Parisienne Mais Presque

L'américain in the china shop

2012-01-30T23:11:00.001+01:00

I've been living here for over eight years, and it still happens to me. It's like my accent: I can't shake it, and perhaps I shouldn't even try anymore. Yes, folks, l'américaine has stumbled and shattered a few metaphorical plates.

Maybe my transition to expatriate life was easier for me because I never felt like I "got" all the social rules, even when I lived back home. I was painfully shy as a child, but sometime in high school I embraced the fact that I never fit it. I found my voice, and then decided to be loud, with a unsubtle sense of humor. I was the kid whose constant commentary in English class was smart and just this side of impertinent. Then I became a geek, and geeks can get away with ignoring most social niceties. I wasn't... comfortable, exactly, but I mostly avoided embarrassing myself.

Then I moved to France, and the social script got a whole lot more complicated. I didn't know when to insist, when to flatter, when to speak up (I still hesitate), when to be discreet (never my forte), or when to cheat, just a little bit. You see, the French love rules. They love making them, and they love breaking them. They love making exceptions, and more than just about anything else, they love benefiting from exceptions. The more exclusive, the better. But breaking rules and making exceptions can't be done willy-nilly, no; there are rules for breaking rules, a sort of savoir faire. Anyone who has ever stared down a French public servant and eventually obtained what they needed knows that there's a dance: be self-deprecating, but make your request seem important; show you understand, but don't grovel; show you care, but not too much. Last, seal the deal with a sort of fraternal understanding between deal-maker and rule-bender. Wink, wink.

At work every day, a caterer brings freshly made hot meals and salads for lunch. The food is delicious, and so by ten to noon there's usually a line already forming in the lunch room. The woman who works for the caterer arrives at noon on the dot, already harried and rushed from a trip in and out of Paris to pick up the merchandise. She unpacks as fast as she can and then faces alone a crowd of hungry, bored computer geeks. No small feat. She's very friendly, and knows us all by name. She knows that many of us workout at lunch, and will put our meals aside in the fridge if we discreetly pass her a meal check. I take advantage of this three days a week when I'm rushing off to yoga class or going out for a run.

The problem is, how to slip a meal check discreetly to someone in front a line of fidgety colleagues all craning their necks to see what's on the menu. My American sensibilities cry out that no, I can't possibly cheat. Look at all those people! They're just as hungry as I am! The least I can do is play by the rules; cheat, yes, but do it with finesse.

Today all finesse fled me. I walked into the lunchroom, which was unusually quiet. Twenty people were waiting, but silently. I knew it, of course: they were looking at me, watching for my next illicit move. I hesitated in the corner, nervously opened my purse and pretended to consult my cell phone. The caterer caught my eye and nodded. Nothing left but to pull off the hand off.

It seemed so blatant to me that I was cheating, so painfully obvious, that I decided I needed to mask my misdeed by saying something completely off topic. So I brought up a do-it-yourself project I did over the weekend. "Yeah, uh, the kitchen faucet? I did replace it myself!" When I said it, it came out loud and ridiculous in front of twenty people who didn't care and wanted me to just quit distracting the caterer, who of course was obliged to reply as I carried on, and who might otherwise be getting them their food. I felt them stare at me, as they seemed to say, so you're friends, so you get special treatment? The least you can do is keep it on the low-down, you American oaf.

I tend to speak first, reflect later. And -- and this is why I'm a blogger, of course -- I feel a great need to talk, about anything, everything; when I'm nervous, when I'm sad, when I'm laughing to myself and no one else can possibly get the joke. Despite eight years of language immersion and a vocabulary good enough to read Proust, I'm still opening my mouth and finding something all wrong comes out. Ce n'est pas ce que je voulais dire... but wait, that's not what I wanted to say. Did I want to say anything at all?

French interaction is heavy with context, and the unsaid weighs as much as what is actually said out loud. Often I've had to read between the lines in my boss' requests in order to understand that something was delicate or important. I'm not always good at this. I'm currently reading Balzac and despairing of my ability to ever grasp French social interaction (at least in the 19th century upper crust -- I guess I'm off the hook in real life). In Le père Goriot, Rastignac receives a letter which ostensibly invites his mistress and her husband to a ball. Except that when he reads it, he understands that the husband isn't actually invited. I read the passage in the book three times in a vain attempt to understand the same thing.

Yet the French also relish being startling blunt. They yell, they insult, they ostentatiously ignore. Perhaps the fact that no one did this when I cut in line today means I can assume that perhaps, maybe, no one actually cared that much?

"They're all just jealous. They know you've got a good deal. They're just not willing to go for a ten kilometer run in the cold for the same thing," my husband said simply, and shrugged. He's always been one to ignore etiquette. He's an iconoclast. Or maybe he's just not a born Parisian. Anyway, he always does know how to make me feel better, whenever I manage to drop some china on my feet once again.

Note: I could have written "le français in the china shop" about my husband (for example) in the US. Stomping around breaking someone else's cherished cultural rules is part of the universal expat experience. So don't think I'm trying to paint Americans as particularly inept or anything (even if I do feel particularly inept today myself).

Staff of life

2012-01-18T22:37:00.003+01:00

"Did you get the bread?"

The first years of our life together were more than just sweet words and 'je t'aime's. After all, a relationship is about negotiation and responsibility. And what bigger responsibility could there be than getting the daily baguette?

"There's no bread."

I would walk in the door from work, and with one sentence I knew one of us had to go back out on the bread mission. It was non-negotiable, and I can tell you, it used to irritate the hell out of me. Back in Boston, it meant jumping into the car and driving over to Whole Foods, then the only place in the neighborhood that sold anything approximating the "real" bread one might find in France. Most day-old baguettes are deadly weapons, so it wasn't an option to just eat yesterday's leftover.

"But why do we need bread?"

Growing up we ate white sandwich bread, and dinner rolls on special occasions. Sometimes a baguette would make it into the kitchen only to be sliced in half, smeared with garlic butter and Parmesan and toasted in the oven. Bread was by no means considered necessary at mealtime. We went through supermarket loaves slowly, slice by slice, storing them in the freezer and reanimating them in the toaster.

My husband, when he lived in the US, ate supermarket sandwich bread only when absolutely nothing else was available, and always whole whole grain, never white. When I described how American children often require the crusts be trimmed off their sandwiches, he was perplexed.

"But the crust is the best part!"

You know the stereotype of the Frenchman with a beret and a baguette under his arm? Berets are difficult to spot these days, but in Paris around 7 o'clock in the evening practically everyone is heading home with a thin loaf of bread. Some even head out early in the morning to pick up fresh bread for breakfast. There are often long lines in front of the boulangerie, but mercifully they usually move fast.

Before I had kids and knew true daily logistical constraints, I resented the ball-and-chain nature of daily bread.

"No, I didn't get the bread. If you really want it, you go back out and get it. I'm perfectly happy with just pasta."

Flour, water, yeast, salt: the only ingredients in a baguette. I believe it is a legal standard, codified like so much else in this rule-loving country, but I could be mistaken. That doesn't mean that all French bread is created equal, however, and in the eight years I've lived here, I've witnessed a veritable bread revolution. Half the baguettes in Paris used to be pale yellow, soft, gummy and tasteless, indistinguishable from mass-produced supermarket loaves. Then high-end bakeries in chic neighborhoods started selling loaves supposedly baked according to long-lost artisan tradition. Whether it was true tradition or just good marketing, the bread was better, with a thick golden crust, an airy interior, and a smell that made you want to tear into it as soon as you walked out into the street. Pretty soon every corner boulangerie had its own version, often developed by a national flour "brand," with a catchy name, like la rétro or la tradition.

"Une tradition, bien blanche, s'il vous plaît."

France has always been a divided country: montagnards vs. jacobins, readers of Le Figaro vs. readers of Libération, Parisians vs. provincials. One more division concerns baguettes, between those who like them under-baked (bien blanche) and those who prefer them over-baked (bien cuite). They regard one another with suspicion as they take turns at the counter. "Bien cuite. Burned, even!" my mother-in-law requests emphatically. "I don't understand," she adds with scorn, "How anyone can eat the undercooked paste they sell here usually."

The customers who file through the boulangerie on a weeknight say more about themselves than they perhaps intend. Order one half a baguette and you're inviting pity; you're clearly single, a lone soul sharing a single helping of bread. It's only slightly less pathetic than ordering a sandwich.

"I know, I know. You'll get your piece, I promise!"

Mademoiselle's first solid food wasn't rice cereal or strained prunes or carrot purée but a chunk of baguette that she reached and begged for shortly before her six month birthday. She gummed it and swallowed mushy bits while I held my breath, for this was not standard baby-rearing practice back home, and yes, probably also a potential choking hazard. Although the experts and books and pediatricians here all say to start with mashed vegetables, I personally suspect that many a French baby has been weaned on bits of stale bread from the family table.

After all, it's perfect for teething.

"Pain! Pain!"

The French word for bread is one of Mademoiselle's first words. After work, I swing by the bakery right after picking her up and buy our baguette. She gets the first chunk, the pointy, crunchy end, which buys me peace as I push her home in the stroller. At home, if someone walks through the door with a long, white paper bag under their arm she starts throwing a fit, grabbing and pointing until she gets what she wants.

There's no way we'll forget the bread now.

At seven o'clock in the evening in the countryside, eight o'clock in big cities, the bakeries all close. If you're smart, you'll arrive at least fifteen minutes before then, however, for if not, you risk fighting over the last loaf of bread. The baguettes are the first to run out. The last customers often have to choose between odd specialty loaves with nuts and seeds and other non-standard attributes which they pay extra to avoid going home empty handed. I've stood in line counting the number of loaves and the number of people in front of me, wondering if I'll have anything to show for my trouble. And sometimes in these tight situations I remember to think about the person in line behind me.

"You have two half baguettes left, one with seeds, one whole grain? I'll take both. Unless... madame would like some, too... yes? Well in that case, I'll just take one half."

That way no one has to eat cake.

The curse of being first

2012-01-09T23:33:00.000+01:00

Last night, le Petit had his very first homework assignment. The class mascot, a bright pink bear with a sweater and cowboy boots, spent the weekend at home with us, and Le Petit was instructed to bring "Clara Lulu" back on Monday morning with her portrait done. On Friday afternoon, Le Petit started a rudimentary drawing at Grandma and Grandpa's house. He traced a pink balloon-like animal with big black eyes. It could've passed for Clara Lulu easily enough if he'd just bothered to color it in, but drawing and coloring is not le Petit's thing. It's taken all of the teacher's efforts this year to get him to hold his crayon properly and concentrate on it at all. From what I see tacked to the wall in his classroom, his reticence is not unique, particularly among the boys. But I'm a mom, and I'm me, so I have to worry, and when I saw the sparse pink lines haphazardly scribbled on Clara's round belly, I felt I had to intervene.

It was his first assignment, and he was failing.

So I gently tried to get him to sit down and color with me, and when that failed I complained to my husband, who bellowed at le Petit which made me yell at him for not being a sensitive parent but seemed to work. And then I fled in shame to the kitchen to make dinner and my husband sat down with le Petit and a new reserve of patience, and le Petit finished Clara. After a fashion. With more than a little hands-on help.

As I tried to fall asleep last night, my mind raced to extrapolate this scene as far into the future as possible. Soon there would be real homework and who would be behind him to make sure it got done? Should we be behind him at all? Or should we instead let him turn in a picture with a few stray pink lines? Would I have time to decide? Would I fail as a mom?

Poor Le Petit. I do this to him all the time.

It began with the first long nights when Le Petit was a newborn. We didn't know what we were doing, so like so many bleary-eyed rookie parents before us, we searched in vain for the owner's manual in the parenting section of the bookstore. Clearly, our baby would never sleep on his own, we were certain of it. Of course, he did eventually; the details of when, exactly, he finally slept through the night are lost to me now, as are the sometimes tender, often tedious hours spent putting him to bed. But I still do remember, clearly, the desperation I felt in the middle of the night -- not to mention the middle of the day, as I discussed the problem over a nth cup of coffee with anyone willing to listen -- that the sleeplessness would never end. I remember the middle-of-the-night arguments with my husband. The raised voices, the angry words to or in front of our baby that I immediately wished we could take back. Although we muddled through and eventually figured most of the important things out, we were not always the best parents, I'm ashamed to admit. All because we wanted to fix things, right then and there. All because we had too little faith in our child.

The curse of the firstborn.

Mademoiselle, on the other hand, gets battle-scarred parents who are impressed by nothing, comparatively speaking. I'm not saying our patience is never tried, but in general we keep our cool because we have an important piece of first-hand information: children do eventually sleep though the night. (We also know how quickly it all passes, so it all seems more tender and less tedious the second time around.)

You'd think we would have learned, so marked were we by the ordeal of sleep deprivation, but every new parenting challenge seems to throw us into the same desperate reasoning. Potty training. Tantrums. Table manners. Some significant part of me is always sure that this time we've never going to help le Petit over the hurdle. My husband obviously often feels the same way, and some of our worst parenting moments have been when we were mired in mutual despair over something that in retrospect was no big deal. Something that le Petit figured out on his own, despite --- not thanks to -- our best efforts to help him.

I was mulling this over yoga class today when I was supposed to be thinking of nothing at all and concentrating on my breathing. I've spent so much of my life trying to be the Good Girl, and this segued quite naturally into trying to be the Good Parent. And what makes a Good Parent other than the Perfect Child: proof we did everything right, which is, of course, the great lather-rinse-repeat of dysfunction.

I contorted myself into a bow-shaped pose on the floor and thought about this further. So, some part of this was clearly ego. And my impatience with the sleeplessness, well, there was a whole lot of selfishness there, too. But there was more. Why do I always want to be the Good Girl again? Because I irrationally feel that if my conduct is beyond reproach, then everyone around me will be happy: everything will go swimmingly, the sun will shine, the dollar will go up, everyone will smile and agree with one another, and I, personally, will never be hurt. The ever-anxious mom, I extrapolated this reasoning to le Petit. If he could just be Good, he'd be safe from all the bumps and bruises of the world.

So what exactly does this have to do with coloring, potty training, and sleeping through the night? Nothing much, I guess, except that at every step along the way, le Petit finds some ingenious way to teach me that I'm wrong. Step back, Mom, lighten up. Let go. Trust your kid. Trust yourself. I've taken to asking myself if my parenting problem du jour is something I'm likely to still be dealing with in two, five, or fifteen years. The answer is usually no. My response (when I'm thinking clearly) is to stop and take a deep breath.

