Every Anglophone mother I speak to has a cautionary tale about a mother in her social circle who refuses to leave her child with anyone. These mums aren’t urban myths; I frequently meet them. At a wedding I sit next to a stay-at-home mother from Colorado, who explains that she has a full-time babysitter but never leaves the sitter alone with her three kids. (Her husband has skipped the wedding to look after them.) An artist from Michigan tells me that she couldn’t bring herself to use a babysitter for her son’s whole first year. ‘He seemed so tiny, he was my first kid. I’m really pretty neurotic. The idea of handing him over to someone …’ Her voice trails off.
Other Anglophone parents I meet have adopted such specific diets and discipline techniques that it’s hard for anyone else – even a grandparent – to take over and follow all the rules. A grandfather from Virginia says his daughter became livid when he pushed her baby’s buggy the ‘wrong’ way over a bump. The baby’s mum had read that there’s a smaller chance of brain damage if babies go over bumps backwards.
Obviously, Simon and I aren’t against babysitters. We’re currently employing half the Philippines. But since the boys were born, I haven’t spent more than a few hours away from home. Mostly I do what that mother from Colorado does: I use the babysitter as a kind of assistant who changes nappies and does the laundry. But I’m usually on the premises.
This system has the advantage of both depleting our savings and destroying our relationship, simultaneously. I feel rebarbative much of the time. I realize I’m losing my mind a little bit when – about fifteen minutes before one of our babysitters is supposed to arrive – my phone beeps, indicating that I have a new text message. I panic, fearing that the babysitter is late. In fact, it’s a message from a news service that I subscribe to, informing me that there’s been a deadly earthquake in South America. For an instant, I’m relieved.
Of course, it’s easier to get along with your spouse if your baby sleeps through the night by three months old, your kids play by themselves, and you’re not constantly shuttling them from one activity to the next. What also seems to help is that French couples view romance differently, even when they have young kids. I get an inkling of this when my obstetrician writes me a prescription for ten sessions of rééducation périnéale – perineal re-education. She did this after Bean was born, and again after the birth of the boys.
Before my first re-education, I had only been vaguely aware that I had a perineum, or what exactly it is. It turns out to be the hammock-like pelvic-floor area, which often gets stretched out during pregnancy and birth. The stretching makes the birth canal a little less ‘tight’, and can cause mothers to pee a bit when they cough or sneeze. To prevent this, mothers in British antenatal classes are advised to do pelvic floor exercises on their own. Some of them probably do.
In France, getting a woman’s pelvic floor back into shape is a priority. Friends tell me that their French obstetricians gauge whether a few sessions of perineal re-education are needed by asking, ‘Is le monsieur happy?’
I think my monsieur would be happy to have any access to my perineum. The region hasn’t exactly lain fallow in the year or so since the boys were born. But I wouldn’t say there’s any danger of overuse. For a while, as soon as Simon went anywhere near my breasts, it was like a fire alarm: they began spurting milk. Anyway, sleep is more of a priority.
I’m intrigued enough by perineal re-education to give it a try. My first re-educator is a slim Spanish woman named Mónica, with an office in the Marais. Our introductory session begins with a forty-five-minute interview, during which she asks me dozens of questions about my bathroom habits and my sex life.
Then I disrobe from the waist down, and lie down on a padded table covered with crinkly paper. Mónica slips on surgical gloves and leads me in what I can best describe as assisted crunches for the crotch, in sets of fifteen (‘and up, and release’). It’s a bit like Pilates for the below-the-belt region.
Afterwards, Mónica shows me a slender white wand that she’ll introduce in the next phase. It resembles a device you might see for sale in an adults-only shop. The wand will add electro-stimulation to my mini-sit-ups. By the tenth session we’ll be ready to try out a kind of video game, in which sensors on my groin measure whether I’m contracting the muscles enough to stay above a running orange line on the computer screen.
Perineal re-education is at once extremely intimate and strangely clinical. Throughout the exercises, Mónica and I address each other using the formal vous. But she asks me to close my eyes, so I can better isolate the muscles where her hand is. My doctor writes me a prescription for abdominal re-education too. She’s noticed that, more than a year after the twins are born, I still have a kind of bulge around my waist that’s part fat, part stretch, and part unknown substance. Frankly, I’m not sure what’s in there. I decide that it’s time to take action when I’m standing up on the Paris métro and a decrepit old woman offers me her seat. She thinks I’m pregnant.
Not all French women do re-education after they give birth. But many do. Why not? France’s national insurance picks up most or all of the cost of re-education, including the price of the white wand. The state even helps pay for some tummy tucks, usually when the mother’s belly hangs below her pubis, or when it’s inhibiting her sex life.
Of course, all this re-education just gets mothers out of the starting gate. What do French women do once their bellies and their pelvic floors are back in fighting shape?
Some do focus only on their kids. But unlike in the US or Britain, the culture doesn’t encourage or reward this. Sacrificing your marriage and your sex life for your kids is considered wildly unhealthy and out of balance.
