fixed as a red flag, an indication of my mom’s lack of self-care. And self-awareness. But if I can see how obviously wrong this was, surely Dad and her closest friends must have?

  “What about Dad,” I ask, “or Sarah or Karin? Didn’t they try to talk you out of it?”

  “Maybe they did, I don’t remember,” she sighs, pushing away a clump of hair the wind blew into her face. “It was such a whirlwind of house-hunting and packing and researching real estate courses. And if they did, well, you know how I can be.”

  I know very well. Once my mom gets something in her head, talking sense to her is an exercise in frustration; intelligence and energy make her extremely convincing, to herself especially.

  “And do you think that maybe, just maaaybe, you were avoiding me so you could bypass the whole what-the-hell-are-you-thinking conversation you know damn well we would have had?”

  “Maaaybe,” she says, then sheepishly smiles and offers me the bite of bread, cheese, and fruit she nicely prepared.

  I laugh as I take it from her, though I also can’t help but smile a little ruefully. To think that a woman twice my age—my mother, no less—got scared and ran away. It’s such a simple thing, feeling scared. It’s so human. I guess somewhere in me is still the childhood notion that my mom is superhuman, that nothing truly awful can happen when she’s there because she can do or fix anything. Maybe somewhere in her is that same notion. Maybe most mothers never stop wanting to be our heroes and infallible guides, maybe no matter what age their kids are, they like us to feel that the world’s safe as long as they’re with us.

  The thing ees this,” Chrystelle says, frowning. “Eet must be kept very specifically.”

  Chrystelle is politely putting in her fridge the artisanal tapenades we bought at the outdoor market and bringing out store-bought replacements. She’s still in office clothes, a sable-brown linen shift, pretty flats, and a chunky wooden necklace. Chrystelle’s style is somewhere between Milan and New York. A single signature ring or necklace and well-cut, classic clothes; she never wears makeup and her honey-colored hair is usually pulled back into a ponytail. She’s the only person I’d happily hand over my wallet to buy me a wardrobe and know I’d send nothing back.

  When I met Chrystelle ten years ago, she had long red hair and a bohemian flair. She had just met Jean-Christophe (JC), a chef at the Palais des Papes. She’d studied business and Chinese in college and was marketing wines to China.

  Now she’s happily married to JC and has a son and beautiful stepdaughter, two cats, a tranquil home, and a 9–5. JC is quintessentially French. Dark hair and olive skin, huge brown eyes that turn down at the corners, accomplished in many areas. I had no idea that he’d done the excellent nude charcoal in their bedroom. Or that the languid subject with her back to the viewer was Chrystelle.

  “JC made that for me just after we get married,” she said proudly on my last visit. “Eet made me very ’appy, this. Eet will be nice to ’ave when I don’t look like that anymore!”

  For a long time they lived in an artsy medieval village nearby until they bought this home in a hilly, verdant town across the river from Avignon. The house is typically Provençal, with a terra-cotta roof and big French doors in every room opening to the terrace, which is shaded in vines with tiny white flowers and edged with big pots of rosemary, thyme, and lemon verbena. The yard is bordered with cypress and cedars, with a pool and deck to the side.

  She’s bustling about the kitchen now making a salad while JC grills steaks on the terrace. “They were on ice, Chrystelle,” I say of our tapenades. “They should be fine.”

  Le finger doesn’t care. “Non,” she says, annoyed. “Eet does not matter, you cannot leave eet in the sun like ’e do.” She obviously knows the merchant. “You can get very sick. That man know this. And ’e knows you do not know. I don’t like ’e do that to you.”

  Mr. Tapenade will definitely be getting a scolding come market day.

  “When I get some days off,” she says, “you weel come ’ome and I make you see my secret places where I get this sort of thing. I show you my Système D.”

  Système D is slang for a Frenchwoman’s system of where to buy what at the best prices. She pours me a glass of wine. “Once I make you see where to go, you can shop like a Frenchwoman. I take you to our friend Ed. ’E ’ave the interesting prices.”

  I love that they call bargains interesting prices. She can’t show us her pal “Ed” (a grocery chain) and her secret weapons fast enough. The market’s a three-mile walk one way, and Les Halles, the covered market in town, is charming but expensive.

  “Now, you sit ’ere and relax,” she says as she sets out a small dish of olives. The French serve very few hors d’oeuvres; it makes no sense to them to eat before dinner. She loads a tray with dishes and walks out to the terrace, framed by a beautiful sunset.

  She leans back inside to call out, “Antoine, montre aux Américaines ton numéro de danse!” winking my way at Antoine’s habit of referring to me and Mia as “les Américaines.”