Still, I fear le Petit is going to continue taking all this collateral damage as he grows up first in the family. My yoga teacher would say he chose his parents and birth position, long before he was born. If that's the case, let's hope he knew what he was doing. I'll give him a big grateful hug and an apology in advance for my inevitable missteps.

Because after all, there are advantages to being the firstborn. Right?

(My goal for this year is to be better at mothering, not just le Petit and Mademoiselle, but also myself.)

Ten hours, two kids, one plane

2012-01-04T22:45:00.000+01:00

We're back from two weeks in Seattle. Two pleasant, worthwhile weeks which still passed too quickly for me and in somewhat of a haze, thanks to a bad head cold and the usual dose of jet lag. I'm homesick, yet glad to be back. Mademoiselle is stuck on Pacific Standard time and waking us up for two solid hours every night, yet Le Petit has been sleeping well from his first night back in Paris.

In the wee hours of the last few nights, as I've been trying and failing to calm a jetlagged baby back to sleep, I've had a few thoughts on how to survive long-haul plane travel with small children that I thought I might share. Just in case anyone wants to visit us here in Paris, you know.

Tips for the twelve-month-old:

Any toys you bring will be far less interesting than any random non-toy objects you manage to dig up. Mademoiselle spent roughly two minutes of the ten-hour flight playing with the bag of toys I carefully selected. She spent at least a half an hour ripping apart the in-flight magazine.
The most alluring object on the whole plane will quite possibly be your plastic water glass, and this only because it breaks into sharp pieces when mouthed. Hide it and instead distract baby with an empty water bottle.
Watch the hours tick down with optimism. Count every ten minutes as a victory.
Order the white rice, and let baby eat it off your tray in handfuls. Avoid the marinara sauce.
Nurse baby without worrying what other people may think. Chances are they won't care, since after all, your kid isn't screaming. (And think to wear a discreet nursing top to make things easier.)
Rest assured that as long as the airplane cabin is pressurized, it is physically impossible for anyone to open the exit doors and throw your family from the plane.
Distribute Cheerios slowly, wisely.
Smile appreciatively at anyone willing to hold baby's attention with hand motions, songs, silly games, and goofy facial expressions. (Pay it forward: remember to make goofy facial expressions at the next grumpy baby you see in public. Their parents will be grateful.)
When things get tough, flee with Baby to galley area at the back of the plane. There you have room to pace and bounce, and there's usually a bored flight attendant all to happy to help you distract baby. I spent a total of a couple hours hiding out there with Mademoiselle on the flight back.
Keep yourself hydrated, especially if you're nursing, and keep baby hydrated.
Fly Air France. Seriously. Flying with kids is no fun, but every time I've had to cross the Atlantic with tykes in tow, the in-flight personnel of Air France have made me feel welcome, understood, and well-taken-care-of.
If all else fails, let your toddler pace up and down the aisles (following closely behind, of course). It will annoy your fellow travelers far less than screaming, after all.
Thank your fellow passengers. Smile.
Think of it as quality time with your baby. (This may be the very best advice I ever read on the subject of flying with small children, found on some random internet forum.) Yes, you're in close quarters, at 30,000 feet, squeezed unhappily into an uncomfortable seat, but... you love this little person. And rarely do you get to devote so much time just to keeping them happy.
Remember, eventually you do land. And then you'll only have the jet lag to contend with.

Tips for the four-and-a-half-year-old:

Explain what to expect. Make it sound exciting, but warn them that it's also a bit long.
Don't promise a window seat if you're not absolutely certain you'll have a window seat.
If you're bringing the iPad, spring for the full version of Elmo's ABCs and not the free "lite" version that only has the letters A, B, and C.
Bring snacks.
Bring water.
Bring patience.
Bring crayons, not markers -- no caps to lose, and they're less likely to stain your pants if they fall in between the seat cushions.
You may expect them to be rational and grown-up, but they're only mostly rational and grown-up. Expect some whining and squirming.
Do your best to remain rational and grown-up yourself when faced with whining and squirming.
Rest assured that as long as the airplane cabin is pressurized, it is physically impossible for anyone to open the exit doors and throw your family from the plane.
Bring a kid-friendly pair of headphones, or a headband to help the airline headphones stay on your kid's head. I didn't do this and le Petit ended up holding the headphones against his ears with his hands for most of the flight, which added to the squirming.
Thank your fellow passengers. Smile.
When all your efforts to minimize seat-kicking fail, remember that as long as your kid isn't screaming, the person sitting in front of them might not mind. (The kind person sitting in front of Le Petit on the way over said as much.) If possible, seat your kid behind another kid. And remember #12.
Think of it as quality time with your preschooler. Put your heads together and do some coloring.
Remember, eventually you do land. And then you'll only have the jet lag to contend with.

The flight back was far easier than the flight over, mostly because both kids slept a bit. Unfortunately neither one of my kids can lull themselves to sleep just because the cabin lights have been dimmed, but both did sleep when it was "time" (according to the whichever time zone we were leaving). This meant Mademoiselle had a nap on the way over and both a nap and the beginning of a night's sleep on the way back, and le Petit caught two hours of sleep at the tail end of the flight back.

I want to thank the Italian grandparents who sat across the aisle from us on the way over and kept Mademoiselle happy for the last hour of the flight with games of peek-a-boo and an involved conversation in the universal language of Baby. I am also grateful to the three flight attendants on the way back who talked for hours with me and with Mademoiselle as we hung out in the back of the plane. One of them earns my particular recognition for bringing me a giant bottle of water, "Because," she explained, "you're nursing, madame, and you shouldn't get dehydrated." You rock.

Anyone else have tips for traveling with small kids?

Or for helping a baby get over jet ag?

Or for throwing a festive impromptu family party at two o'clock in the morning because, after all, you're all awake anyway?

All I want for Christmas

2011-12-09T12:54:00.001+01:00

Le Petit decided to pretend to be Santa Claus, or as he usually says, the père noël. I was to be the père fouettard, the anti-Santa. As we walked back from Grandma and Grandpa's house across the square lit brightly with Christmas lights, le Petit pretended to distribute presents as I handed out imaginary lumps of coal.

"So, Santa," I said, joining my hands and holding them open like a book, "I have a letter for you." Le Petit stopped and listened attentively.

"Dear Santa," I began, "What I really want for Christmas is..." I hesitated, wondering if I should pretend to be a kid and ask for Legos, or just be myself, silly and honest.

"What I really want for Christmas is... a bigger apartment!"

"But Mommy," le Petit explained slowly, as if I were a child too young to understand the rules of the game, "You can't ask Santa Claus for an apartment. You buy an apartment. With moneys [sic]!"

-----

I've had a few thoughts on the subject of the apartment, and whether or not a new one will figure on my Christmas list. I'm beginning to think we'll stay put for another year. We were lucky to find a warm, loving nanny for Mademoiselle (shared with another local family), and the two seem to have become quite attached. Meanwhile, le Petit has settled into school and made friends. Both kids profit greatly from having their grandparents live right next door. Since a bigger apartment means moving farther out into the suburbs, I'm thinking that we should wait one more year -- time for le Petit to finish his last year of nursery school, and for Mademoiselle to hopefully be ready to start her first.

-----

We'll be heading back to Seattle in a week. It will be my first trip back home for the holidays in over ten years. Le Petit expects to see Santa and his sleigh from the window of the airplane, since I've explained we'll fly real close to the North Pole. I warned him last night that the other people on our direct flight may very well be close friends of Santa Claus and thus likely to report him to the big guy in the red suit as pas sage if he doesn't do his best to keep reasonably quiet and avoid kicking the seat in front of him. I'm not sure he buys it. Which is good, because otherwise I might feel guilty.

He's asking a lot of questions about chimneys and just how Santa intends to make his entrance. Since we don't have a fireplace, will he try to squeeze down the aeration conduit in the bathroom? I reassured him that no, he wouldn't try that, certainly not with his big bag of toys. He'll surely just ring -- very quietly, so no children can hear -- and come right on in the front door.

Birthday girl

2011-12-02T23:09:00.001+01:00

One year is a long time. I'm telling you. Don't ask my mom, because I'm pretty sure I know what she'll say. She'll tell you this year has gone past in a heartbeat, in less time that it takes me to push a high chair tray's worth of broccoli on the floor. But I'm telling you otherwise. I'm telling you like it is. And you can trust me because I'm still short. In my experience, few people are telling the whole truth when their head passes the top of the dining room table.

One year ago I was barely blinking the glare of the fluorescent lights from my eyes, skin to skin next to my mom -- not that I knew to call her that then -- nursing, which was new, but kind of familiar. The shapes and colors and sounds were erasing memories of a simpler place before, where I didn't feel cold, or hungry, or lonely, or... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Things had been tight, it was time to move on, move out. I would figure the rest out as I went along I decided, and though I didn't know it then, I was lucky to be born a second child so my parents weren't rank beginners. My big bro -- le Petit, you call him? He ain't so petit to me -- had broken them in real well. One of these days I'll have to thank him for it.

Once I figured out that this big, warm Mom shape was pretty reliable -- she had me convinced a week or two into the gig -- I could get down to the serious business of growing. For a few weeks, I was mostly working my arms and legs, swinging them around, getting the hang of them. I can't say I had any big plans yet, but I had a hunch that synchronizing my limbs might come in handy wherever I went next. At the same time, I started making more sense of the things I saw; colors emerged from the shades of gray, and gosh darn it, if there weren't things out there to grasp. So I opened my hands.

But still, the first few months were kind of dull, truth be told. I kept falling asleep in the middle of my meals, but what can you do? I was trying so hard to roll over, it was wearing me out. The rest of the time I just stayed put, following with my busy eyes from my swing or my baby chair or my activity mat the constant movement around me. I pretended to be interested when Mom made me sit and watch her work out to her exercise video, or peeked her head at me from behind the shower curtain in the bathroom. OK, so she could sometimes make me laugh.

What I lived for, though, were the walks, facing out and taking in the world, or snuggled against Mom in the scarf. She walked and chatted and I swayed back and forth, adrift in my own ocean, remembering an even simpler place long ago, before the creatures of the planet evolved and invented the drama of being born.

Summer came. I sat up. I grabbed pebbles. I ate sand. I wasn't too convinced by the real ocean, loud and cold. But I watched from the shore. When Daddy carried me in the Bjorn I felt as tall and as strong as a big person, and people noticed me and talked and I answered with smiles that told them they weren't wasting their time with me.

Halfway through the year, self-propulsion became my obsession. I learned to crawl in my own unique way on two hands and one knee, pushing with my foot and my leg bent off to one side. I gave that up for pulling myself upright along the furniture, and then I let go... and now I walk. I make it look easy now, but when I think back on how I got here, I fall down in astonishment on my padded, diapered behind.

What's next? Talking. So many words are on the tip of my tongue, you wouldn't believe it. At least with my first word I have "maman's" full attention, and with the next my proud "dada" now knows he's also "papa." Then I've got some score settling with my big brother. His toys are my toys and my toys are his toys and I saw already that he won't keep his grubby hands off of my brand-new birthday presents. I also want to find out just why so many things are no -- why can't I lean backwards on the edge of the couch? Or pick up shoes and parade them around the house? Or eat the crumbs I find under the dining table?

Mommy talked to me quietly tonight just as she always does when she nurses me to sleep, but tonight the script was different. She kept saying "a year ago..." and repeating "so exciting, so exciting." "You arrived, and you were in such a hurry," she said, but the way she told it, I almost felt like she was talking to herself. Then I started to drift off to sleep because nursing still makes me so tired, and with all the champagne and foie gras and chocolate cake shared with Grandma and Grandpa tonight, it was a full hour past my bedtime. Eventually my mom's voice was same warm, soft murmur that I remember from one year ago, when I was first blinking on the outside.

I remember it. I really do. And I tell you again, one year is a very long time.

Happy Birthday, Mademoiselle. Forgive me for giving you your words, because I can't find my own to thank you for the love, peace, joy, and wonder you've given me.

You might be an Expat if...

2011-11-27T01:06:00.001+01:00

...on the Sunday after the fourth Thursday in November you find yourself up at one a.m. making cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie from scratch, and ripping up bread cubes.

The one where I finally get the driver's license

2011-11-24T22:53:00.001+01:00

Ca y est.

The République française, represented by a cheerful, bespectacled test inspector, has deemed me competent to operate a motor vehicle.

I can hardly believe it. Especially since I don't have the paper in my hands yet, I've so far only received an overjoyed call from my driving instructor yesterday. The driving school got the results, which, as the secretary explained to me when I later went in, are theoretically supposed to be transmitted directly to the school headquarters unopened. But, V, my instructor, is like a kid and can't wait. He discreetly opens up the results and then calls his students to share the good news.

It wasn't such a sure thing, you see.

Tuesday was my second attempt to pass the driver's exam. The stress had been eating at me for weeks, making me grumpy with the kids, absentminded at work, even slowing me down during my lunch hour run with my colleagues. I didn't want to blog about it for fear of jinxing or simply humiliating myself. So I stopped blogging, more or less. As the date came closer, my appetite even started to suffer.

Out of proportion? Ridiculous? Embarrassingly so? Yes, yes, and yes. It was like my head was stuck in gear and my foot was slipping and I was going to lurch forward and stall out and...

Anyway.

V was determined to help me pass. He was encouraging, and almost endearing in an odd way, if of a bit of a nervous temperament. After having my confidence ground to a pulp by the first two instructors I encountered, I found V supportive, sympathetic and practical, and I quickly decided I'd stick with him to the end even though he systematically tuned the car radio to RMC, a low-brow French talk radio station. He still yelled at me to shift gears differently or brake more slowly or why the hell was I in neutral already, but, you know, nicely. And I had to laugh -- to myself, in between silent tears of frustration -- when he bellowed at me to accelerate: "Accelère, fort! FORT!"

On Tuesday morning, I met V at the driving school and we left for two hours of driving in circles around the Paris suburb where my test would be held. The rough edges of the warehouses and tattered apartment buildings were softened by a thick morning fog. I fumbled with the fog lights. We drove down the streets that were starting to become familiar, the scene of my previous humiliation in May when I first tried to pass the test, when in a moment of nervous inattention I cut off someone at a stop sign. This being France, and this being the Paris region, I had to wait six whole months to schedule another exam. (There aren't enough inspectors, you see. And then they went on strike. To protest the fact that there aren't enough inspectors.) As we turned through the fog, I tried to memorize the treacherous "Do Not Enter" signs and tame the butterflies in my stomach.