The French know that having a baby changes things, especially at first. Couples typically assume that there’s a very intense stretch after the birth, when it’s all-hands-on-deck for the baby. After that, gradually, the mother and father are supposed to find their equilibrium as a couple again.
‘There’s this fundamental assumption [in France] that every human being has desire. It never disappears for very long. If it does it means you’re depressed and you need to be treated,’ explains Marie-Anne Suizzo, the University of Texas sociologist who studied French and American mothers.
The French mothers I meet talk about ‘le couple’ in a wholly different way from the Anglophone parents I know. ‘For me, the couple comes before the children,’ says Virginie, the skinny stay-at-home mum who taught me to ‘pay attention’ to what I eat.
Virginie is principled, smart, and a devoted mother. But she has no intention of letting her romantic life slacken just because she has three kids.
‘The couple is the most important. It’s the only thing that you choose in your life. Your children you didn’t choose. You chose your husband. So, you’re going to make your life with him. So you have an interest in it going well. Especially when the children leave, you want to get along with him. For me, it’s prioritaire.’
Not all French parents would agree with Virginie’s ranking. But in general, the question for French parents isn’t whether they’ll resume having full romantic lives again, but when. ‘No ideology can dictate the moment when the parents will feel truly ready to find each other again,’ says the French psycho-sociologist Jean Epstein. ‘When conditions permit, and when they feel ready, the parents will give the baby his rightful place, outside their couple.’
Anglophone experts do sometimes mention that parents should take time for themselves. In Dr Spock’s Baby and Child Care (which my friend Dietlind hands over to me before leaving Paris) there’s a two-paragraph section called ‘Needless self-sacrifice and excessive preoccupation’. It says that today’s young parents tend to ‘give up all their freedom and all their former pleasures, not as a matter of practicality but as a matter of principle’. Even when these parents occasionally sneak off by themselves, ‘They feel too guilty to get full enjoyment.’ The book urges parents to carve out quality time together, but only after making ‘all the
necessary sacrifice of time and effort to your children’.
French experts don’t treat having quality time together as an afterthought; they’re adamant and unambiguous about it. That’s perhaps because they’re very sanguine and up-front about how having a baby can strain a marriage. ‘It isn’t for nothing that a good number of couples separate in the first few years, or the first few months following the arrival of a child. Everything changes,’ one article says.
Le couple doesn’t just get a cursory mention in the French parenting books I read; it’s treated as a central topic. Some French parenting websites sometimes have as many articles on ‘le couple’ as they do on pregnancy. ‘The child must not invade the parents’ whole universe … for family balance, the parents also need personal space,’ writes Hélène de Leersnyder, the paediatrician. ‘The child understands without a clash, and always very young, that his parents need time that’s not about work, the house, shopping, children.’
Once French parents emerge from the initial cocooning period, they take this call to coupledom seriously. There is actually a time of day in France known as ‘adult time’ or ‘parent time’. It’s when the kids go to sleep. Anticipation of ‘adult time’ helps explain why – once the fairy tales are read and the songs are sung – French parents are strict about enforcing bedtime. They treat ‘adult time’ not as an occasional, hard-won privilege but as a basic human need. Judith, an art historian in Brittany with three young kids, explains that all three are asleep by 8 or 8:30, because ‘I need a world for myself’.
French parents don’t just think these separations are good for parents. They also genuinely believe that they’re important for kids, who must understand that their parents have their own pleasures. ‘Thus the child understands that he is not the centre of the world, and this is essential for his development,’ the French parenting guide Your Child explains.
French parents don’t just have their nights to themselves. After Bean starts school, we are confronted with a seemingly endless series of mid-term two-week holidays. During these times I can’t even arrange a play date. Most of Bean’s friends have been dispatched to stay with their grandparents in the countryside or the suburbs. Their parents use this time to work, travel, have sex and just be alone.
Virginie says she takes a ten-day holiday alone with her husband every year. It’s non-negotiable. Her kids, aged four to fourteen, stay with Virginie’s parents in a little village about two hours by train from Paris. Virginie says guilt doesn’t enter into her holiday planning. ‘What you build between the two of you when you’re away for ten days has to be good for the kids too,’ she says. She says that kids occasionally need space from their parents too. When they all reunite after the trip, it’s very sweet.
The French parents I meet seem to grab adult time whenever they can. Caroline, the physiotherapist, tells me without a trace of guilt that her mother is picking up her three-year-old son from maternelle on Friday afternoon, and looking after him until Sunday. She says that on their weekend off, she and her husband plan to sleep late and go to the movies.
French parents even get pockets of ‘couple time’ when their kids are home. A 42-year-old with three kids aged three to six tells me that on weekend mornings, ‘The kids don’t have the right to enter our room until we open the door.’ Until then, miraculously, they’ve learned to play by themselves. (Inspired by her story, Simon and I eventually try this. To our amazement, it mostly works. Though we have to re-teach it to the kids every few weeks.)
I have trouble explaining the concept of ‘date night’ to my French colleagues. For starters, there’s no ‘dating’ in France. Here, when you start going out with someone, it’s automatically supposed to be exclusive. To my French friends, a ‘date’ sounds too tentative, and too much like a job interview, to be romantic. It’s the same once a couple lives together. ‘Date night’, with its implied sudden switch from sweatpants to stilettos, sounds contrived to my French friends. They take issue with the implication that ‘real life’ is unsexy and exhausting, and that they should schedule romance like it’s a trip to the dentist.