  Six-year-old Antoine’s a live wire with sun-bronzed skin, big hazel eyes, and a dark blond Julius Caesar haircut. It’s been a joy watching Chrystelle with him. She’s very proud of her son—that he’s assertive, athletic, tough, in a good way, yet tender in an instant. One minute he’s yelling and horsing around on their deck with his friend, the next he’s cooing sadly over an injured insect.

  He leaps off the sofa to get into position to show us his dance number in his school’s upcoming end-of-year performance (or spectacle, as it’s called here). He was practicing with the precision and focus of a soldier when we arrived. Chrystelle’s upset that neither she nor JC can get off work early enough that day to see him perform, so they’ve asked us to attend and film it for them.

  Chrystelle’
s always had something of the wide, calm sea to her—the quality of movement and stillness at once. Now that she’s a mother I notice a deeper, more observant quality to her. I also notice that she gets harried at times, something I never saw before. Motherhood, a full-time job, being a wife, and running a home is harrying, no matter how well you manage it. Especially so if you’re a bit of a perfectionist, something else she and I have in common (and husbands who are frustratingly not so inclined). We also share a love of history, literature, and walking in cemeteries. But our lives as mothers differ in significant ways.

  Partly because women fought for it, but mostly in response to the declining birth rate after World War II, the French government supports mothers in a way we can only dream of. Four months’ paid leave and job protection, and the state pays for someone to come in to do laundry and assist you after childbirth. Child care is subsidized and you get a few hundred dollars a month for each kid, till they’re in their teens. If you choose to stay home the amount can be higher.

  The program paid off. France is one of the only first-world countries that doesn’t have a declining birth rate, especially among educated women. It’s quite common for a high-powered career woman to have four kids, which is rare in the States.

  How is it we don’t demand some version of what every other wealthy nation gives its mothers? Why don’t we withhold votes from candidates who won’t legislate to make it easier for women to manufacture and develop the single most important product of any nation—the citizens? There is no corporation, company, or entity on earth more important than we are: we make the people. And business and government make it hard for us?

  We don’t need any more articles or studies or reports on our dissatisfaction. We hold the purse strings and we have the Internet—all we have to do is decide to do it, in unison. When Mia was a child, moms got every apple grown with the pesticide Alar off of every grocery store shelf in the country in very short order. With no Internet, we got giant agribusiness and food conglomerates to do what we wanted. Just by saying We won’t buy. Just as we can with the media, mothers could improve our mental and physical health, our families’ lives, and our careers right now.

  “It’s so frustrating,” I told her. “You guys go on strike for an extra workday a year and get it. We haven’t even succeeded in getting paid leave for a baby.”

  “Yes, eet’s true, but we ’ave a long history of la grève (strike). We ’ave the weel to fight for as long as eet must take, and we are very united, including mothers. We don’t ’ave this mommy war like you. We don’t say what ees right for another woman, and nobody waste time doing things that are the teacher’s job or making cakes. Why, when the patisserie ees down the street? We don’t make such beeg pressure on ourselves for such things. The thing of eet ees this: for us what ees important ees that a woman should enjoy ’er life and ’er fameely. Eet’s one reason I never go to leeve in Paris, where eet ees all about business and ’hoo ’ave what.”

  The French don’t expect mothers to sacrifice as much for their children as we do. Women don’t neglect social life, career, and physical and emotional self-care over kids. There’s simply not the guilt that’s become one of the hallmarks of motherhood in the United States. Women here generally assume they’ll be fine mothers, without reading a slew of books and listening to experts’ every word. They also don’t usually put kids before their marriage or sex life. Chrystelle sometimes refers to JC as her lover in conversation.

  There is a trade-off for such balance, however. When you’re expected, and expect yourself, to excel in all things—looking chic, being a good mother, a sexy wife, having a beautiful home, a successful career, being informed on the culture and trends—it’s got to be exhausting at times. A Frenchwoman earns all the vacation time she gets (and they get a lot).

  “Yes, we’re more balanced, but then the expectations are very high,” explained my friend Nathalie, a photographer whose popular blog is devoted solely to Avignon. “The pressure is always on, in all areas of a woman’s life. It can get very stressful.”

