The sister of the sports-marketing consultant is my American friend Nancy, who lives in Paris and has a son with her French boyfriend. The two sisters, who even look alike, are a kind of social experiment. Just by virtue of where they live and who their partners are, they’re facing opposite social pressures. Nancy, the sister in Paris, tells me that a few months after she gave birth, her French boyfriend began needling her to stop wearing sweatpants and to shed her spare tire. As an incentive, he offered to take her shopping for new clothes.
Nancy says she was both surprised and offended. Like her sister in Connecticut, she had imagined herself to be in a protected “mom zone,” where she got a pass on her appearance for a while so she could devote herself to looking after the baby. But Nancy’s French boyfriend was working from a different script. He still viewed her fully as a woman and felt entitled to the aesthetic benefits that go with that. He was equally surprised and bothered that she was willing to just give that up.
In France, three months seems to be the magic number: Frenchwomen of all ages keep telling me they “got back their ligne” (figure) by three months postpartum. Audrey, a French journalist, tells me over coffee that she got her figure back right away after both of her pregnancies—one of which was with twins. “Of course. It was natural,” she says. “You too, no?” (I was already sitting down when she arrived at the café.)
As a foreigner who’s not married to a Frenchman, I’ve excused myself from the three-month rule. I’m not sure I even heard about it until Bean was six months old. My body has charmingly decided to store its extra bulk around my belly and hips, giving the impression that I might be holding on to at least the placenta.
I’d surely be skinnier if I had French in-laws to needle me. It seems that just as obesity spreads through social networks, so does thinness. If everyone around you a s arws ssumes that they’re going to drop the extra pounds, you’re more likely to actually do it. (It’s also easier to lose weight if you haven’t gained too much.)
To lose their baby weight, Frenchwomen seem to do a slightly more intensified version of what they do the rest of the time.
“I pay a lot of attention,” is how my friend Virginie, a svelte mother of three, explains it to me over lunch one day, as I gorge on a giant bowl of Cambodian noodle soup. (Any country that France has occupied or colonized is overrepresented in cheap, delicious ethnic restaurants in Paris.)
Virginie says she never goes on a diet, known in French as a régime. She just pays a lot of attention, some of the time.
“What do you mean?” I ask Virginie between slurps.
“No bread,” she says, firmly.
“No bread?” I repeat, incredulous.
“No bread,” Virginie says, with steely, calm conviction.
Virginie doesn’t mean no bread ever. She means no bread during the week, from Monday to Friday. On the weekends, and on the occasional night out during the week, she says she eats whatever she wants.
“You mean ‘whatever you want’ in moderation, right?” I ask.
“No, I eat whatever I want,” she says, with that conviction again.
This is similar to what Mireille Guiliano prescribes in French Women Don’t Get Fat. (Guiliano suggests taking just one day “off,” and even then not overdoing it too much.) It’s inspiring to see someone who’s actually implementing this, evidently with great success.
Paying attention may be another example of Frenchwomen intuitively following the best science. Researchers have found that the best way to lose weight and keep it off is to carefully monitor yourself—for instance, by keeping a food diary and weighing yourself daily.3 They have also discovered that people have more willpower when they don’t rule out ever eating certain foods but rather tell themselves that they will eat those foods later4 (such as, presumably, during the weekend).
I also like the neutral, pragmatic French formulation “paying attention” over the value-laden American one, “being good” (and its guilt-ridden, demoralizing opposites: “cheating” and “being bad”). If you’ve merely stopped paying attention and had some cake, it seems easier to forgive yourself and to eat mindfully again at the next meal.
Virginie says this way of eating is an open secret among women in Paris. “Everyone you see who is thin”—she draws a kind s drini of imaginary line down her small frame—“pays very close attention.” When Virginie feels like she’s put on a few pounds, she pays closer attention still. (My friend Christine, the French journalist, later sums up this system very succinctly for me: “Women in Paris don’t eat very much.”)
Over lunch, Virginie looks me up and down, and evidently decides that I have not been paying attention.
“You drink café crème, don’t you?” she says. Café crème is what Parisians call café au lait. It’s a cup of steaming milk poured onto a shot of espresso, without the foam that would make it a cappuccino.
“Yes, but I use fat-free milk,” I say, weakly. I do this when I’m at home. Virginie says that even fat-free milk is hard to digest. She drinks café allongé—lengthened coffee—which is espresso diluted with boiling water. (Filtered American coffee or tea is fine, too.) I scribble down Virginie’s suggestions—Drink more water! Climb the stairs! Go for walks!—as if I’m receiving revelation.
I’m not obese. Like my friend Nancy, I’m just sort of motherly. There’s no risk of Bean’s getting jabbed by a hip bone when I bounce her on my lap. I have skinny aspirations, though. I’ve promised myself that I won’t think of getting pregnant again until I finish my book and reach my target number of kilograms. (After years in France, I still don’t know whether to wear a sweater when I hear the temperature in Celsius or how tall someone is when they give their height in centimeters. But I immediately know whether my weight in kilograms means I’ll fit into my jeans or not.)