Why is something as simple as driving so hard, you ask? I wish I knew. All I know is that the driving test looms large in the personal experience of most French. If they passed on the first try, they're ridiculously proud of it. If they didn't -- which is the majority, I would guess -- they can precisely recount the details of their initial failure decades later.

We parked along the designated sidewalk and waited for the inspector, who arrived early. He took his place in the front passenger seat and V took his place behind. I started the car. We crossed one intersection, then another, and then, carefully checking my blind spot for bicycles or scooters just as I'd been taught, I slowly turned right into a narrow street and firmly hit the edge of the curb with my right tire.

The inspector cringed and sucked in his breath. I did, too. V grimaced helplessly in the back seat. Don't lose your cool, I told myself. I kept going. There were no other mishaps, although the inspector once made a comment about my choice once to downshift to first. The guy was nice, mentioning that I was in a one-way street before he asked me to make a left turn (one-way streets are not always obvious in Europe), and asking me to take a right "as soon as possible" to subtly warn me to be extra vigilant about Do Not Enter signs. When he asked me to parallel park, he even chose a spot with no car behind.

"You have plenty of room," he said kindly.

I still messed up on my first try. I was that nervous. As calmly as I could manage, I re-positioned the car and tried again. V made discreet hand motions to clue me when to turn the wheel.

Then, in twenty short minutes, the test was over. "Stop next to the curb, and that's it," the inspector instructed matter-of-factly.

"How long have you been in France?" he asked as we pulled up.

"Eight years," I answered.

"You're not close to losing your accent, are you?" he remarked with a smile in his voice.

"No, that, I doubt it." I laughed. I'm more likely to master parallel parking.

After I stepped out of the car, V and the inspector spent a long moment chatting inside. The inspectors don't give the results immediately, so I stood on the sidewalk wondering, worrying, deciding that because of the little curb incident and my poor parking skills I was surely sunk. The test also seemed suspiciously short. Oh, well. Though I couldn't explain why, a second failure suddenly didn't seem as catastrophic as it had before.

"I guess we'll be seeing more of each other," I joked after the inspector left and V got out of the car to join me.

He was more optimistic. "Je crois que c'est bon." I think it's okay, he assured me. "On verra."

I was still practically shivering with residual adrenaline when I climbed into the passenger seat, but I felt lighter, almost giddy. I insisted lightheartedly that I wanted good news. For Thanksgiving.

Yesterday, after getting V's phone call, I took the kids across town to the driving school to see the results with my own eyes, even though I'll be receiving them soon at home in the mail. The envelope had been resealed already, but I did pick up my bumper sticker with a big red "A" that will designate me as an apprentice driver for the next three years. Le Petit watched me place it carefully, like precious relic, in the pocket of Mademoiselle's stroller. "I'm so-o-o happy!" he exclaimed, imitating me and jumping up and down.

Sittin' pretty

2011-11-24T22:46:00.001+01:00

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all! A real post follows this one -- yes, you read that right, a real post, from me, remember me? But first, I have a quick question. Have any of you out there had any experience with those portable high chairs that attach to the side of a table top? The whole family will be heading to Seattle for Christmas this year, and my stepmother has graciously proposed to find one of those new-fangled gadgets to use when we're all out celebrating pre-Christmas Eve dinner at the Space Needle. And, of course, to take back home with us afterward. My question is, is there a particular brand or style to look for? Mademoiselle is getting big now, and will be one year old in a week (I know, I can hardly believe it either...), so it has to be something that will hold up to a toddler's squirming.

Thanks!

Noted, sleepily

2011-11-10T00:31:00.001+01:00

My husband is in Madrid for the week for work, and I'm holding the fort with the kids. I should be in bed, since I have to wake up to go to work in six hours which may feel like five minutes but will give Mademoiselle ample time to wake me up a few times, I'm sure. It took me from when the kids were asleep until roughly twenty minutes ago to do dishes and laundry and organize things for tomorrow. And as always when I've got this kind of temporary superwoman gig, I'm filled with awe for parents who do it solo all or much of the time.

Today, Wednesday, was my day "off." I put "off" in quotes the same way I put "working" in quotes to describe what my husband is doing in Madrid, because I spent all day running around and he's at a tech conference, after all (which, to be fair, isn't devoid of irritation and annoying colleagues, but hey, he gets to sleep through the night.) It's crazy, and I'm exhausted, but a few things made me smile, and I have to write them down.

So far this week, I've noticed that,

1) You shouldn't turn your back, even for a few seconds, on a baby with a high chair tray spread with raspberries. If I could take the bits that ended up on the floor and in the hair and on the face on all ALL all over the clothes and reassemble them, I'm pretty sure I'd have more than the five raspberries I presented her with, and I can't explain this.

2) I can still utterly fail to understand when someone on the phone is asking me to spell my last name in French. Even when they repeat themselves twice.

3) The four-year-old, not the baby, puts the strangest and most disgusting things in his mouth when we're outside.

4) It is very hard to read "Fox in Socks" and prevent a daredevil baby from climbing onto a table at the same time.

5) If le Petit is hungry enough, he will eat raw broccoli dipped in store-bought gazpacho. Of his own initiative. [Le Petit digging through the fridge while I was making dinner: "Mommy, can broccoli be eaten raw?" Me to myself, "Who are you and what have you done with my son?"]

6) I can keep my cool during a supermarket checkout line temper tantrum ("But Mommy! I only want to put MY things in MY bag!") by assuming that if people are staring, it's either in appreciation of my calm yet firm (if punctually slightly ineffective) parenting style or in wonder that my son is bilingual.

7) Few things feel quite as nice as le Petit's head leaning against my shoulder as I read him a bedtime story.

8) It may be way past Mademoiselle's bedtime, but she may still stop nursing, start babbling to herself, and clap joyfully in the dark. And I'll find this cute, though irritating when I think of the pile of dishes waiting for me.

9) Few things feel quite as nice as Mademoiselle (finally) drifting off to sleep in my arms.

Onward, upward, forward!

2011-10-28T00:46:00.000+02:00

The world looks different when you're standing up.

For months now, I've been peering over the edge of cribs and playpens. First I gripped the top bar as hard as I could and pressed my face to the side. When I pulled myself up on my tiptoes, I could just point my nose over the side. Just enough to look imploringly at the big folks, Mommy, Daddy... even le Petit, though he's too small to pick me up. I suspect if he could he'd help me make a break for it. I can stand and watch him play with his Legos through the mesh fabric of the playpen, or now that I'm tall enough, clear over the top, and almost forget I'm stuck turning in circles in four feet square.

Now there's Up. And Down. And I get to decide.

Soon after I learned to pull myself up, I learned to push myself forward. Suddenly the world had three dimensions, and things that once looked abstract turned out to be real -- I know, because I've checked them out now personally. There's the couch, for instance: it's solid, but also squishy and soft; it's kind of white and kind of gray but when I look at it closely I see different spots and colors that I can poke with my fingers. (Mommy sees the same ones sometimes, but they don't seem to make her too happy for some reason.) I can pull myself up against it and lean into it, and slap it with my hands, and it makes me laugh. But I don't stay put. I walk along the edge, and then I see that the couch isn't that far from the coffee table... and I start to think... hey, if I stabilize myself by leaning on the outside of the playpen I can make it from one to the other without even dropping to the floor!

The floor. The floor! It's covered with countless fabulously tiny things, and though Mommy keeps sweeping, I still find stray rice grains and crumbs and bits of fuzz that flee my fingers. Grandpa worries that I'll eat the gravel that travels inside on everyone's shoes. Maybe I already have. I'll never tell.

To be honest, though, I've spent enough time on the floor crawling. I'm starting to suspect, a little more each day in fact, that two limbs are more efficient than four when your biggest goal in life is moving forward. So I've become a bit obsessed with figuring out this walking thing. When I'm lucky, someone big will hold my hands -- at first I needed two, but now one will do -- and help me put one trembling foot in front of the other.

The house has been reduced in my head to an ensemble of points A and points B. Coffee table to high chair leg; bookshelf to dining room chair. I choose my itinerary so as to stay as close to the action as possible. I love to stand up next to the bathtub while le Petit is taking a bath. Yesterday, when Mommy was busy helping le Petit with the soap, I intrepidly dropped one of her slippers into the water.

(I'm pretty clever. They're figuring that out quickly these days.)

Not that I'm always moving, mind you. Part of the deal with propelling yourself forward, I'm learning, is mastering standing still. I plant my feet kinda wide apart, bend both knees, and slowly stand up. Concentration is key. I hold myself stable for one breath, two, and then I slowly, cautiously lower myself back down. I keep practicing, often in the middle of the room by myself when there's nothing else exciting going on. I stand up and look around, then sometimes Mommy applauds and I smile so wide.

On the 24th of September -- may the date be recorded for posterity -- I stood at the edge of the couch. I spied the cabinet just a few feet away. I gauged the distance. And I let go. Daddy glanced over in time to see the top of my head bob with each hesitant step.

Though I didn't know it at the time, it was practically the same launching pad le Petit chose three and half years ago. Mommy missed the moment, and I wasn't ready to try again; I'm prudent, you see, and affronting gravity once was enough at first. But N, who looks after me while Mommy it at work, likes to help me walk up and down the hallway. She also takes me to the park where I can hold her hands and stride sure-footedly with a cute pair of pink shoes, but where she refuses unjustly to let me crawl on the ground... tisk-tisking that it's dirty or some such thing. So I started taking steps here and there, but never when Mommy was around.

Until this weekend.

This weekend I took off.

Hold out your hands ready to catch. Watch!

Grandma is terrified. Mommy is apprehensive. At the same time I'm learning to climb, you see. Mommy thought her cell phone was safe pushed back up onto the seat of the couch, but no. If le Petit knew the designs I have on his Lego corner, he'd be worried, too. "Fini la tranquilité," Grandma says. Mommy agrees, but doesn't hide that she's more than a little bit proud.

Out of breath

2011-10-19T23:26:00.000+02:00

Today Mademoiselle discovered she could climb by herself onto the stain-covered old futon that serves as a couch in our living room. She was reaching for my cell phone, which I'd slid just beyond her reach, and decided what the heck, she'd try and hoist herself up with her knee. And sure enough, it worked.

She looked as surprised as I was. She's not walking yet, although she's taken a couple of very tentative steps on several occasions; she's still nowhere close to sleeping through the night. Nevertheless, I feel like everything has sped up suddenly, and I can't keep up.

Being back at work is exhilarating. But every day is a race, or rather a whirling dance, from the morning train I chase to the clothes I choose before going to bed at night. Obviously I've been finding no time to blog.

Le Petit has been quickly and quietly growing up, too. OK, not exactly quietly -- a neighbor actually scolded him for yelling in the hallway last week -- but discreetly, in his own way. All of a sudden he can count (with some help) all the way to 100, and he even sets his place at the dinner table by himself, without prompting. He's four years old, after all, as he proudly announces to everyone he meets.

"J'ai quatre ans," he announced to the lady who lives down the hall. Four years old.

A few days later, he saw her again.

"J'ai toujours quatre ans," he assured her. Still four years old.

I dunno about her, but I certainly found that reassuring.

Working Girl

2011-09-26T23:09:00.001+02:00

Last Monday I set my alarm for 6:30 a.m., got up, showered, dressed, hastily ate breakfast, and took a bus, a train, another train, and another bus. My badge still opened the front door. My computer password, however, had long disappeared from my memory. It turns out that changing it via the VPN in a postpartum haze a month after you've given birth is a good way to ensure you'll forget it. The african violet on my desk was still holding on, barely, a near victim of my colleagues' collective well-intentioned but overzealous watering. People seemed happy to see me.

For my part, I was happy to be back. I don't know yet if I'll ever love my job, and there are days I certainly don't like it very much, but last week I absolutely loved being back. I had more energy than I've had in years, and even tales of system bugs and incomplete functional requirements couldn't dampen my uncharacteristic enthusiasm. Irrational exuberance, perhaps? Still, I can't wait to dive back into the project head first. I'll find out soon enough if I'm standing at the shallow end of the pool. I'm just ready, I guess, to turn my thoughts to something other than my children, adorable as they are. To work on a project with other adults. To leave the apartment without pushing a stroller in front of me.

Everyone's been asking me if it is hard to be back. I don't know if this is a cultural thing, and I'm curious, do people in the US ask this as well? Or is it just blindly obvious that after the short maternity leave most US mothers have, going back is quite likely to be a challenge? Honestly, I don't know what to think. No, I tell them with a genuine smile, it isn't hard. Nine months at home was just right for me, personally, and I'm happy to be doing something else now. It helps that le Petit is happy to be at school and Mademoiselle seems content with the nanny. She cries a bit when my husband leaves in the morning, but she's far from the wailing wreck her brother was at first when I went back to work when he was the same age. When I pick her up in the afternoon, she's busily, happily playing. (This is usually when my questioner starts to tune out. Yes, I am one of those mothers, who goes on and on about their kids long after everyone's stopped listening.) In my self-analysis, I end up feeling a bit guilty for not feeling guilty, if you know what I mean. But I fundamentally feel that every mother has a different amount of time at home with a baby that feels right to her and it can be long or short. The baby is happiest, the entire family is happiest, when Mom gets to choose; I'm exceptionally lucky to have a country, a culture, a career, and a personal economic situation that allows me this choice.

I wonder, why does no one ask a dad -- a dad who, even in France, has to go back to work after only two weeks of leave -- if it is hard to go back to work after the birth of a child? How different is it for men, really? I'm not sure how much of the biological programming argument I'm ready to buy. If you're an involved parent, working and parenting at the same time is hard. It is most often a necessity, too, of course. For many of us, it is also somewhat liberating.

I prudishly left one detail of my transition back to work until the very end of the week: mentioning to my boss that I was pumping breast milk so he wouldn't be surprised when I disappeared briefly from my desk twice a day. I told him as matter-of-factly as I could, but I was embarrassed, even though I remembered vaguely that it wasn't so hard last time around. I must have been channeling my inner lactivist back then or something, for I clearly remember proudly explaining that I was pumping to any colleague who happened to ask about the mysterious soft-sided cooler I toted around with me. I also wrote a long blog post detailing how I'd worked out the logistics.