When the American movie Date Night comes to France, it’s renamed Crazy Night. The couple in the film are supposed to be typical suburbanites with kids. American and British reviewers have no trouble relating to them. A writer for the Associated Press describes the pair as ‘tired, ordinary but reasonably content’. In an opening scene, they’re awoken in the morning when one of their children pounces on their bed. French critics are horrified by such scenes. A reviewer for Le Figaro describes the kids in the film as ‘unbearable’.
Despite having kids who don’t pounce on them in the morning, French women would seem to have more to complain about than American women do. They lag behind Britons and Americans in key measures of gender equality, such as the percentage of women in the legislature and heading large companies. And they have a bigger gap than we do between what men and women earn.5
French inequality is especially pronounced at home. French women spend 89 per cent more time than men doing household work and looking after children.6 In America, women spend 31 per cent more time than men on household activities, and 25 per cent more time on childcare.7
Despite all this, my British and American girlfriends with kids seem a lot angrier at their husbands and partners than my French girlfriends are. ‘I am fuming that he doesn’t bother to be competent about a whole slew of stuff that I ask him to do,’ my friend Anya writes to me in an e-mail about her husband. ‘He’s turned me into a shrewish nag and once I get mad, it’s hard for me to cool back down.’8 American friends – or even acquaintances – regularly pull me aside at dinner parties to grumble about something their husbands have just done. Whole lunches are devoted to complaints about how, without them, their households would have no clean towels, living plants or matching socks.
Simon gets many points for effort. He gamely takes Bean across town one Saturday, to get some American-sized passport photos. She sets off looking completely normal, but somehow returns with photos that make her look like a five-year-old psychopath having a bad-hair day.
Since the boys were born, Simon’s incompetence seems less charming. I no longer find it adorably mystifying when he breaks the second hands on all his watches, or reads our expensive English-language magazines in the shower. Some mornings, our whole marriage seems to hinge on the fact that he doesn’t shake the orange juice before he pours it.
For some reason, we mostly fight about food. (I put up a ‘Don’t Snap at Simon’ sign in the kitchen.) He leaves his beloved cheeses unwrapped in the refrigerator, where they quickly dry out. When the boys are a bit older, Simon gets a phone call when he’s in the middle of brushing Leo’s teeth. I take over, only to discover that Leo has an entire dried apricot in his mouth. When I complain, Simon says he feels disempowered by my ‘elaborate rules’.
When I get together with my Anglophone girlfriends, it’s just a matter of time before we start venting about our men. At one dinner in Paris, three of the six women at the table discover – in a ricochet of me-too’s – that their husbands all retreat to the bathroom for a long session, just when it’s time to put the kids to bed. Their complaining is so intense, I have to remind myself that these are women in solid marriages; they’re not on the verge of divorce.
When I get together with French women, this type of complaining doesn’t happen. When asked, French women acknowledge that they sometimes have to prod their husbands to do more around the house. Most say they’ve had their sulky moments, when it felt like they were carrying the whole household, while their husbands lay on the couch.
But somehow, in France, this imbalance doesn’t lead to what a writer in the bestselling American anthology The Bitch in the House calls ‘the awful, silent process of tallying up and storing away and keeping tabs on what he helped out with and what he did not’. French women are no doubt tired from playing mother, wife and worker simultaneously. But they don’t reflexively blame their husbands f
or this, or at least not with the venom that Americans women often do.
Possibly, French women are just more private. But even the French mothers I get to know well don’t seem to be secretly boiling over with the belief that the life they have isn’t the one they deserve. Their unhappiness doesn’t manifest as rage against their partners.
Partly, this is because French women don’t expect men to be their equals. They view them as a separate species, which by nature isn’t good at booking babysitters, buying tablecloths, or remembering to schedule check-ups with the paediatrician. ‘I think French women accept more the differences between the sexes,’ says Debra Ollivier, author of What French Women Know. ‘I don’t think that they expect men to step up to the plate with the same kind of meticulous attention and sense of urgency.’
When the French women I know mention their partners’ inadequacies, it’s to laugh about how adorably inept the men are. ‘They’re just not capable, we’re superior!’ jokes Virginie, as her girlfriends chuckle. Another mother breaks into peals of laughter when she describes how her husband blow-dries her daughter’s hair without brushing it first, so the little girl goes to school looking like she’s just stuck her finger in an electric socket.
This outlook creates a virtuous cycle. French women don’t harp on men about their shortcomings or mistakes. So the men aren’t demoralized. They feel more generous towards their wives, whom they praise for their feats of micromanagement and their command of household details. This praise – instead of the tension and resentment that tends to build in Anglophone households – seems to make the inequality easier to bear. ‘My husband says, “I can’t do what you do,”’ another Parisian mum, Camille, proudly tells me. None of this follows the Anglophone feminist script. But it seems to make things go more smoothly.
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