Of course, French mothers aren’t just different because they’re thin.Not all of them are, anyway. And I meet American women who fit back into their pre-pregnancy jeans by the three-month mark, too. But I can spot these American mothers from a distance in the park just by their body language. Like me, they’re hunched over their kids, setting out toys on the grass while scanning the ground for choking hazards. They’re transparently given over to the service of their children.
What’s different about French moms is that they get back their pre-baby identities, too. For starters, they seem more physically separate from their children. I’ve never seen a French mother climb a jungle gym, go down a slide with her child, or sit on a seesaw—all regular sights back in the United States and among Americans visiting France. For the most part, except when toddlers are just learning to walk, French parents park themselves on the perimeter of the playground or the sandbox and chat with one another (though not with me).
In American homes, every room in the house is liable to be overrun with toys. In one home I visited, the parents had taken all the books off the shelves in their living room and replaced them with stacks of kids’ toys and games.
Some French parents store toys in the living room. But plenty don’t. The children in these families have loads of playthings, but these don’t engulf the common spaces. At a minimum, the toys are put away at night. Parents see doing this as a healthy separation and a chance to clear their minds when the kids go to bed. Samia sto at, my neighbor who during the day is the extremely doting mother of a two-year-old, tells me that when her daughter goes to bed, “I don’t want to see any toys . . . Her universe is in her room.”
It’s not just the physical space that’s different in France. I’m also struck by the nearly universal assumption that even good mothers aren’t at the constant service of their children, and that there’s no reason to feel bad about that.5
American parenting books typically tack on reminders for mothers to have lives of their own. But I frequently hear American stay-at-home mothers say they never use babysitters because they consider all child care to be their job.
In Paris, even mothers who don’t work take for g
ranted that they’ll enroll their toddlers in part-time child care in order to have some time alone. They grant themselves guilt-free windows to go to yoga class and to get their highlights retouched. As a result, even the most harried stay-at-home moms don’t show up at the park looking frazzled and disheveled, as if they’re part of a separate tribe.
French women don’t just permit themselves physical time off; they also allow themselves to mentally detach from their kids. In Hollywood films, you know instantly if a female character has kids. That’s often what the film is about. But in the French romantic dramas and comedies I occasionally sneak out to watch, the fact that the protagonist has kids is often irrelevant to the plot. In one typical French film, Les Regrets, a small-town schoolteacher rekindles a love affair with her former boyfriend, who comes back to town when his mother becomes ill. During the film, we’re vaguely aware that the schoolteacher has a daughter. But the little girl appears only briefly. Mostly, the movie is a love story, complete with steamy sex scenes. The protagonist isn’t supposed to be a bad mother; it’s just that being a mother isn’t part of the story.
In France, the dominant social message is that while being a parent is very important, it shouldn’t subsume one’s other roles. Women I know in Paris express this by saying that mothers shouldn’t become “enslaved” to their children. When Bean is born, one of the main television channels runs a talk show most mornings called Les Maternelles, in which experts and parents dissect all aspects of parenting. Right afterward there’s another program, We’re Not Just Parents, which covers work, sex, hobbies, and relationships.
Of course some middle-class Frenchwomen lose themselves in motherhood, just as some American mothers manage not to. But the ideals in each place are very different. I’m struck by a fashion spread in a French mothers’ magazine,6 featuring the French actress Géraldine Pailhas. Pailhas, thirty-nine, is a real-life mother of two who’s posing as different types of moms. In one photograph she’s smoking a cigarette, pushing a stroller, and gazing into the distance. In another she’s wearing a blond wig and reading a biography of Yves Saint Laurent. In a third, she’s wearing a black evening gown and impossibly high feathered stilettos, while pushing an old-fashioned pram.
The text describes sxt cigPailhas as an ideal of French motherhood: “She is at her base the most simple expression of female liberty: happy in her role as mother, avid and curious about new experiences, perfect in ‘crisis situations,’ and always attentive to her children, but not chained to the concept of perfect mother, which, she assures us, ‘does not exist.’”
There’s something in this text, and in Pailhas’s bearing, that reminds me of those French mothers who snub me in the park. In real life, they mostly aren’t prancing around in Christian Louboutin heels. But like Pailhas, they signal that while they are devoted mothers, they also think about stuff that has nothing to do with their kids and enjoy moments of guilt-free liberté.
Pailhas of course shed her baby weight the instant her kids came out. But that inner life, which we glimpse in the photos, and which I see in those French moms at the crèche and in the park, is also required to keep her looking and feeling seductive.7 Pailhas doesn’t look like a cartoonish MILF. She just looks like a sexy, relaxed woman. I can’t imagine her telling me that she’s only as happy as her least-happy child.
I consult my friend Sharon, who’s a Francophone Belgian literary agent married to a handsome Frenchman. She’s lived all over the world with him and their two kids. Sharon immediately homes in on another thing I’m seeing in the Pailhas pictures
and in the mothers all around me in Paris.
“For American women, the role of mom is very segmented, very absolute,” Sharon says. “When they wear the mom ‘hat,’ they wear the mom clothes. When they’re sexy, they’re totally sexy. And the kids can see only the ‘mom’ part.”