My boss' response: "Yeah, of course, I figured you would." And he went on to tell me that another woman in the office did the same for her baby, after first asking him how I'd organized things, so my inadvertent, indiscreet publicity had paid off. This may sound not like much, but I assure you that in France you have to be both exceptionally motivated and impervious to raised eyebrows to dare pump breast milk at work. At the same time attitudes will only change as more women just go ahead and dare, and anyway, as a foreigner, people expect me to be eccentric. I don't know whether it was my daring or my eccentricity or the mere fact that I figured out that the shower/dressing room near the exercise area could serve as a discreet pumping location, but my lactivism helped gain one to the cause.

My boss and I went on to talk about how in general it is easier for women in France to combine motherhood and career than it is in many other countries. I expressed for the umpteenth time that week how thankful I was for the time I got to take off, and how happy I was to be back.

"Attitudes have changed. Now long maternity leaves are accepted, are even the norm," my boss observed, "But... it isn't easy to have to make due without [Parisienne] for a year. Not easy at all."

French bosses are notoriously parsimonious with praise, so that statement totally made my Friday afternoon. Then I had to run. My family was waiting for me. I skipped off to the bus, took a train and then another train, then another bus, picked up Mademoiselle and took her home -- le Petit was later delivered by conspiratorial grandparents -- and met my husband, who poured me a celebratory glass of wine.

It's not bad being a working girl again.

And that, my friends, is why I'm going back to work

2011-09-17T00:47:00.001+02:00

I picked up le Petit at four o'clock today. By letting him skip After Care for the first time this week, I felt like I was breaking him out of jail. He goes willingly to the cafeteria at lunch each day, but he was clearly glad this morning that for once he wouldn't share the fate of the majority of his classmates and be led off to the centre de loisirs at the end of the afternoon with the dim promise of snack time. Cantine, mais pas goûter, as he explained happily to his teacher at drop off. I wonder if he understands that it's all over on Monday. If he wants to skip out early from now on, he'll have to rely on his grandparents. I'm having fun imagining Grandpa calling over the playground fence as he arrives for an early pick up, "Hey, don't worry, kid, I've got a plan to spring you outta this joint."

By contrast, Mademoiselle was in no hurry to leave when I arrived to pick her up. Sharing a nanny with another family means a whole other home to explore, with all manner of interesting new things to put in her mouth. She was applying herself to the task diligently, but didn't I realize this was twice her normal workload?

The three of us walked home with le Petit doing his best to maintain our slow, dignified pace by dragging his feet and practically hanging off the handles of Mademoiselle's stroller. When I'm not in a hurry -- and luckily, tonight I wasn't -- I find it fascinating to walk with le Petit and watch him discover the city street at preschooler level: there are metal plates with cryptic letters, grates that cover mysterious holes, and curbs, ledges and lines that all cry out to be walked along. Today he stopped and planted himself in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the window of a real estate agency.

"Look!"

I followed his gaze inside to a knee-high model of an apartment building that was presumably under construction. There were tiny little windows, tiny little balconies, and tiny little plants hanging off the tiny little balconies. I let him look as I tried to push the stroller off to the side a little, since we were blocking the sidewalk and irritated people in a hurry were huffing and pushing around us. I acknowledged le Petit's enthusiasm. He wanted to go inside and take a closer look.

"No, hon, because if we go in there, they're going to want to sell us a big, expensive apartment that we can't afford," I explained lamely. There were about a million valid reasons I was not going to talk to a real estate agent tonight, but none would make much sense to le Petit.

Le Petit thought about my excuse as I tugged on his arm and he reluctantly followed me to leave.

"Mommy?"

"Yes?"

"You're going to have to see a lot of clients."

My husband, you see, works as a technical consultant in the sales department of a software firm, something utterly uninteresting and incomprehensible to a four-year-old. So we've explained that Daddy "goes to see a client" when he leaves in the morning. Especially when he leaves in the morning wearing a nice suit that no one may touch with hands stained with butter and jam. For a while this spring le Petit liked to ride his toy car around the living room and pretend to visit clients, and I even made him an imaginary laptop computer out of piece of folded cardboard and a spare ribbon. I program computers and beat up databases for a living, but that's even more abstract.

"I'll have to see a lot of clients... and why's that?" I inquired.

"Clients every day. Every, every day... except... except the days when I am at school."

The notion of time is still fuzzy, so he puzzled over this a bit before eventually adding:

"Yes. So that you can make lots of money."

"Lots of money, and then?" (It was almost impossible for me not to finish his thought.)

"And then you'll make lots of money, and we can buy a nice big apartment in Versailles, and we can come back and see the inside of the little house!"

And to think, I was worried my children might not appreciate it when I was once more off to work.

J - 4

2011-09-15T09:59:00.004+02:00

I'll be going back to work in four days.

In the meantime, I have two days of relatively freedom while le Petit is at school all day and Mademoiselle is with N, her new nanny. I'm running around getting frivolous things done for myself (pedicure! new shoes! haircut!) and less frivolous things done for the house and kids (fix broken shower head! buy new toilet seat! pick up Mademoiselle's passport!).

Mademoiselle is still waking up three or four times a night, and I'm wondering how I'll muddle through my days once I'm back at the office. But I'll be able to go for a run during my lunch hour, and take a yoga class once a week, and honestly it seems like so many people in the world, from those close to me to those I read about in the newspaper, have real big problems. I'm feeling a bit selfish, and useless, and helpless about that. Like I can't do much but the little I can do I'm not doing.

But this morning, after a crazy scamble to get ready and out the door due to a malfunctioning alarm clock and four-year-old reluctance to put on the damn shoes already, my husband dropped le Petit off at school. The teacher, who has 30 students, one helper, and approximately ten seconds to devote to small talk with parents in the morning, complimented le Petit on his English. Twice a week, now, they have an English teacher spend thirty minutes with the class, and on the first day they'd already discovered that le Petit has a perfect accent, an impressive vocabulary, and is eager to talk. I glowed at the news. My husband just wanted to say, "Well, duh." (He has a decent grasp of American slang, too, you see.) But part of me had been worried that he'd hide in the back and not say a word. So, I guess I can give myself some credit for something, right?

I'm delighted, too, that Mademoiselle is adjusting well to spending her days far from maman. N is experienced as a nanny and seems quite gentle and maternal with Mademoiselle, even in the struggle to get her to nap. When I pick Mademoiselle up in the afternoon she's often still at the park, perched on N's hip and surrounded by N's local nanny friends and a giggling group of children of all ages. She seems so surrounded by warmth and happy activity, I'm sure her days go by quickly. N also takes care of two school-aged children from another family in the afternoon, so Mademoiselle has some big kid playmates.

So here we are, in the starting blocks for another year. I'm ready to take off at a sprint, but as a seasoned distance runner I know I need to pace myself from the beginning (especially on so little sleep). I also suspect that I need to remember to slow down, stop, look around, and be grateful from time to time, too.

La rentrée

2011-09-07T22:00:00.002+02:00

It's a good thing le Petit is now a big kid in the moyenne section of his nursery school. It's also a good thing that it's my second year with a kid at la maternelle and I know the ropes. Otherwise, I might have been just a tiny bit terrified when I dropped le Petit off at his new classroom for the first time on Monday morning. The teacher, barely looking up long enough to match a name with a face, checked le Petit's name off a list. She noted that he'd stay for lunch but go home before snack time, and handed us our notebook for official school correspondence.

"Will there be nap time after lunch?" my husband asked politely, almost timidly. We're both disproportionately intimidated by nursery school teachers.

"No, of course not!" the teacher answered sharply. This is moyenne section, after all, she seemed to say. Ca ne rigole plus. We're no longer joking around here, people. Not that we were hoping for nap time, mind you -- le Petit hasn't taken a nap regularly for at least a year and a half.

A line of parents and children was forming out the door, and the teacher was clearly overwhelmed. The classroom aide hadn't arrived. She had thirty students. I decided not to worry too much about how things would go. Instead, we cheerfully and briefly said goodbye to le Petit and left, and he readily popped inside, more than happy to leave us. It was his first full day at school, first day at the cafeteria, first day with a new teacher. What could possibly go wrong?

(I didn't try to answer my own question there, hoping the change of clothes I'd sent him with would cover any eventualities.)

When I picked up le Petit at four o'clock he was ecstatic, and, I noted with relief, wearing the same clothes. I heard more details of his day on the way home than I'd heard all the year before, and they all came out in a fascinating jumble. Four-year-old stream of consciousness is so damn cute. I learned that they'd had recess on the playground on the roof (ah, urban elementary schools) where men with tool belts were building new toys. There were two new helicopters, both blue. They'd read a story about a bear in the woods. There were lots of new kids, and they sat together on a big bench -- big, but not as big as the Viaduc de Millau that we saw on our vacation this summer. They played some sort of game with chestnuts, separating the marron inside from the spiky part on the outside.

The most involved story involved recess. First, he was playing with a small red bicycle -- small like this, he said, holding his hands close together -- which was claimed by another kid while he went off to use the potty. Luckily, however, someone then gave him big yellow bicycle -- big like this, he said, holding his arms as far apart at he could -- and they all turned it upside down and pretended to make chocolate milk.

Hearing this I was tugged back into the imaginary world I created at recess thirty years ago, where we turned toys into machines, kitchens, and hot lava fields, and turned blades of grass into magic potions and improbable recipes.

So, you know, turning a bicycle upside down to make chocolate milk made total sense to me.

It made sense to my dad, too, when le Petit narrated his first day of school later on Skype.

"You know what? When I was a kid, I turned my bicycle upside down and pretended to make ice cream," he shared with le Petit.

Le Petit thought about that for a moment. Our vacation was somewhat of an ice cream tour de France. Thanks to indulgent parents and grandparents, le Petit sampled ice cream everywhere we visited, always the same two flavors, pistachio and raspberry. And on an outing to Versailles with my in-laws last week le Petit visited le hameau de la Reine, the mock country village created for Marie Antoinette on the grounds of the chateau, and saw the "dairy." "That," my father-in-law had explained, "Is where Marie-Antoinette made her ice cream."

Le Petit misses nothing, saves up all that he observes and overhears to make brilliant statements of four-year-old logic when we least expect them. Like on the night of his first day of school, as my husband was putting him to bed.

"Papa?"

"Yes?"

"When I'm big like you, Papa, you know, there will be lots of toys on the roof of my school. And Grandpa G will have a bicycle and turn it upside down to make ice cream, just like Marie-Antoinette."

A parent sends their kid off to school for the first day and nervously tries to imagine all the possibilities.

But there's absolutely no way I could ever have come up with that.

Nine month sleep regression 1, Parisienne 0

2011-09-03T21:59:00.003+02:00

The nine month sleep regression is beating me.

Down.

And kicking me, too, while I'm there.

I don't remember that le Petit went through sleep regressions as an infant, at least not the classic ones at four and nine months. His sleep was miserable as a newborn and gradually improved throughout the first year. By the time he was two or three months old he was only waking up to nurse once or twice a night, and that remained pretty constant until he was a toddler. He occasionally would wake up for several hours in a row and throw a party for the entire family between two and five o'clock in the morning, which was its own kind of bleary-eyed hell. He was also very difficult to help fall asleep at night, and a terrible napper. But frequent wake-ups were not his thing past two months old. I'm sure a skim through the archives would provide more details, but frankly I'm too tired.

When I was pregnant the second time around, I worried about sleep. What would it be like when Mademoiselle arrived? I figured that chances are it would be better, but if it were as bad or worse, at least I'd be prepared. What I didn't count on was that it would be neither... just different. A new brand of exhaustion.

If my memory weren't compromised by lack of sleep, I could count on one hand the number of nights she's woken up less than twice. When sleep is good, she averages three wake ups; when sleep is bad, that slides to four or five. What has saved my sanity from the beginning is that she'll usually nurse briefly and fall right back asleep, so with her crib still next to our bed (no third bedroom in our apartment, and we don't want Mademoiselle to wake up le Petit), I barely have to open my own eyes. I suspect that my own sleep cycles are even more or less patterned on hers now, so I am less tired than you'd expect.

Enter the nine month sleep regression. Mademoiselle learns to crawl*, and then to pull up and cruise furniture, and suddenly sleep is so last month, already. Four wakes ups, minimum. More often than not I lose count. I find her awake two or three hours after I put her down for the night, upright in her crib, gripping the bars and screaming. She's obsessed with mobility and she's staging an uprising, demanding her rights or something -- what, exactly? Oh, yeah. Two syllables:

LO! LO!

That's our cute word for lait, or mommy's milk. She can't say it yet, but she sure as hell knows what it means, and when she wakes at night she will accept no substitutes. We know because we've tried, most recently last week. On that fateful night, she woke up for the second time a half an hour after waking up for the first time, upon which I said something rude and handed her over to my husband. He tried to calm her down unsuccessfully while I pretended to sleep on the couch. By the time I intervened again, Mademoiselle was so wired that she wouldn't nurse down but instead wanted to sit up in our bed and clap her hands. She refused to go back into her crib without throwing a fit. I swear she would've started singing protest songs if she'd only had a guitar. After losing two hours in the middle of the night, we ultimately calmed her to sleep in our bed in between us, and in another hour, she was awake again.

Last night she woke up two and a half hours after I put her down, and then woke up roughly every hour after that. I was a mess this morning, barely rested after having cycled through strange dreams. Our apartment was stifling thanks to a late summer heat wave. Poor Mademoiselle had five new mosquito bites, a possible partial explanation for the miserable night we'd all had.

I was irritable all day today, snapping at my husband and le Petit for little or no reason, complaining, yelling. I'm coping -- barely -- by swearing loudly at things like household appliances and eating too much chocolate.

I don't know if I can or should try to "fix" anything. Mademoiselle will grow out of this. I'll head back to work in two weeks, and Mademoiselle will be starting partial days with the nanny on Tuesday. It will be hard enough for her soon without trying to nudge her into better sleep, even in the gentlest of ways. I guess all I can do is hang in there, knowing This Too Shall Pass, be thankful all day long my kids are healthy and happy, and post incoherent rants here and on Facebook.

And go off to sleep. Now. For an hour or two, at least.

