Have Mother, Will Travel

by Claire Fontaine

  “You mean minus the ashtrays and beer?” I ask, dodging a group of squabbling boys. “My God, if I ever have kids I don’t think I could handle boys. Just chasing after them is a full-time job! Maybe it’s selfish, but I don’t want my whole life to be my kids.”

  “All kids are a full-time job, Mia—it’s called parenthood. Your whole life shouldn’t just be your kids. You were there when Chrystelle and I were talking about that at dinner the other night—”

  “I know,” I tell her. “I heard you guys. I kept thinking how much it was like what that woman Martine said, too, about motherhood being easier in France.”

  Last week, I found myself in deep conversation with a woman at the table next to me in Bar les Célestins. She was in her early forties, dressed in a chic black outfit and chain-smoking while bantering with friends. Her straight, dark hair, deep-set olive eyes, and sharp, angular features reminded me of a slightly more masculine Anjelica Huston, a look the French call jolie-laide (pretty-ugly) to describe women who are striking yet not conventionally pretty. She intrigued me. She had a confident, perhaps even cocky air to her, but there was also something sad and mysterious about her.

  We struck up a conversation, and I learned that she’d spent ten years in San Francisco after falling in love with an American, whom she married and had three children with. At first because there was no maternity leave at her job, and then because she loved it, she stayed at home with her kids. Her husband’s income allowed it, particularly as he moved up the corporate ladder.

  Several years into the marriage, he developed a taste for cocaine, their marriage fell apart, and she ended up moving back to France to be closer to her parents. She received some alimony but not enough to continue staying home with her children.

  “I love my children, I gave myself to them completely,” she’d said, taking a deep drag from her cigarette. “They’re great kids, happy and healthy. As a mother, I feel good. I know I did well. As a woman . . . well, I teach high school math. It’s not a bad job but I have a Ph.D. My friends from before I left France are where I should be, university professors, getting published, giving lectures, better salaries. It’s awkward between us sometimes, you know? They pity me now. I pity myself. I’m a successful mother and a failed woman.”

  She stamped out her cigarette, exhaled deeply, and shrugged her shoulders. I could tell she’d delved as deeply as she wanted.

  “It scared me,” I relay to my mom now. “It seems like you totally lose yourself when you have kids.”

  My mom shakes her head.

  “There are lots of ways to lose yourself—motherhood’s just one of them. That’s why it’s so important to be conscious and intentional about your choices. And it’s not like you have to go to every single Mommy and Me class, or bake cookies for class parties. You see what works and doesn’t work and modify it for yourself. Oh, hey, there’s Chrystelle.”

  Chrystelle’s pulled her car up across the playground and is waving at us. She drops us off at Place Crillon, a plaza not far from the Palais des Papes, but not before Antoine takes my face in his hands, firmly kisses each cheek, does the same to my mom, and then hollers, “Au revoir les Américaines!”

  “Let’s go to the bluff, Mia, I don’t feel like going home just yet,” my mom says, and we turn onto the quiet, cobbled road leading to the bluff and the palais.

  “You know what the most important thing about having kids is, Mia? If you listen to nothing else I say, get this—you have your kids on your terms.”

  I’m taken aback by the sudden intensity she says this with, her voice and expression almost terse.

  “Don’t put your career on hold when you have children. I didn’t and it’s one of my biggest regrets. I worked, I’m a Writers Guild member, but I didn’t pursue screenwriting full-time and I never accumulated the body of work I should have. While your husband’s career keeps climbing, yours stalls and it’s almost impossible to catch up and compete. I stayed too focused on motherhood to see any life for myself outside of it once you were gone.

  “Start getting clear on your vision of your life now, and when you’re ready, you choose how many kids you want. It’s your body and your life. Marriages don’t always make it and kids leave home, so you have how many you want, when you want. Your terms.”

  “You always told me I was planned, so that would have been on your terms,” I point out, wondering why I’m suddenly getting lectured.

