French Children Don't Throw Food

by Druckerman, Pamela

  I also read up on the nomenclature. In French, twins aren’t called ‘identical’ or ‘fraternal’. They’re ‘vrai’ or ‘faux’ – real or fake. I get used to telling people that I’m waiting for fake twin boys.

  I needn’t have worried about my fake boys coming out early. At nine months pregnant, I have two full-sized babies inside me, each weighing nearly as much as Bean did. People point at me from café tables. And I can no longer climb stairs.

  ‘If you want an apartment, go find one,’ I tell Simon. Less than a week later, after seeing exactly one apartment, he does. It’s old, even for Paris. It has no hallways, and a triple-width pavement in front. It needs a lot of work. We buy it. The day before I give birth, I have a meeting with an architect to plan the renovations.

  The private hospital where I delivered Bean was small and spotless, with an around-the-clock nursery, endless fresh towels, and steak and foie gras on the room-service menu. I barely had to change a nappy.

  I’ve been warned that the public maternity hospital where I’m planning to deliver the twins will be a less rarified experience. The medicine is excellent at French public hospitals, but the service is no-frills. They give you a list of things to bring to the birth, which includes nappies. There’s no customizing with birth plans, bathtubs and ‘walking epidurals’. They don’t give the baby a chic little hat. People keep saying ‘conveyor belt’ to describe the efficient but impersonal experience.

  I opt for Hôpital Armand-Trousseau because it’s a ten-minute taxi ride from our house, and it’s equipped to handle complications with twins. (I later learn that it’s attached to the children’s hospital where Françoise Dolto did her weekly rounds.) I don’t want to give birth in a bathtub anyway. And I figure that, when the moment comes, I’ll just use my New York chutzpah to customize things. I point out to Simon that we’re already enjoying economies of scale: they’re going to deliver our two babies for the price of one.

  When I go into labour, the epidural isn’t optional. The doctor puts me in a sterile operating room, so he can do a C-section instantly if necessary. I’m flat on my back, my legs locked into a retro 1950s harness, surrounded by strangers in shower caps and surgical masks. I ask several times for someone to put pillows under my back, so I can see what’s happening. No one even responds. Eventually, in a small concession, someone shoves a folded sheet under me, which just makes me more uncomfortable.

  As soon as active delivery starts, my French evaporates. I can’t understand anything the doctor says, and I can only speak English. This must have happened before, because a midwife immediately begins interpreting between me and the doctor. Maybe she’s summarizing, or maybe her English isn’t great. But she mostly just says ‘push’ and ‘don’t push’.

  When the first baby emerges, the midwife hands him to me. I’m captivated. Here is Baby A at last! We’re just getting acquainted when the midwife taps me on the shoulder.

  ‘Excuse me, but you must deliver the other baby,’ she says, taking Baby A to an undisclosed location. I realize, right then, that having twins is going to be complicated.

  Nine minutes later, Baby B emerges. I say a quick hello, and then they whisk him away too. In fact, soon almost everyone is gone – Simon, the babies, and most of the enormous medical team. I’m still on my back, paralysed from the waist down. My legs are still up in the harness, spread wide apart. On a stainless-steel table in front of me are two red placentas, each the size of a human head. Someone has decided to open the dividing curtains that were the walls of my room, so now anyone who walks past has a bull’s-eye view of my five-minutes-post-twins crotch.

  The only person still with me is the anaesthetic nurse, who also isn’t thrilled about being left behind. She decides to mask her irritation by making small talk: where am I from? Do I like Paris?

  ‘Where are my babies? When can I see them?’ I ask. (My French has reappeared.) She doesn’t know. And she’s not allowed to leave me to find out.

  Twenty minutes pass. No one comes for us. Perhaps because of the hormones, none of this bothers me. Though I’m grateful when the nurse finally uses surgical tape to put up a little modesty cloth between my knees. After that, she no longer wants to chat. ‘I hate my job,’ she says.