* I realized that I didn't properly describe Mademoiselle's adorable method of crawling in a previous post. She advances her arms and then, with her left leg bent out to the side, propels herself forward by pushing with her left foot. She lets her right knee drag along the floor. She's gotten quite good at this, and stealthily heads off on her own to explore the apartment, so I've got to be fast these days. Which would be easier if I weren't so damn tired, but I digress.

Amour et charité

2011-08-25T16:49:00.009+02:00

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.
1 Corinthians 13:4–8a
(English Standard Version)

Ten years ago yesterday the warm light of a flawless late summer New England afternoon streamed into a little white church in Warren, Vermont. I, like all self-respecting brides on the day before the wedding, was an anxious wreck. I wasn't yet Bridezilla, though I'd come close that afternoon when one of my bridesmaids called insouciantly to let me know she'd be late for the rehearsal. She'd since made it in time, and now the wedding party and a few odd friends and family were gathered, listening to instructions from Father R. We'd gotten to the readings, and A's aunt began reading 1 Corinthians 13 in French. "L'amour est patient," she recited solemnly from a piece of paper she'd brought with her from France.

Father R jumped in and stopped her. It wouldn't do. It wouldn't do at all. Although our wedding ceremony would be in English -- co-officiated by the local pastor in Warren and Father R, priest from my church back in Seattle and a dear family friend -- we had planned to do one of the readings in French. Now Father R was objecting, politely but firmly, to the word "amour." To him apparently amour was primarily about physical love; it was also, I supposed, about cabarets and Edith Piaf and a mountain of American stereotypes about the French. To him, the proper translation of 1 Corinthians 13 used the more chaste "charité."

A flurry of simultaneous translation followed, between Father R, who only spoke English, A's aunt, who only spoke French, and my husband, who barely understood at first what the problem could possibly be. Once the objection was duly translated and explained, A's aunt looked confused and a bit embarrassed. The very idea that this kind, serious, respectable woman in her seventies could be introducing anything improper to our wedding ceremony was absurd. And I was a bit taken aback that Father R, from our laid-back, accepting, diverse church in Seattle, held such a prudish view on a linguistic detail.

By now the issue was making its way around the room, and the previously bored French bystanders were whispering amongst themselves and laughing discreetly. Meanwhile I was growing more and more upset. I disliked the word "charité." It sounded rational, just, kind, measured, but devoid of passion. To my still less-than-fluent ear it sounded nothing like what I felt for A. We'd looked specifically for a translation that didn't use it. I had no idea how I'd stand up to Father R's well-meaning pastoral authority, however, or how if necessary I'd find another translation in time for the ceremony the next day.

A close friend from high school stepped up and started calmly explaining the French etymology, as he understood it, and the subtleties of the multiple Greek translations of the word "love". He'd studied French, he was raised in the Greek Orthodox church, and his parents were librarians; this was the kind of argument he could have had at the dinner table. Meanwhile, one of A's groomsmen smirked indulgently at the textbook case of American puritanism. I can't remember exactly how, but we eventually reassured Father R that the reading even with amour did address all the facets of love.

Father R poked fun at the incident in the homily the next day. With his customary warm eloquence, he wished us plenty of both amour and charité, as I recall.

I haven't thought much about 1 Corinthians since, and I'll admit that except for the misunderstanding during the rehearsal, I hadn't thought much about it back then. It was simply the reading everyone chose for a wedding. Yes to patience and kindness. No to arrogance and envy. It sounded a bit obvious taken out of context, as if it could be a biblical version of 'Marriage for Dummies.' But sweet, still, and the lesson clear enough, with a neat little "Love never ends" to tie it all up reassuringly. A and I squeezed each other's hand as we sat and listened attentively next to the altar.

We've been married now for ten years, and in the last week I have been less than patient and certainly less than kind on more than one occasion. I have also, I'm afraid, insisted heavily on having my way more than once. I am sometimes (ahem) a bit irritable and resentful when I wake up for Mademoiselle's third night feeding, or when my husband heads out the door for a run as I sweep the breakfast crumbs from under the table. But here's the strange thing. We now have two kids. Days are short, nights are even shorter (!), our apartment is smaller, and the logistics of life are more challenging than I ever would have guessed at age 24, back when we got married. Lord knows I gripe -- c.f. my previous post -- and my husband, of course, has his own grievances I'm sure, but that is not what defines our love. The irritation, the arrogance, the frustration, just as much as the sleepless nights with crying infants, the long discussions about job and hearth, shopping lists, tantrums, meal planning, scattered Legos, the picking up mummified avocado off the living room floor... are like waves. That's it, I guess. Waves against stone, smoothing the rough, fragile bits and wearing the strong part smooth.

It feels easier to be in love now than at age 24. I've slowly shed much of what was then so defensive in my nature. I no longer need it. My husband and I know each other well enough now to sometimes finish each other's sentences, while at the same time we're both better at stopping and actually listening to what the other one is saying. Nothing motivates me more to finish something, like the dishes, than knowing that A would do it for me unasked. We still wind up taking collateral damage when we stumble unexpectedly into the minefield of each other's childhood crap. Everyone's got baggage and in every marriage you occasionally drop it on the other's toes. But when that happens, we both see it, admit it (after screaming and stomping a bit, perhaps), problem solve as polite adults, and manage to poke fun at ourselves.

I suspect that's the charité that Father R was getting at. But it's also, I maintain firmly, most of what you need to know about amour.

A weekend of her own

2011-08-21T23:02:00.002+02:00

Anyone else have weekend angst? C'mon, give me a show of hands. Do you leave work on Friday, heart light, head full of plans for two full days of freedom, only to see it all crumbling to dust by noon on Saturday? Or is it just me? At the moment I'm not working, but you'd better believe I'm waiting impatiently for my husband to walk through the door on Friday evening and share full-time parenting duty for two whole days. Then, by Saturday afternoon I'm griping at him, frustrated that the house isn't really cleaned as I'd like it, the floor is vacuumed but not mopped, or half the laundry is unfolded. Or maybe I haven't gone for a run, and it's almost five o'clock and I'm still in my pajamas. Mademoiselle doesn't want to nap, and the floor under the dining table is still covered with giant, scary crumbs from lunch.

Yeah. If only I could take a deep breath and smile at that point instead of moping and yelling.

Remember how Friday night felt in college? Even the nerdiest among us took the night off. My school was hardly a magnet for parties, which suited me since I was a teetotaler and just a wee bit "lame" back then. I'm not sure what I did, exactly, except try to escape to wherever my loser boyfriend at the time happened to live, or failing that, hang out with friends and maybe scrape together enough money among us to go out to dinner or coffee. I studiously avoided schoolwork without any of the guilt that needled me when I avoided schoolwork on Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning. I could stay up as late as I wanted. I could sleep in the next day. I hadn't a care in the world.

Now, well, I've got kids, and the song is a little different. Friday night starts at nine or, now that it's summer and the schedule has gone a bit sideways, nine-thirty, when the kids are finally asleep. I don't manage to get any of my projects out (sorting through vacation photos, writing a new blog entry), and instead I waste time on the computer and procrastinate on doing the dishes. By the time 11 o'clock rolls around, I've done nothing, and Mademoiselle has likely woken up for the first of three or four times that night.

Now I'm lucky, because my husband will as often as not do all or half of the dishes if I procrastinate long enough -- we really do split things 50/50 -- and I know that if Mademoiselle wakes up at 7 the next morning, my husband will look after her and let me sleep in until 8 or 9. Still, my Friday nights are more exhausted apathy than giddy anticipation.

So, by Sunday night I'm worn out, fed up, mad as hell at no one in particular and everyone in general that the weekend didn't live up to my ill-defined expectations. I wanted to DO SOMETHING, I whine. I wanted some FREAKIN' TIME TO MYSELF, ALREADY.

"If you wanted to do something, all you had to do was ask," my husband protests. This makes me angrier still because it's at the same time incredibly kind, completely true, and irritating. If he agrees that the weekend was less than stellar, I accuse him of blaming me. If he points out the silver lining of all the things we managed to accomplish, I whine that it wasn't enough, it wasn't what I wanted, so who the hell cares? And so on. He's long-suffering, yes -- some of this bellyaching of mine was worse, believe it or not, before we had kids -- but he also stands up for himself (and rightly so).

So, I've come to conclude that although the difficulties of organizing a weekend with small children are large and structural, they aren't insurmountable. I can have fun if I put my mind to it. Heck, I wasn't so cool back in college, so there's no reason I can't have as much fun now as I did back then... at least, as soon as I manage to get my French driver's license. So this is my weekend manifesto:

1. Routine. We clearly need one, so I will define one. It will involve kicking the kids and my husband out of the house for two hours on Saturday morning so I can get the house clean once and for all, so the housework isn't hanging over my head like a Damocles sword all weekend. (My husband already does the shopping, which I hate, so don't think he gets off the hook.) It will also involve getting the kids in bed by nine, for the love of God.

2. Goals. I will make doable goals for each weekend, including something just for me.

3. No more Friday Night lethargy. If I started the weekend by spending a little time on a pet project, perhaps I'd feel more optimistic come Saturday.

I'll work on this for a few weeks and see where it gets me, hopefully halfway to a much-needed new attitude.

...and we're back

2011-08-14T23:12:00.003+02:00

Yesterday I came back from what was my longest stint away from home since college. Almost a month! We started doing laundry immediately upon unpacking the car, and the last load is still in the dryer as I type. The house is almost put back together, or at least what passes for put together these days. As I mentioned to my husband today, our life is like a giant game of Tetris, with new stuff constantly dropping in as I frantically look for a place to fit it all. Every once in awhile, some of it magically disappears -- usually to the basement storage unit, where I've learned to not poke around too much for fear of provoking a cardboard box landslide and taking out my husband's wine collection (which is probably the one thing in the entire basement we'd miss).

Mademoiselle left in mid-July with two teeth and a fierce determination to finally crawl, and she came back with four teeth and the ability not just to shuffle efficiently around the living room, but also to pull herself up to standing position. We took a nap together today, I in my bed next to a heap of unfolded clean laundry, she in her crib which is still between my side of the bed and the wall. I woke up to her standing and peering over the edge at me with a huge smile. Her primitive crawling style is adorable, and I must film it before she perfects it any: she first moves one arm, then the other arm, then slides one knee forward and finally pushes the other leg forward with her foot, keeping the second knee folded off to the side. It's quite asymmetrical and charming.

Le Petit has grown, too. Gone is the "reserved," reluctantly verbal child described to me in my end-of-year meeting with his teacher. Everywhere we went he chirped 'Bonjour' to people in the street and repeated it until he got a response, and when someone engaged him in conversation, he explained that he was four years old (and with great concentration, showed the requisite number of fingers) and that his baby sister was eight months old. He readily found other kids to play with at the beach, and even had his first summer crush, a little girl named Anna who coaxed him into the water at the beach in Collioure and held his hand when he was a little scared.

It was also le Petit's first gastronomic Tour de France. He visited the Roquefort caves and came back with a kilo of his favorite cheese. In Collioure he threw a tantrum when we wouldn't let him finish in one sitting an entire package of anchovies. In La Rochelle he made friends with the vendors at the central market, using his charm to beg slices of salami. In Brittany, he took his crab stuffed animal to visit the crabs in the tank at the fishmonger, and was unfazed when we took one of the crab 'friends' home to cook.

Most impressively, le Petit can accurately describe what he's seen, what we've done and where we've been in a way that shows he now participates in our travels more than he ever has in the past. Perhaps this will be the first family vacation that he remembers when he grows up.

There were moments when I felt guiltily like the vacation wasn't much of a break for me, since I was on-duty mothering 24/7. Mademoiselle still woke up two or three times a night, and Le Petit had a memorable tantrum at the end of a visit to the La Rochelle Aquarium. Getting everyone fed, dressed, bathed, packed, and out the door in the morning was an undertaking. A trip to the beach involved logistics that rivaled a Napoleonic campaign. Le Petit started "singing" loudly to Mademoiselle in the car during her naps, cheerfully explaining that he was trying to wake her up (and when that didn't work, he sometimes surreptitiously took a swipe at her car seat with his foot). I lost my patience more than I'd like, and I even threatened once to take everyone back to Paris on the next train. But on the whole, the Great Vacation of 2011 will go down as a success.

I had no time to write. I dragged the laptop across France and didn't so much as fire up Word. I brought back plenty to write *about*, though, and I hope I'll have time to do it shortly.

When Mademoiselle abruptly took the stage

2011-08-02T12:00:00.001+02:00

The streets were quiet and what passes for deserted in our suburb of Paris. My husband, panicked, parked the car haphazardly next to the hospital entrance, then sprung out leaving the door open and ran around to help me. My father-in-law jumped as quickly out of the back seat. I had my back arched and was otherwise unable to move; we'd driven the five minutes from home with me in that position. My husband, in a brief moment of calm between the screams I belted out during contractions, had noted with tense humor that for once I wasn't worried about buckling my seat belt. I was almost in enough pain to not feel guilty, and the truth was, I couldn't have bent myself into a true sitting position if I'd wanted to. I'd gratefully noticed that my husband had somehow preserved enough presence of mind to drive carefully if quickly to the hospital, stopping at traffic lights, keeping his eyes as much on the road as on me writhing in the passenger seat. He'd even spent a minute studying the map before we left in order to memorize the route through the maze of one-way streets to the hospital, which we'd mostly been to before on foot.

We could have rehearsed this before, I guess, just as we could have had the waiting suitcases fully packed, as opposed to 80% packed. But when le Petit was born, I'd spent over 12 hours in labor at the hospital, epiduralized and on Pitocin and feeling kind of like I was waiting for a train during an SNCF strike. I expected Mademoiselle's arrival to be quicker, but nothing like this. I figured I'd have time to throw together the last items before leaving. I figured... I figured it no longer mattered what I had planned. Childbirth does that.

An hour and a half before our arrival at the hospital I sat -- or the closest I could comfortably come to sitting, which was more like lying down, actually -- on the couch, tired, pregnant, and for the first time very tired of being pregnant. My mother likens being pregnant to being stuck on a runaway train. While I had relatively easy pregnancies and I never felt quite that negative about it, I did feel like I was at times gripped by runaway, irrational anxiety. The train wasn't out of control but it was headed to parts unknown, both times. And while I'll never know just what (undoubtedly tiny) influence the psychological had on the physical, both times I was pregnant I held on mentally as long as I could, wishing and willing my pregnancies to last into the final weeks.