  “Oh, you were planned, you were just ahead of schedule. I wanted to finish my degree before having kids, but after the ectopic the doctor told me that the longer I waited, the harder it would be to get pregnant. Boy was he wrong—I got pregnant five different times after that, four on birth control, mind you!”

  I think for a minute, because something’s off.

  “Um, not to point out the obvious, Mom, but me, plus the miscarriage, plus two ectopics equals four pregnancies. And I’m pretty sure the answer was no when we were talking about abortion rights that one day and I asked if you’d ever had one.”

  “Well, darling, I lied. Sorry. I wasn’t ready to share that. It’s something I still regret, I always wanted to have another child and we never did.”

  “Why did you decide not to keep it?” I ask gingerly.

  “It was a rough time in a lot of ways, mostly between me and Paul.”

  The bitterness in her voice unnerves me. I don’t know what to say. That sucks? I’m sorry? You can always adopt? I always thought I was good with thorny topics, but I have no idea how to even begin to relate to something like this.

  “I will, Mom,” I say, turning to look at her. “I’ll try to get really clear about what I want in life.”

  “Good. Because it’ll feel really shitty later if you don’t.”

  We’d been headed toward the bluff but my mom suddenly turns and heads quickly for an alley we rarely use.

  “Hey, where are you going?” I call after her, then realize by the suddenness, by the way she’s holding her body, not to mention the word “shitty,” that something’s wrong. I hurry beside her and take her arm.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She’s crying.

  “Mommy, it’s okay.”

  She suddenly stops and looks at me, puzzled, hard in a way I’ve never seen.

  “Okay? Of course it’s not okay.”

  She finds a tiny stairway to a street below and sits on the top step.

  “It was never okay. And it was never okay to pretend it was. Or to pretend it didn’t hurt. It did. It does. A lot of things do.”

  She puts her head on her knees and cries. After a while, she takes a deep breath.

  “Some things will simply never be possible for me again, ever. With life, work, kids. I know it in my head, I’ve talked about it but I’ve never let myself feel any of it. I’m sorry.”

  “Mommy, don’t apologize. Just cry.”

  Most of our dreams never really vanish. Our deep, unrealized wants just languish until we’re old enough or slowed down enough by some crisis for our skin to have thinned a bit. Then they appear like pentimento, the artist’s regret. The cost of their burial just aches right through.

  And you can’t therapize it or deny it or New-Age it away on some retreat with platitudes like it was all meant to be. With rare exception, I think we make meant to be. I made certain choices, paid certain consequences, and then chose the mask. And now it’s time to pay the piper. I can choose the cost of glossing over, of continuing to deny what hurt, which already has a long running tab. Or the cost of admitting it.

  Which feels so horrible it’s almost too much to bear—admitting I wanted to be a doctor, that I wanted a big, happy family, a son. That I wanted a lot of things I was too polite or too afraid to ask for. Jobs I didn’t take, things I didn’t do because Paul didn’t want to, or because I sometimes lacked confidence, though usually it was clarity I lacked rather tha
n confidence.

  Nothing earth-shattering, certainly nothing like the events of Mia’s childhood. But those events were explored, expunged, learned from—I felt all the emotions that went along with them.

  These are the kinds of regrets all women have, mistakes and missteps, paths not chosen, opportunities gone. Youth gone. Forever. And until I honestly acknowledge how this regret feels, acknowledge that I’m not okay with how some of my life went, it’s like having a fake past, and a fake present, which is surely a prescription to a fake future.

  And it precludes grace, my life’s slate wiped clean by granting myself tender mercy. You can’t forgive what you don’t face.

  After a while, I heave a sigh. I’m glad I’m not alone. Whenever I cry, which isn’t often, I do it alone. I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable or force myself to stop crying before I’m ready. With Mia, right now, I feel free to be honest, vulnerable, to let it all out.