  Eventually someone wheels me into a recovery room, where I reunite with Simon and the babies. We take pictures, and for the first and only time I attempt to nurse both boys at once.

  An orderly wheels us to the room where the boys and I will be staying for the next few days. A boutique hotel it’s not. It’s more like a Travelodge. There’s a skeletal staff to help out, and a nursery that’s open from about 1 to 4 am. Because I have an older child, and am thus deemed unable to mess up too badly, the staff leaves me practically on my own. At mealtimes someone brings in plastic trays with a parody of hospital food: limp French fries, chicken nuggets and chocolate milk. It takes me a few days to realize that none of the other mothers is eating this: there’s a communal refrigerator down the hall, where they store groceries.

  Simon is at home looking after Bean, so most of the time I’m alone with the boys, who howl for hours at a stretch. I usually wedge one between my legs, in some approximation of a hug, while I try to nurse the other. With the constant blur of noise and body parts, it feels like there are more than two of them. When I finally get them both to sleep, after hours of wailing and drinking, Simon shows up. ‘It’s so peaceful in here,’ he says. I try not to think about the fact that my belly looks like a giant mound of flesh-coloured Jell-O.

  Amid all this, we have to name the boys. (The city of Paris gives you three days. By day two, an angry-looking 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 discover that someone who asks whether the boys are identical has no interest in babies.

  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 boys wake up all through the night. Simon and I 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. At about six months old, the boys start to sleep until six am.

  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 manage to 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 call Leo Joel and Joel Leo. I spend my few leisure minutes ruminating on this.

  Then comes the small matter of the circumcisions. Most French babies aren’t circumcised. In the main, just Jews and Muslims do it. Because it’s August in Paris, even the mohels, who do ritual circumcisions, are on holiday. We wait for one who’s been recommended (a man who is reassuringly both a mohel and a paediatrician) 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 to do this would be awful. 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 neighbourhood. 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 nappy. His poo, 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 on to the national meal plan, with four feeds a day. From the time they’re a few months old, except for the goûter, they rarely 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.

  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 OK. This isn’t easy for her; she’s quite a bit shorter than me.

  ‘I’m OK, 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 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 buggy in the vestibule downstairs. He won’t commit.

  ‘The previous owners were excellent neighbours,’ 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 disappeared. They’ve been replaced with new, flimsier 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 mouldings – until I destroyed a small part of it, at enormous expense.

  Now I spend a lot of time ruminating on this. ‘You know how Édith Piaf said, “Je ne regrette rien”?’ I ask Simon. ‘Well, for me it’s “Je regrette tout”.’

  Occasionally our life changes 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 pyjamas – silently pull themselves up and down on 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. ‘For 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 coming from inside. 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 immediate type this into Google Translate. It turns out that she has called me a ‘mummy bogey’. Given the circumstances, it’s a very good description.

  11

  I Adore This Baguette

  FRIENDS 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 rumour 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. 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.

  ‘OK, 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. 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 out a scary vibe. A childless couple we know come to visit from Chicago and conclude, 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 places in the crèche for both boys (even my mother is relieved to hear this). Twins are still uncommon enough in France that our application got priority status. The crèche committee 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 still 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 the labour-intensive parenting style ha
s become de facto for the middle classes, research shows that marital satisfaction has fallen1 and that mothers find it more pleasant to do housework than to take care of their kids.2 Social scientists now pretty much take for granted that today’s parents are less happy than non-parents. Studies show that parents have higher rates of depression, and that their unhappiness increases with each additional child3 (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 Anglophone 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 Canadians4 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 they 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 America and the UK. A cousin of mine – who’s a nurse with four kids – has family near by 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. They’re too tired. A schoolteacher from Manchester tells me that she’s taking her toddler on her honeymoon, even though her mother has volunteered to look after him. ‘I’d just feel too bad leaving him behind,’ she explains.