Ever heard "It's so much easier when they're on the inside"? I subscribed to this wholeheartedly.

But on the couch that night, I had finally gotten to the point where I was ready for the baby to arrive. More precisely, I was ready to not be pregnant any more. I was two days from the 41-week mark: the due date, as calculated in France, and also the date at which most French hospitals schedule an induction. I was also four centimeters dilated, as the midwife had cheerfully announced on my last visit, two days previously.

She was the third person at the hospital to suggest a scheduled induction in as many weeks, but I kept declining. I had hopes and half-formed plans of natural birth, and my typically rational brain was awash in uninformed astrological theories. I blame the hormones. I also wanted labor to be as short and, well, sweet as possible, and I figured that ruled out induction. "But at four centimeters, half the work is done already!" the midwife added with insouciant optimism. Yeah. Except from my previous experience, I was pretty sure that the part about pushing out the head was weighted a bit more than the dilation part. I'd been walking around for weeks with painless contractions, and that was just fine with me. So I shook my head and she shrugged, and gave me a piece of paper instructing me to show up again on the morning of my due date.

On the couch that night, I started to whine, about what I can't remember. I was just trying to get my husband's attention, I think, and I felt too discouraged and top-heavy to search a less childish way to do it. He sat down next to me, asked what was wrong, and I vehemently aired some inconsequential grievances, finishing with, "And I feel giant, and pregnant, and I'm tired of being pregnant!" Then I cried. And then I shared some fears that were lurking in the corners of my rattled brain. Then my husband held me and reassured me, and I felt miraculously better. And then, in the space of a pause to catch my breath, the first painful contraction arrived.

"I think this is it."

I was now calm, my husband was suddenly nervous.

"Really?"

"That one was different. That one..." I paused to catch my breath and plan my rehearsed Zen pain-management response, "...hurt."

And I waited, and there was another painful contraction, and as I tried to remember the breathing and self-hypnosis and all that, I went off to take the prescribed shower. During the shower, I fumbled with the bottle of soap and noticed that the contractions were getting much more painful, and quickly. I lathered some, bent over in pain, tried to breathe, tried to use my visualizations, lather, rinse, repeat, and then decided (and said out loud to myself), "Oh, hell, I think I'll get the epidural."

Getting out of the shower was a challenge. Getting dried off and dressed was worse. My husband, meanwhile, was trying to get a hold of his parents on their cell phones. They live five minutes away from our apartment by foot, so they were the obvious first-line babysitters. Naively, we didn't have backup sitters. They were, however, at a wine tasting, in a basement shop where we later discovered cell phone signals don't pass so well. We assumed correctly that my brother-in-law was with them, and luckily his cell phone managed to ring.

Although my in-laws left immediately, and at any rate couldn't go any faster than the Métro would take them, they didn't at first feel like they were in any great hurry. It was twelve hours last time, after all; they figured this time I would be in labor for at least five or six.

"Are they on their way?" I asked from the hallway more or less at the top of my lungs. My husband called back to urge them to hurry, which they couldn't possibly do any more than they were already, but it made us both feel better. My husband then informed me that I'd have to get dressed.

"I can't," I whimpered.

"But you have to." He stated the obvious delicately. Then he went to find clothes, and somehow got me dressed with very little useful intervention on my part, and then my water broke and he had to start all over again. I sobbed and yelled throughout, and le Petit miraculously slept somehow in his room just next door.

My in-laws called to say they had arrived at the Métro station and were running to get to our place. My husband and I decided that he would take me down to the entrance hallway of our building where I'd wait for his parents while he went down to the parking garage to bring the car around to the front. He helped me to the mirrored marble alcove that serves as a bench, then ran back to the elevator. I sat, waited a minute; a contraction arrived and I confusedly decided I'd be better off kneeling on the floor, leaning on the bench with my forearms. I kneeling, moaning to myself when a neighbor walked in and took one started and terrified look at me.

"Ca va, madame?"

"Ca va. Just the beginning of labor," I assured her, trying to sound unworried and cheerful. She hurried off past the front door. My in-laws arrived a second later; my mother-in-law ran upstairs to stay with the (still sleeping) le Petit, and my father-in-law helped me to my feet. My husband arrived with the car, and the two of them picked me up and carried me to the front seat. Once we arrived at the hospital, they picked me up and carried me again.

The hospital where I'd given birth to le Petit and would shortly give birth to Mademoiselle is small, a neighborhood hospital, really, and quite sleepy at 9:30 at night. There was no wheelchair at the door, and the man seated at the reception desk looked unimpressed by a screaming pregnant lady being carried in and at any rate unmoved to get up and help. A bystander -- a father whose poor wife had been in labor for over 24 hours, we later learned -- sprung up from his seat and offered to help, both supporting my weight and directing my husband and father-in-law to the door of the labor ward. Beyond the double doors, two nurses and a midwife attended to me immediately, and in seconds I found myself on a waiting gurney.

"Her water broke," my husband explained, feeling, I'm sure, like he needed to explain something.

"That's no reason to cry, madame!" one of the nurses insisted kindly, though I barely heard her.

"She's pushing!" noticed the midwife, alarmed, "Madame, don't push yet!" Pushing, I realized dazedly, so that's what I'd been doing since before we left the house. She confirmed what I already guiltily realized: that pushing had probably not been such a good idea. But my body was commanding by then, and my brain was just along for the ride. In less than a minute they had me wheeled into a delivery room, transfered to a bed, dressed in a gown and hooked up to an IV. They also determined how far things had progressed.

"...and an epidural?" I asked weakly.

"I think, madame, it's too late," all answered in chorus (and slightly amused, perhaps).

"Now you can push," the midwife instructed. She'd repositioned Mademoiselle, who apparently hadn't been lined up properly, and much of the excruciating pain was alleviated. The on-duty OB arrived immediately, too, and it just happened to be the OB who had been following my pregnancy, the same OB who had delivered le Petit. This was coincidence, perhaps just resulting from the happy fact that both of my children were born on Thursdays, but in the moment it felt like a miracle.

"C'est Dr. M! C'est mon ange guardian!" My guardian angel, I repeated dumbly, "He was here when my son was born!" I was vaguely aware how cheesy this sounded, but communicating my gratitude and relief felt as primordial as screaming, in English, with each contraction. This confused the midwife and the nurse, who tried to talk to me in their approximate English while the OB explained that I understood French perfectly well. He explained that I would have to push effectively in the next seconds, that this would be very important for the baby. And I did the best I could, several times. In the end, the ventouse (yeah, I don't know what it's called in English) was used to help her out more quickly, since, he later explained, the amniotic fluid was tinted and they didn't have enough monitoring information to know how she was doing. My husband calculated that Mademoiselle was born twelve minutes after we'd pushed open the hospital door.

Mademoiselle rested on my tummy quietly, not crying until after they cut the cord. Wanting to welcome her as I did le Petit, I told her how happy I was that she was here. The nurse dimmed the lights, and calm swept in as quickly as the chaos. Mademoiselle was weighed, diapered, and given back to me to nurse. I started to shiver, and a nurse wrapped us both in a big, garish comforter.

Two hours later she was dressed, bundled up in onesie, thick pajamas, a sleeping bag, and a hat, and we were wheeled upstairs together. Later I nibbled on my tray of food, looking with wonder and more than a little anxiety at the tiny bundle in the Plexiglas tub crib next to me. I remembered feeling lost when I was left with tiny le Petit, so alone and so puzzled and exhausted by his needs even as I was overwhelmed with love. This time I knew what to do -- theoretically at least -- so I didn't admit to the knot in my stomach when I bid my husband good night and he left us in the wee hours of the morning.

Mademoiselle slept. I couldn't. I was too joyful. Too scared. Too vigilant. Too much adrenaline still running in my veins. I didn't close the shutters, because the muted light from the street lights reassured me. She eventually woke up and started to cry, and I picked her up and put her to my breast like the old pro I felt I should be. She drifted off in my arms, and instead of worrying how and if I'd lift her back into her own bed without waking her, I held her tightly next to me and just watched her sleep. "I'm so glad you're here," I willed her to know, and at some point I slept, without moving my body or my arms an inch, I'm pretty sure. "Need me as much as you need to, little one," I thought, "I understand this time."

The next day, of course, I thought I'd been a bit silly, and I was terrified that Mademoiselle would fall out of my high hospital bed. I also knew, from le Petit, that as a parent you're always fundamentally making it up as you go along. I wondered, though, if holding Mademoiselle for those hours that first night had reassured her as much as it had me.

"I'm so glad you're here."

...the Euro-zone can't fall apart this July, or this August

2011-07-14T12:00:00.000+02:00

...because we're all out on decadently long vacations!

This year, since I'm not actually working again just yet, I'll be gone with the kids for a month. My husband will be back in Paris for a brief week that I'll spend in La Rochelle with my in-laws. Before that week we'll visit the Aveyron and the Mediterranean, and after that week we'll be back in Brittany. I'll bring the computer to write, although I'll be largely off the communications grid. OK, just the non-mobile-device Internet. My plan is to have lots of great things to post here when I get back.

In honor of Mademoiselle's eight-month birthday, I have (finally) written about her birth in a post that will auto-publish on August 2. So check that out if you're not on vacation yourself. I'll be back in mid-August, and I'll look forward to reading your comments (on my BlackBerry! From the beach!) in the meantime.

Oh, and happy Bastille Day!

Four years

2011-07-13T23:13:00.002+02:00

Four years and a day ago, I was on the threshold of what may be the biggest Before and After of my life. The different realities on either side of this transition are too disparate, too personal to even begin to explain what I mean. But still, le Petit's birthday feels almost (this sounds selfish) like my own.

So I was giddy yesterday, even before the feast that was planned for the evening approached. (Only in France are four-year-olds' birthdays celebrated with foie gras and Champagne.)

Le Petit is a bit of a Paris monument geek, obsessed in the cute way preschoolers approach their favorite subjects. He can spot the Tour Saint Jacques above the Hôtel de Ville, and tell the Invalides from the Panthéon at a glance, which is more than some Parisians can do. My mother-in-law and I took him on a Paris river cruise on one of the ubiquitous Seine tour boats that leaves from the foot of the Eiffel Tower. The program was a special one adapted for children, however, and the foreign tourists were replaced by pint-sized Parisians and their beaming parents and grandparents. I hoped this would be the first birthday experience le Petit would remember his entire life, but I'm not sure. He liked it, and was wide-eyed the whole time, but didn't talk much about it afterward. I think the new bicycle he got from Grandpa and Grandma may take center stage this year. When we left the boat, he said goodbye to the guide and added proudly, "I made the Eiffel Tower out of Legos."

Yes, my kid, the one his preschool teacher described all year long as "reserved," had plenty to say to anyone and everyone yesterday.

"Today is my birthday! I'm four years old," he announced to each shopkeeper he met when he was out buying provisions for his birthday feast with Grandma. Then he counted on his hand: un, deux, trois, quatre. It was his birthday, and he wanted his cake, his foie gras -- his face fell when the store clerk jokingly told him they were out of it -- and back home, wanted his candles and his presents.

The scene yesterday evening was chaotic, as I tried to bake a chicken, cook up risotto and mushrooms, iron a tablecloth and wrap presents more or less simultaneously. My in-laws provided babysitting, foie gras and the cake, and my husband dealt with the details I frantically threw at him. I was stressed, and if I weren't breastfeeding, a bit more wine might have done me some good. We're leaving for vacation tomorrow, and a day of packing and organizing today loomed, the kids wouldn't be in bed until bedtime in some American timezone. At one point, when I discovered I had to pop the undercooked chicken back in the oven, I lost it and started to yell. I even threw an oven mitt across the kitchen. Le Petit thankfully didn't notice. A Champagne glass got knocked off the table and I stepped on a shard, and Mademoiselle started to cry.

But then, through little intervention of my own, the pieces were picked up and the dishes mostly cleared and before I knew it le Petit was in his bath, busy fishing for plastic fish with Grandpa using the new magnetic fishing poles he'd just gotten as a present. The laughter didn't even wake up Mademoiselle in the next room. After the bath, I dressed le Petit in his pajamas and hung around hoping I'd be chosen to read the bedtime story, and to spend the last few minutes of his fourth birthday with him, telling him a little about the first few minutes of the night he was born. (Also just a little bit selfishly, to avoid cleaning the kitchen.)

We chose to read his favorite book about Paris.

"We'll look at the monuments," I suggested, "and you tell me which ones we saw today from the boat. What's that?"

"Hôtel de Cluny," he answered quickly, with a sly smile.

"Did we see that today?"

"Noooooooo!" He giggled.

"And this, what bridge is it?"

"Le pont... le pont de l'Alma!"

"Did we see that?"

"Yes!"

"Did we go under that?"

"YES!"

After we closed the book I sat on the edge of his bed as he snuggled into his pillows and animals and made a little mound out of his comforter, to sleep on top. I started to tell him about the night he was born and how very special it was, because it was when I got to meet him. I went on to list his major accomplishments in chronological order.

"First you could only cry and drink 'lolo'. But then you learned to smile. Then, hold things. Then crawl... and then walk... and then talk."

He listened attentively, his head against my thigh.

"You stared to talk, and your first words were 'dada' and 'coco'."

"Coco, yeah, coco because... because... because there was the crocodile song!"

"It was that, or maybe the chickens on the farm where we spent our vacation, and the roosters who went 'cocorico'."

"What did I learn next?"

He listened as I went on to list things like Legos and potty and Paris monuments. I don't know if he heard what I was trying to say: You're special. You've changed my life. You've learned so much already, and you will learn so much more, and just being here to watch you learn is enough for me.

I got up to leave, said goodnight, and bent down to kiss his hair. I think that when I closed the door to his room he was already asleep.

Not from around here

2011-06-24T23:46:00.000+02:00

My mother-in-law was chatting a few days ago with the woman across the hall and le Petit was listening in on the conversation. The woman mentioned something about how le Petit's mom is an American.

"Oui," le Petit chimed in, "And I am, too. And so is my sister, because we took her to the embassy."

He's fascinated by geography these days, and pores over the children's atlases we've purchased for him even though they're meant for children twice his age.