  “Thank you for being here with me, for just letting me cry,” I tell Mia, wiping my eyes on her sleeve for a change.

  I told my mom earlier I wanted to know more about her and I’m getting more than I’d imagined, or perhaps bargained for. Never in my life have I seen her upset like this, there’s a resigned and bitter quality to her anguish that’s extremely difficult to watch. She has so much anger at herself that I’m not sure how I never noticed it before. Either she deliberately hid it very well or she’s simply never allowed herself to feel it. Part of me wonders if impulse-buying the house was my mom’s unconscious attempt to re-create the family life she wanted but never had.

  Living with my mom this summer feels a little like being a fly on the wall of a director editing footage. She’s shifting through scenes, finding patterns, seeing how things could have been alternately filmed. From the moment she called to say that she was going to France, something in her voice told me she was going through a big change, and that the summer would be a pivotal time for her.

  Moments like these make me certain that I did the right thing in coming here; I’m learning more about her than I ever otherwise would have, and our relationship is completely changing, opening up, and becoming much richer.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Avignon

  Those Who Matter Don’t Mind

  Imagine this life: every drive home is through rolling fields of grapevines and sunflowers, dotted with centuries-old farmhouses and garage-size rolls of dried hay. Your lavender-lined driveway ends at a terrace with an enormous tree shading a long rustic table filled most weekends with a bounty of food, family, and friends; your home is a huge old restored farmhouse with a big writing office that looks out on your husband’s dream come true, an organic vineyard of award-winning artisanal wines. When not tending your two beautiful children and home, you’re writing a hugely popular blog on France and the French language.

  Oh, and you’re stunning, beloved, and feel God’s presence in your life. And your husband is a sweet, smart Gallic hunk. Voilà, my girlfriend Kristin’s life. One that she’d dreamed of since she was an adolescent living in the shadow of a freeway near Phoenix. She’d just gotten her first diary and seen a Bain de Soleil commercial and knew her destiny: she was going to be a writer living in France. Which she is.

  She was so determined to live her dream that she created a blog before there was any real Internet. While working as a bilingual secretary in Marseilles post-college, she crafted vignettes describing life in France that she sent by regular post once a week to Francophiles in the United States who might be interested in her weekly “Café letters.” Once she started a blog, she drew fans worldwide, along with a publishing deal for a memoir.

  She picks us up at the train station in Orange, looking breezy and radiant with her long, white gauzy skirt, intensely blue eyes, and tousled blond locks. I insist Mia sit up front, as it’s her first time meeting Kristin. She and Kristin are full of questions for each other, about college, life in France, writing, dating. I love watching Mia get to know my friends. They elicit different things from each other than I do, and it’s a chance to learn new things about each of them.

  Kristin’s normally reserved but she and Mia are chatting away like old friends. Mia has the ability to make anyone open up; she’s genuinely curious and listens well, beneath the words.

  On my last visit, I marveled at how such a soft-spoken, somewhat shy woman could do all the things Kristin does in a day (full-time blogging and photography, speaking, writing short stories, mothering two kids, helping Jean-Marc with a grueling harvest in the fall and a stream of vineyard clients and visitors all year long). What’s allowed her to realize her dream where so many others fail, including me for many years, is how carefully and sanely she chooses exactly where to spend her time and energy. On the way from collecting us at the station to her home, she’d shot enough photos for a few blog posts at the cost of only two minutes’ extra time—the old bicycle leaning against the boulangerie wall, an old tobacco ad painted on a crumbling building, a cat stretched out on a sidewalk. She threw together a wonderful lunch in ten minutes (“instant couscous tastes the same as the longer kind”). Her house is fresh, typically Provençal, and looks neat but lived-in. She wears simple, pretty clothes, a great haircut, little or no makeup, and no nail polish.

  Basically, she’d become a French mother—disciplined about time where it counts most and not too worried about the rest. Though the rest isn’t always something she and Jean-Marc agree on.