  However, as goes American culture, so goes the world. Mommy blogs are becoming popular here and women who speak English read ours. Elisabeth Badinter, one of the foremost feminist writers here, writes about the coming of our style of guilt-driven, perfectionist “eco-mothering” as she calls it, and the division between these moms and working moms. These women, in both countries, bring to motherhood the same skill set and drive to excel that served them in the professional world, with the resulting toll on mind, body, and psyche. Yes, there’s a call for sanity in the United States; there’s recognition (or resignation) that you can have it all, just not at the same time. But that doesn’t stop us from missing whatever it is we’re not doing at the moment, whether we’re in the boardroom or nursery, or from feeling guilty.

  There are longer-term consequences awaiting these moms, something many women my age are already experiencing: being able to choose both worlds—the professional and the domestic—means a lot of women will strive, struggle, and judge themselves in two worlds. Moms of the past used to take stock at midlife by looking at how well they raised their kids and managed a marriage and home; now we get to add to that the midlife crisis men have always had—did I choose the right field, make enough money? Did my job mean anything, did I measure up?

  France may not have our mommy war yet, but the divisions are forming. During the week, we’d attended a spectacle at a more working-class elementary school in town. It was like a trip back in time, with the kind of barely organized madness these things had at my own elementary school, back when parents and kids moved in separate orbits and perfection wasn’t a goal for either group: kids running loose on their own, music blaring, slapdash costumes, half the kids forgetting their lines or steps, a rickety stage, parents laughing and socializing among themselves.

  A week later we stand amid well-dressed, hushed parents at Antoine’s more upscale suburban school, outside a barricade surrounding a huge blacktop that serves as the spectacle stage. Antoine’s lining up with a big group of boys for his number. There’s tape on the ground to spot the dancers.

  It’s a grand, elaborate reenactment of The Lion King, and the kids must have all been practicing as long and diligently as Antoine; almost all are focused and serious, sporting matching, beautifully hand-painted loincloths, spears, necklaces of feather and stone, and face paint.

  Several teachers stand right among the kids to guide and remind, mouthing the lyrics, racing to put someone in the proper place, even sticking out their bottoms and wiggling them as a prompt. It’s like watching dog obedience training—the dogs are rarely obedient but the owners, damn, you never saw such synchronized precision.

  The parents are intensely focused on their kids. These are the parents who will sweat bullets and pay tutors to assure their teens pass their bac (short for baccalaureate, the big exam that determines if you go to university) and go on to run industry and nation; parents like myself and most parents in America today—very invested, involved, intense.

  When the show is over, Mia and I head to the refreshment area to wait for Chrystelle. Antoine rushes up to us, says something I can’t understand, and hurries off to roughhouse with his friends.

  I say to Mia nostalgically, “I remember how much fun these things were at your school.”

  “Not as much fun as it is here,” Mia says, eyeing the tables.

  There are gourmet cheeses, gorgeous desserts—and wine and beer. Antoine calls out for us to watch a crazy flip he’s attempting to do, then hollers to watch a karate kick he executes on his playmate, then insists we watch another feat. How different a boy’s energy is! So much more physical and independent, yet still looking over to see that Mom (or Mom’s substitute, in this case) is watching.

  I’m caught off guard by an ache that’s become familiar in the last several years—what it would have been like to have a son. When Mia was five, Paul and I went t
hrough a difficult time, and I chose to abort a pregnancy, something I’ve always regretted terribly. Looking back, I see how little thought I gave it. I made a choice based on emotions and current circumstances, which included Paul’s resistance, rather than a firm vision of how many kids I wanted.

  I wanted a son, and I wanted Mia to have a sibling. I just assumed I would have one “someday.” And I just knew in my soul that the child I would have had was a boy. For a long time after that, I had recurring dreams with a little boy with curly black hair and big brown eyes.

  The way Paul and I handled it marked the beginning of a pattern our relationship took on; he would be upset by something and rather than talk about it, he would withhold, be passive-aggressive, the emotional bastion of the polite and saintly. Which left me feeling bewildered and abandoned, but I had nothing to pin it on—that’s the beauty of passive-aggressiveness. And the frustration would make me angry, sharp, often at the wrong things and the wrong times. Which bewildered and upset him, and the cycle went on, waxing and waning as the years went by, unraveling threads in the tapestry of our marriage, leaving thin spots. It’s a testament to our mutual love for Mia that she was the one thing we’ve never argued about; even during the terrible years, we were a solid team as parents.

  I don’t like that the ache I still feel for that lost child is tinged with anger at Paul. He had the right not to want another child, I’ve no cause to be angry at him. The only purpose it has served is to avoid being angry at myself, because, ultimately, it was my choice; almost everything in life is.

  This reminds me of when you were little,” my mom says, looking around the yard of Antoine’s school at kids running around, playing noisily, and small clumps of parents warmly greeting each other and conversing animatedly.