"Is Saint-Ouen in Europe, Mommy?" he asked me, randomly, about a suburb on the northeastern edge of Paris that we pass on our way to Troyes. Yes, I assured him, it is. I've tried to explain cities and countries and continents to him by showing progressively bigger distances between my hands. Saint-Ouen is in Europe because it is in France, and France is in Europe.

He'll often talk to me about Italy, which he explains is in Europe, and Spain, also in Europe. As we listened to the BBC streaming on the computer yesterday, I explained that it was radio from London, in the UK.

"Is the UK in Europe, Mommy?"

I assured him that it was. Later, as I was in the kitchen, the BBC switched back to Seattle's local NPR station -- I listen to the streaming of KUOW which early in the morning Seattle time is still the BBC World Service -- and le Petit told me that the radio was now 'United States radio.'

"How did you know that?" I asked amazed, wondering if he'd interpreted the change in accent (unlikely), or just overheard the station identification as Seattle and known that Seattle was in the US. He stared at me, confused, unsure how to answer. Then we were back to 'London Radio,' and as le Petit remembered from watching the royal wedding on TV, London is home to Buckingham Palace.

"Mommy," he told me excitedly, "[Mademoiselle] is in Buckingham Palace!"

I glanced at Mademoiselle, sitting in her high chair.

"And why do you say that?"

"Because, Mommy, because she's got a balcony!"

Sure enough: the high chair tray.

"And Mommy," le Petit continued, and I expected him to say something about her being a princess, "Mommy, her head is... a flag!" He giggled at the idea.

A little later, as we were eating lunch, he stopped to say with great seriousness, "Mommy, you are a-mé-ri-caine. And Daddy, Daddy is... pa-ri-si-enne [sic]!"

I texted my husband with the news, and toulousain that he is, I think he was a little bit disappointed.

At the table

2011-06-23T22:31:00.004+02:00

Yesterday for dinner le Petit asked for magret, or duck breast. Magret cuit au four, specifically, or broiled duck breast, in le Petit-speak. And potatoes. With rice.

I ignored the rice request because I'd already made Italian black rice for lunch. It was deliciously fragrant and went quite well with the smoked salmon and steamed zucchini I'd served along with it, but I'd spent the rest of the afternoon picking errant grains up off the kitchen and living room floors, noticing that they looked disturbingly like tiny insects. Potatoes, however, I could do, and the sautéed potatoes from Richard Grausman's "At Home with the French Classics" that I serve systematically with magret are pretty much the only potatoes that le Petit will accept to eat. My husband was out of town for the night, and I felt a bit silly going out of my way to make a meal much more complicated than pasta for just me and the kids. But le Petit had asked, after all, and after a couple of recent evenings with kid duty solo, I was on sort of a supermom trip. So I fired up the broiler.

Recently, le Petit has been uncharacteristically open to new foods. He'll sometimes take a few bites of broccoli or carrot, or grab a raw piece of zucchini off of a cutting board if he's especially hungry. He'll state with seriousness, "Autrefois, je n'aimais pas ça, mais maintenant je l'aime:" I disliked that before, but now I like it. Conversely, he'll suddenly spurn some things he used to adore, saying "Autrefois, j'aimais ça, mais maintenant je ne l'aime plus." You win some, you lose some.

I estimate he's still getting only 0.9% of his daily serving of vegetables, but still, there's new variety.

He's not nearly as open to new foods as his sister is, of course. Now that Mademoiselle's six months old, we've launched into the solid food adventure, and she precipitates into her mouth anything that I place on her high chair tray. Yesterday at lunch she eagerly made disappear the same steamed zucchini her brother haughtily pushed off his plate. I found half on the floor and on the seat cushion, of course, but the rest was greedily devoured.

By the time the duck breast and the potatoes were ready last night and I'd managed to herd le Petit to the table, Mademoiselle was too fussy to stay in her play pen, so I popped her into her high chair beside us. I thought she might be happy just observing dinner, but she took one look at le Petit's plate and then looked at me, indignant.

I pulled apart a chunk of potato and dropped in on the tray in front of her. Her gaze dropped, her arms flew out in front of her, and with careful concentration, she started zeroing in on the target. She closed the potato chunk in her fist, brought it to her mouth and looked happily startled. Mmmm. As I dropped more chunks, I noted with satisfaction that I had two happy kids eating a home-cooked meal, both with such enthusiasm that neither one was using a fork. I must be a pretty good cook. Then I remembered that Mademoiselle will actually try to eat anything these days, including paper (!), plastic wrap (!!), and cloth napkins, provided it falls within her grasp. As a good friend remarked recently, she'd try to eat nuts and bolts if I put them on her plate.

I got up to get le Petit's dessert from the refrigerator, a bowl full of freshly cut strawberries with a dusting of sugar, his favorite. As I disappeared back into kitchen I heard him say to himself, his mouth full of strawberries, "This is a wonderful meal!"

What's that? My son, complementing my food? I went back to the table and asked him to repeat himself. Then, sure that I'd really understood, I planted a kiss on the top of his head and told him how happy I was to hear that the dinner I'd prepared was appreciated by the people I love.

"And, Mommy, what's your meal?" he asked oddly. Uhh... I'd been eating the duck and the potatoes with him. Was I even sure he knew what the word 'meal' meant?

Maybe he knows he has me figured out, because today, encouraged in part by the rave review I'd gotten the night before, I made le Petit's favorite risotto for lunch. (OK, Mock Risotto -- but I honestly can hardly tell the difference.) I steamed up some broccoli for myself and Mademoiselle, and le Petit even nibbled at it a bit after declaring "Autrefois, je n'aimais pas ça." Mademoiselle munched away as I handed her stalk after stalk, throwing all caution to the wind about what it might do to her poor unsuspecting digestive system. After all, this may be the last time she begs for broccoli, so I'd best take advantage of it.

I encouraged le Petit to use his plastic knife to push the risotto onto his plastic spoon, and I pretended not to notice when at the end he shoveled fistfuls into his mouth. "I like the wine in the risotto," he commented. Yes, my little food critic with the primitive table manners can tell when I have some white wine on hand to add to the chicken broth.

When lunch was over, the floor was littered with sticky rice kernels, tiny broccoli buds were spread all the way from the back of the high chair to the threshold of the kitchen, the sink and counter were covered with dirty pots and pans, and both kids were in desperate need of a good wipe down with a wet wash cloth. I wearily trekked off to start cleaning and came back to find le Petit trying to push one last broccoli stalk, salvaged from his own plate, into the mouth of one very surprised Mademoiselle.

"But Mommy, I'm trying to help her eat her broccoli!"

I intervened quickly and explained why we don't force feed vegetables.

And to think that in five hours, it'd be dinner time again.

Prendre le large

2011-06-17T22:28:00.005+02:00

My husband turned 40 this year, and I surprised him with a long solo weekend away at les Glénans sailing school in Brittany. A few years ago he started wishing he knew how to sail, and in his typical fashion spent hours selecting just the right books to buy on the subject. Then he didn't act on it. Instead he sighed, and said what-if-one-day to himself repeatedly on each family trip to the ocean. I believe that the very best gifts are the ones that someone longs for but doesn't dare get for themselves. So tonight, after work, my husband hopped the TGV high-speed train for Vannes, and tomorrow he'll take a ferry to the Ile d'Ars in the Gulf of Morbihan and spend three days learning to sail a dinghy.

I hope he enjoys it. I hope he doesn't get too cold. He applied his minimalist packing strategy (as opposed to my just-in-case packing strategy) and I'm not sure he has enough layers. I've told him not to worry about me and the kids, so I guess I'll stop worrying about him. I just hope he comes back dreaming, because to me that's what 40 birthdays are supposed to be about: dreaming about the next half(+) of your life.

Of course, as luck would have it, Mademoiselle has been dragging along a minor cold all week, and today le Petit came down with an unexplained low-grade fever. Both were in bed in good order tonight. I got them both fed, bathed, and asleep by 8:40, which I believe may be my personal best in the solo-parenting category. And we will as usual be largely aided by my in-laws, who are taking us all to Troyes tomorrow. Picture me riding in the back of the car tomorrow morning between two car seats, a nursing pillow on my lap and my knees somewhere folded in improbable angles.

Speaking of which, can someone please explain to me why it takes multiple reasonably intelligent adults a seemingly staggering amount of time to install a car seat in the back of a vehicle? Or is it just me? Or just my car seat? We have an Isofix system (that's LATCH to you all in the US) and I just bought the latest fancy-dancy Swedish extended rear facing model for Mademoiselle, which can be installed with or without the base, and with either the Isofix anchors or a normal shoulder belt. It took my father-in-law and me thirty minutes of puzzling over it and the Swedish manual to get it installed without the base in his car with no Isofix. I almost gave up, and then dropped the base on my foot when I went to get the base out of our car. That thing is heavy, as befits the Volvo of car seats. Nothing like feeling clumsy and stupid. It's worse than those child-proof caps that no one over 12 can manipulate properly.

Mademoiselle is still waking up several times a night. Most nights I don't feel I should complain, since she usually nurses for less than 10 minutes before falling peacefully back asleep. I just pop her back in her crib and slide back down onto the pillows in my bed without hardly opening my eyes. Then, at seven o'clock, she's up for the day, which is highly reasonable for an infant, really, as I was reminded this morning when she uncharacteristically was up at 5:30. But I've gotten reckless with my own bedtime, writing blog entries or even -- the audacity -- watching the occasional movie before going to bed, so I don't get more than three hours before the first wake up. Unless she wakes up for the first time at 11, as she often does, justifying my "waiting" for her. Ugh. And on bad nights, she'll wake up as many five times, if my weary brain is counting correctly at that point. She rarely wakes up less than three times.

Mademoiselle is otherwise the picture of a mature young lady for her 6 months.
She'd still like to crawl, I think, but sitting in one place is The New Big Thing. She spends her days sitting up, alert, fussing with indignation when she unexpectedly flops over to one side. She suffers the playpen with reasonable patience, if I can keep cycling in new toys quickly enough. She is fascinated by tags and tiny details, by the texture and pattern of the rug in the hallway or the smooth surface of the hardwood floor, which she runs her tiny fingers across in rapt observation. I can no longer read while nursing her unless she's mostly asleep because she'll simply turn around and try to grab the book from my hands.

She loves sitting with us at the table in her high chair. She's started eating solid foods, and has decided that while the spoon is far more interesting than the pureed baby food it contains, she's more than happy to serve herself baked sweet potato "fries" or steamed zucchini. Because, after all, if she can pick it up herself, it must be good. I remember worrying about what and when to feed le Petit at that age, and whether he was getting enough. Now I realize that at six months, the main purpose of solid food is to keep the baby occupied so you can eat in peace. With Mademoiselle expanding her palate and le Petit still conscientiously eating most things without a fork, I may soon have to call in a street sweeper after family meals, however.

The photos from my photo shoot with Mademoiselle are now available. Although I don't want to post the pictures here to preserve the relative anonymity of my blog, if anyone would like to see them, just e-mail me and I'll send you the link. I think I look radiant and maternal, and Mademoiselle looks her usual beautiful self, even in the picture taken when she was about to have a meltdown. I think they may have photoshopped away my dark circles, but that's quite all right by me.

Un après-midi aux grands magasins

2011-06-16T21:36:00.003+02:00

Today, Mademoiselle decided she'd wake up thirty minutes into her afternoon nap. Groan. She was still tired and fussy, but her internal baby sleep timer had been reset and I knew there was no hope of getting her back down for another two hours, at least. In the meantime, she wasn't particularly interested in being parked in her playpen, even for a minute while I tried to finish my cup of coffee. Le Petit was glued to sesamestreet.org, but I knew it was only a matter of time before he needed me for something urgent and impractical to do with an infant in my arms, like rebuilding a Lego bridge.

So I did what any rational person would do: I called in the reinforcements. And then plotted my escape.

"How about if I call Grandma and we all go out?" I proposed to le Petit. "How about... we all go to the grands magasins?" I added slyly. "What would you think of that?"

The grands magasins I had in mind were the Paris flagship stores of Printemps and Galeries Lafayette which reign just behind the Opera on opposite corners of the Boulevard Haussman. Le Petit knows them well, since my mother-in-law started taking him there in the afternoons last fall when I was pregnant and on bed rest with Mademoiselle. The model of an indulgent Parisian grandmother, she'd follow him up and down the escalators to every single floor, then take the elevator up and down a few times for good measure. She'd whisk him off for an emergency potty stop. Before coming home, they'd admire the stained-glass cupola from the middle of the cosmetics department far below.

Le Petit remembered all this, and answered enthusiastically, "Yes! We'll go to the grands magasins! In the bus!" Riding the bus through Paris was part of the attraction.

I self-indulgently was planning to refresh my make-up bag with some anti-dark-circle magic. I'm no cosmetic fiend, but I'd just run out of foundation and that's not something you want to have happen when your baby isn't sleeping through the night. In the few hours of uninterrupted sleep I've been getting at night, I've been dreaming of new earrings to show off my short haircut. And also Galeries Lafayette's disproportionate women's shoe department, which takes up the entire floor of the renovated basement.

Yes, I decided, it was time for Mademoiselle's first shopping trip.

I called my mother-in-law and she was on board. Mademoiselle grew excited when she saw me put on the Moby wrap. Then the bus lulled her into a brief nap that lasted through my consultation at the Printemps make-up counter. A sweet young woman with long blond hair assured me, in her charming Quebec accent, that despite my lack of sleep I had 'bonne mine' today. I laughed.

"Well, last night, you see, she had a good night. Only woke up twice..."

She picked out a light tinted cream and a powder, and then easily talked me into also buying lip gloss and eyeshadow. Mademoiselle continued to snooze as she handed me my bag. My mother-in-law chased after le Petit, who I was momentarily grateful to forget entirely. When I finished, we headed upstairs.

"I promised him chocolate," my mother-in-law confessed. "From La Maison du Chocolat."

"Oh, boy. And have you been sage enough to deserve that?" I asked le Petit.

"Well, he's been sage ever since I mentioned it."

His nose just at the bottom of the display case, his arms stretched wide, le Petit told Grandma that he wanted all the chocolates and Grandma, obligingly, got him one of each of the dark chocolate ganaches. We'd all share, I assured the young woman who served us, worried what she'd think of such spoiling of a three-year-old. She handed over the bag, and wished us a knowing "à bientôt."