  “For example,” she tells us as we walk to the river where Mia and Kristin’s giant retriever, Braise, run ahead to have a swim. “I can speak French fluently by now, but my accent is terrible, even after twenty years.”

  It’s true, she has a strong American accent. We’ve twisted our towels around our heads like turbans to keep the sun off our faces as we amble along a stony dirt path. On our right, Jean-Marc’s grapes are just beginning to turn purple.

  “It drives Jean-Marc crazy that I don’t even try. But why spend my time focused on that? Everyone understands me just fine.”

  Kristin’s life illustrates that it takes more than passion and a lot of work to make a dream work—it takes focus. What you think about matters, a lot. Your thoughts drive your actions. When I think about much of what I’ve focused my thoughts on in the last few years, I cringe. You stick a perfectionist who hates domestic stuff in a fixer-upper and what you get is someone constantly obsessing on things she isn’t going to do. The thing about that, aside from premature aging, is that focus = time, something most of us don’t really, truly consider. Those are minutes, hours, and days of your life gone forever.

  There is a balance to be struck, however—a trade-off for such big accomplishments.

  “Some people think I live this dream life. Don’t get me wrong, it is what I always wanted, it’s a beautiful life, and I’m deeply grateful. But every minute is taken up and my mind is always busy.”

  I told her it could also just be her nature, that maybe it’s the other way around—her life is busy because her mind is; she’d live a very full, busy life in any career or country.

  “That’s probably true. But I do pay a price; some part of me is almost always worried about something or someone. I’m still upset about that guy last night.”

  She’d shared earlier about a local journalist who had shown up unannounced. She’d had a long day and all she wanted to do was finish an article with a hot cup of tea.

  “But that voice in my head kept saying, Am I being kind enough, or humble enough, I should be nice to him. So of course I invited him in and was a good hostess for the evening, all while shaking under my skin.”

  Because she’d also had a vague instinct that he might not be sincere about the article he said he wanted to write. But another voice kept chiming in, this time rooted in her faith.

  “I kept thinking of that Bible verse in Hebrews, Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise. I’m
always afraid I’ll misjudge someone. But you know what? He studied everything, but wrote nothing. He just came to snoop. I was so angry at myself—for not respecting myself, for not following my instinct—that I hardly slept all night.”

  I know exactly how she felt, what it feels like to mouth the words Sure, I can do that or Of course you can join me, while some part of me shrivels. What woman doesn’t have that script memorized? Why don’t we say, “Thank you, but I’d rather walk alone today,” or “I’m sorry I’m not able to accommodate you right now,” without having to justify or explain? Why are we so afraid to be hungry? After all, in the words of Bernard Baruch, those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind don’t matter. Otherwise the person who ends up not mattering is us. That journalist was just doing what he does; she had the choice to turn him away.

  Why do so many of us choose to be good girls going for gold stars, instead of clasping tight the gold of our lives by living as we truly desire? We accommodate, we wait our turn, do what we should. Over a few decades of adulthood, you accumulate so many shoulds, I think some of us feel like our own walking, talking avatars, images of ourselves.

  As if we had all the time in the world, as if our lives would never come to an end.

  We tend to think it’s just the sweet, over-accommodating women. Most of us can’t imagine women with strong personalities, like Kristin or me, not speaking up for ourselves. But all of us learned very early on that honesty and boldness cost us relationships.

  Girls are about connection, belonging, and approval; without it, we form a core belief that we’re not worthy enough, not cool enough, not funny or pretty or smart or successful or whatever enough. Even the pushy girls. So we abandon part of ourselves rather than risk losing connection. We may become outspoken, accomplished women, but in many ways we’ve gone a lifetime racking up gold stars. By the time we consciously make the compromises of motherhood, we’ve long been making unconscious ones, for peers, boyfriends, husbands, family.