In France (and apparently in Belgium, too) the “mom” and “woman” roles ideally are fused. At any given time, you can see both.
Chapter 8
the perfect mother doesn’t exist
Here’s something you might not know: spending twelve hours a day at the computer, stress-eating chocolate M&Ms, does not promote weight loss.
It does, however, enable me to finish my book. And the mere presence of this book on Amazon.com jolts awake the “woman” in me. So does the book tour. I travel to New York, sans husband and child, to talk about the book to anyone who’ll listen, and stare lovingly at it in bookstores. (One salesman has seen this behavior before. He approaches me and asks, “Are you the author?”)
My real transformation happens when the book comes out in French. After years of having a semidetached presence in Paris, I’m suddenly thrust into the national conversation. The book is a journalistic study of how different cultures treat infidelity. (This was as far as I could get from financial writin vs ag, and it seemed like a salient topic to research from France.) Americans treated the book as a serious moral inquiry. The French assume that the book is meant to be amusing.
A talk show called Le Grand Journal invites me to come on and discuss it, live and in French. I’d vaguely noticed Le Grand Journal, which is broadcast five nights a week at 7:05 P.M. My French publisher—a wizened woman in her fifties with a solid-gold Rolodex—explains that the show is a French institution. It’s a cross between The Tonight Show and Meet the Press. Host Michel Denisot is a legendary journalist. He and a panel of interviewers grill each guest. Everyone is witty but a bit savage. It’s like a posh French dinner party but broadcast on live TV.
My publisher is thrilled for the publicity, but she’s panicked about my French. She arranges for me to spend hours fielding practice questions in French from a businessman she knows. He seems nervous, too. He keeps reminding me that “affaire” in French doesn’t mean anything extramarital; for that I need to say aventure or liaison.
By the night of the show, I’m feeling immersed and ready. I have three cups of espresso and sit for hair and makeup. Then suddenly I’m standing behind two giant curtains. Michel Denisot says my name, and the curtains open. I descend the glossy white steps, Miss America–style, then walk to a large table where Denisot and the three-person panel are waiting for me.
I’m concentrating so hard on understanding the questions that I’m not even nervous. Fortunately, they’re mostly the questions I’ve practiced. How did I get the idea for the book? How does France compare with the United States? When one of the interviewers asks me if I was unfaithful myself while writing the book, I bat my eyes coquettishly and say that I’m a journalist, so of course I was très professionnelle. The interviewers—and the studio audience—love this.
On this high note, Denisot starts to wrap up the interview. He seems to be making a summary statement. I stop paying close attention. My brother, who watches a replay on the Internet, says at this point I look visibly relieved.
Then, suddenly, I hear my name again. Denisot is formulating another question for me. He can’t let it rest. It’s something about Moïse—French for Moses—and a blog. Moses had a blog? My brother says that when the camera cuts back to me, I look petrified. I have no idea what he’s asking me.
All at once I get it: Denisot isn’t saying “blog”; he’s saying “blague,” the French word for joke. He wants me to retell a joke from my book. It’s the one where Moses comes down from the mount and says, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I got him down to ten commandments. The bad news is, adultery is still in there.”
This isn’t one of the questions I had practiced. On the spot, I can’t think of exactly how the joke goes, and certainly not how it goes in French. How do you say “mount”? How do you say “commandment”? All I manage to say is, “Adultery’s still in there!” The audience, gratefully, is still in a go {stiy od enough mood to laugh. And Denisot wisely moves on to the next guest.
Despite this incident, I’m grateful to be in the working world again. It puts me in sync with French society. That’s because, af
ter boldly not breast-feeding, then reconditioning their minds and bodies, French mothers go back to work. College-educated mothers rarely ditch their careers, temporarily or permanently, after having kids. When I tell Americans that I have a child, they usually ask, “Are you working?” Whereas French people just ask, “What do you do?”
Back in the United States, I know lots of women who’ve stopped working to raise their kids. In France, I know exactly one. I have a vision of what my life as a stay-at-home mom would have been in France, when I ditch work one morning and take Bean to the park. Our local park was built in the nineteenth century on the site of the former palace of the Knights Templar (take that, Central Park). This may sound like The Da Vinci Code, but really it’s quite bourgeois. You’re more likely to dig up an abandoned pacifier there than a medieval relic. There’s a little lake, a forged-iron gazebo, and a playground that fills up as soon as school lets out.
Bean and I are in the gazebo when I’m jolted by the sound of American English, coming from a woman with two little kids. She and I are soon exchanging life stories. She tells me that she quit her job as a fact-checker to accompany her husband on his yearlong sabbatical in Paris. They agreed that he would do his research, while she soaked up the city and looked after the kids.
Nine months into the sabbatical, she doesn’t look like someone who’s been relishing the City of Light. She looks like someone who’s been schlepping two toddlers back and forth to the park. She stumbles over her words a bit, then apologizes, explaining that she doesn’t often speak to adults. She’s heard about the playgroups organized by English-speaking moms, but says she didn’t want to spend her precious time in France with other Americans. (I try not to take this personally.) She speaks excellent French, and had assumed that she’d meet some French moms and buddy around with them.
Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting Page 14