Visiting Paris with Mademoiselle and le Petit in tow is different from wandering the city alone. First, everything is slower and more complicated -- it takes longer to climb down into the Métro, longer to wind through the crowds on sidewalk on the boulevards. I have to worry about wiping hands clean, and emergency toilet stops, and whether or not I've brought sufficient water. I don't dare take both kids out alone on my own. At the same time, the typically apathetic Parisians suddenly notice me -- or us, rather -- and smile. And le Petit stops often and sees something I would never notice, like a partial view of the Eiffel Tower between buildings or a billboard on the street, and says something cute and to my biased ears, insightful.

We were in the shoe department in the Galeries when Mademoiselle started to sing, a long, loud "AaaaaaaAAAAAAaaaaa," not happy but not exactly upset, as if to say "Hey, world, I'm here!" I ignored her and kept turning over shoes and blinking at the prices, but other people stared and chuckled to themselves.

"She's saying, 'All these shoes! And I can't even walk!'" I interpreted helpfully.

She kept babbling, and drooling, and grinning wide to display her two hand-won bottom teeth. I found earrings and explained to the saleswoman, "It's the first time I've taken her shopping. And somehow I doubt it'll be the last."

Homeland

2011-06-10T23:07:00.002+02:00

Today we took Mademoiselle to the American consulate in Paris to formalize her status as an American citizen and apply for her passport and her Social Security number.

We did the same for le Petit when he was only two months old. I recently took out his passport and looked at the photo where he has the serious, slightly confused look of a tiny infant. He was still too small to hold his head up, so I propped him on my lap for the passport photo, using a pillowcase draped over my chest to form a white background. Although he obviously doesn't remember the photo or the visit to the consulate now, almost four years later, he's beginning to understand what it means.

"You get to go to school in the car this morning," my husband announced as le Petit got out of bed, "Because we're taking Mademoiselle to the American consulate. That's so she can become an American, like you."

Le Petit hopped down the hallway in his pajamas, chanting happily, "Je suis américain ! Et maman aussi !" Le Petit is fascinated with geography right now, and he's beginning to grasp the concepts of continents, oceans, and countries. I'm not sure he's actually associated yet the idea of being American with the United States. I suspect his mental construct of the United States is limited to three cities: Seattle, New York, and Washington D.C. ("Where Obama lives"), a few illustrations in his children's books, and the all-important notion of "Where Grandpa and Gramby live."

We hurried to drop him off at school and then stressed and bickered our way through Paris' morning traffic, arriving ten minutes before our 9:30 appointment. It turned out there was no need to rush. We waited for an hour in a large room lined with numbered service windows, watching the "now serving" numbers pop up in mystifying disorder. There were several other couples with small children waiting for appointments, too. I struck up a conversation with a woman who, like me, was carrying an infant in a wrap carrier. She was born in France to an American family, just like le Petit and Mademoiselle were, and she identified herself as both American and French. "I'm a Parisian," she told me matter-of-factly in a flat Midwestern accent, causing me to do a double-take despite myself. Her partner was English, and they had an appointment at the British Embassy later in the day. They were registering their third child.

She had nothing good to say about the Americans at the consulate, or the process she'd gone through to register her previous children.

She told me, "When my boyfriend called up his consulate to tell them, 'My French girlfriend is pregnant, what do I do to make sure the child is British?' they just told him, 'Sir, the child already is.'"

The Americans, on the other hand, had made her jump through hoops to prove that she had enough physical presence in the US to transmit citizenship -- there's a requirement of five years, if I remember correctly -- even though she'd attended high school, college and graduate school in the country. She was most irritated that the official had implied that she somehow must have gone back to France during the brief break between quarters at her university, thus voiding five days of the school year she was claiming.

I nodded sympathetically. I theoretically understand why the physical presence test is applied, because otherwise generation upon generation born abroad could claim American citizenship without any true tie to the country. On the other hand, I get defensive when the test is actually applied to me or to my children. I lived in the US until I was 26 years old and never left the country except for brief vacations. I was soon standing in front of a consular official who was asking for details of those vacations, including specific dates and durations that I had no longer any clue about. Luckily, they let my foggy memory slide, for it was clear enough that I passed the test regardless. But I made note to myself to start saving the boarding passes for each trip I take back with the kids, just in case they need them some day.

Extremists in both France and the United States have been talking recently of making it more difficult to claim citizenship in these sorts of cases. In France, it is already reportedly difficult for children born to a foreign parent, even on French soil, to renew their identity papers. Xenophobia is hardly surprising in hard economic times, I suppose. When times are tough, who better to blame than those who came, uninvited, to take their slice of the pie? But I am saddened when I think of it, even more so now that I'm caught in the 'other,' too. My children are both French and American, and inevitably to some people that will mean that they're somehow less of each. We decided to get all their paperwork straightened out early in their lives, just in case.

I'm not complaining, not really, because I doubt that this will represent any real hardship to me or to my kids. My kids will ultimately carry both passports, it's just a question of navigating the bureaucracy. I realize as well that my children are white, upper middle class, and born in a first-world country with a claim of citizenship in another first-world country. Truly all the privilege cards are stacked their favor. But I inevitably think of other kids who were brought to the US undocumented, were educated in the US, and are are just as rightfully American as my children, yet they have no simple path to citizenship. I also think of children who were born in France with a skin color or a last name that doesn't fit in the French idea of their own identity, and may therefore be regarded skeptically for the rest of their lives.

Like it or not, the world is getting smaller, and there will be more and more children like mine. Like these. I happen to think that these are the children who will grow up to interpret things for the rest of us. Raised between two cultures, they will be able to build bridges. It's a shame that the world sees them more as a threat or as a challenging exception than as an asset.

During the interview with the consular official, there's a moment where they visibly decide if your story holds, if your paperwork is in order, and if your child is therefore worthy to become a bone fide American. They then smile and let you know you'll receive the passport in the mail in a few weeks. Even if I knew today that was all just a formality, I still let out of a sigh of relief.

Pilgrim's progress

2011-06-08T23:00:00.001+02:00

Our house was on the modern Way of Saint James, also known as the GR 65 "grande randonnée" hiking trail that meanders south through France to the Pyrenees before changing name and number and heading across northern Spain to Santiago. A few years ago, I would have spent our week there imagining weary medieval pilgrims on horseback, or leading mules, or simply on foot, staggering down that same path centuries ago. Now I'm less naive, I know there's no particular reason that they would have come down this country road rather than another. They would, however, have likely stopped up the hill from us in the town of Lectoure, in the region known as Gascony, on their way to distant Galicia. One route, one Way -- or rather several official chemins, from Paris, Vézelay, or Le Puy -- is a modern invention, for pilgrims who plan their vacations with guidebooks, fixed dates, hostel reservations and starting points at railway stations and airports. In the distant once-upon-a-time, a pilgrim's route started quite simply at his front door.

At the house in Lectoure, our front door in Paris felt far away, and I hadn't even walked to get there. We'd sped down the A-20 motorway for a week in my current favorite place on Earth, the Gers, and I'd slept much of the way in the passenger seat.

My friends and family tease us now when we admit we're heading again to the same département that draws us back year after year. The Gers, encore? Surely we must have exhausted all the possibilities, seen all the sights, haunted all the limited tourist attractions time and again. It's true in part, since I can no longer remember exactly how many times we've visited, and feel I know the place intimately for someone who has never actually lived there. Half of each stay is spent going back to places we've already been numerous times, like the solemnly luminous Abbey of Flaran, or the round knot of stone houses that forms the bastide village of Forcés, in a sort of a personal pilgrimage. It grounds me, I guess, to know that these things are still here and that little has changed since my last visit. When I'm standing on one of the crest of any of the rolling hills of the Gers, I suspect that the landscape has endured only superficial changes in the last few centuries, and that despite the paved roads and telephone poles, modernity has used light brush strokes here. That leads me to hope that it'll be the same after I'm gone, and that even if the world threatens to crumble around me, this corner of civilization will remain. That's why I don't bother the read the daily headlines when I'm in the Gers.

But back to the Way of Saint James. My husband has dreamed of hiking to Santiago de Compostela ever since he was an adolescent and randomly read Les étoiles de Compostelle by Henri Vincenot once summer vacation. Before that, he grew up going to Spain each summer vacation, taking detours with his parents to visit churches hidden in mountain valleys. He also spent hours as a boy inking Michelin maps onto tracing paper. Before we had kids, he used to pore over obscure guidebooks, and we'd spend a good part of our vacations in Spain, Germany and France trying to locate the vestiges of Romanesque buildings in nondescript villages or isolated cow pastures. His veneer of Catholicism is thin -- he goes to mass once a year, and only because I, the Anglican, drag him -- but he's still a pilgrim born.

On this trip to the Gers, we'd rented a house that is nestled in gentle valley on the northern side of Lectoure. The stone building sits right against a narrow country road where almost as many pilgrims pass as cars, and the garden opens up down the hillside to a small hidden stream. The main building is a 13th-century water mill built by monks, now restored by a youngish retired couple who in addition to renting the adjoining house, run a bed and breakfast. I found it difficult to imagine that the valley once possessed enough hydraulic power or religious fervor to justify such a structure, but the local historical record and the Gothic-arched doorways seem to prove it. Now there's a pool, and lawn chairs, and a riot of wildflowers, tall grass and nettles. The steeple of Lectoure's cathedral is half-visible above the trees.

At this time of year, the bed and breakfast's clients are mostly pilgrims wearily arriving on foot with heavy backpacks. The Way of Saint James, once reserved for the eccentric and the devout, has gone mainstream in the last decade. It's hard to find accommodations in the high season and, I'd imagine, even harder to find deluxe accommodations such as these. We were invited by our hosts to drop by for drinks one evening, and when we arrived, the table was elegantly set for their three pilgrim guests, the first of whom descended to join us. With her white hair swept up stylishly to show off two artfully modern earrings and a silky printed shawl draped over her shoulders, she hardly looked like a backpacker.

"My husband and I aren't particularly religious," she explained to us in French. "We're walking with my sister, who's doing this out of true belief," she added with a slight smile. We questioned her about their progress, when they'd left and how far they'd come. They'd started in Le Puy, but were walking to Santiago in week-long chunks taken year-by-year, and this year were on their second leg. More and more people hike the Way in this fashion, fitting segments into their relatively short vacations. Others make the going easier by hiring a service to carry their baggage. My husband and I agree that when we do our pilgrimage, we'll do it start to finish in one go, carrying everything we need on our backs.

"We dream of doing it some day," we said with sighs, "But now, it just isn't possible." And we smiled over the heads of the children, pointing out the obvious.

A day or two later, my husband went for a run along the GR 65. On the road he passed a family of six, he told me in amazement, with kids that looked to be nine, seven, five, and two years old respectively. The older kids had small day packs with pilgrim's scallop shells attached to the back; the youngest was being carried in a backpack by his father. Mom carried the biggest pack of all, filled, I supposed, with snacks, countless changes of clothes, band-aids, face wipes, favorite loveys, and all the other indispensable gear for life with kids.

I watched them walk past our house later. I was changing Mademoiselle on a wide windowsill that overlooked the road from the second floor bedroom. They looked happy, purposeful, undeterred by the steep slope leading up to Lectoure, and no one was prodding, haranguing or bribing anyone. First the dad came by, talking with an older child and carrying the baby, and then the mom came along a few minutes later, leading each of the other children by the hand. I wanted to run outside and ask them how they did it, but I was busy wrestling a diaper onto an acrobatic six month old. Maybe the family was only out for a week's walk, or even just a long weekend. Maybe they had no intention to continue on to Santiago right now, or ever. But still: four kids! I wondered if the parents fretted about what the kids would eat, about whether a restaurant at each stop could be talked into serving ungarnished pasta, and how they responded to the inevitable pleas of "Carry me!"

Clearly, we were wimps. My husband and I admitted it jokingly to each other later. It began to eat at me, though, as the week went on and I started to get depressed at the thought of returning to Paris. "If Only" is a refrain I chant to myself each time I'm in the Gers, often when I'm staring longingly at the house with the blue shutters in central Lectoure that I pretend is destined to be mine someday. "If Only we lived in Toulouse, we could buy a second place here, we'd spend all our weekends." "If Only we could move out of Paris and both find decent jobs." "If Only I weren't stuck in a job I dislike." "If Only we lived in a bigger place... I had my driver's license... I knew exactly what I was doing with my life..." I do eventually manage to kick myself, good and hard, out of such useless and self-centered thinking, but not without feeling bitter and stupid.

In the Gers, the Pyrenees are still far away, a curtain of white peaks that, they say, are only visible on the horizon in the clear weather than precedes or follows a storm. I worry that if I were on foot heading toward them, I couldn't stare at them too long for risk of being too discouraged. After the Pyrenees, there's all of Spain to cross, including endless, sweltering Castilla, but that would still be too abstract to deter me. I know, though, that the Way takes a path that most people can cross without too much effort; a well-traveled pass was chosen in Medieval times just for that reason. And by the time most pilgrims get there, they've been walking for so long that advancing unconsciously footstep by footstep is easy... or so I've heard. So, what if the impassible mountains of "If Only" I throw up were no more difficult to cross than the Pyrenees on the trail to Santiago?

I'm not sure that I really want to move to the Gers. I'm not sure changing my job would make my life all that much more rewarding. I do know that I want a bigger apartment, eventually. I'd like to think I'll find the moment someday to pack my backpack and head to Santiago with my husband. Maybe our kids will come, too. I doubt the youngest will be as young as two. Perhaps twelve? Maybe I'll pack earrings and a shawl.

On our last day in the Gers, we went on a 16 kilometer hike on a stretch of the GR 65 around La Romieu. La Romieu is a small village with an imposing church, la collégiale de la Romieu, which stands on a hill from which it has beckoned to pilgrims along the Way forever, or close enough. Yet we managed to hike around it for four hours mostly without seeing it at all. We were always on the wrong side of a hill or forest, it seemed, and I therefore had no idea how far I had to walk to get back to our car. I carried Mademoiselle in the wrap, and my husband either chased after, pulled along, or carried le Petit. We walked for most of the afternoon, and my husband seemed to mock my tired legs when he informed me that that was still only half to two thirds of a day's voyage on the Way.

"We could do it, if we had better training," I protested.

"There's no training for Compostelle, you just do it."

"Well, we'd just do it, then."

Le Petit invented a new French word: peleriner, or "to pilgrim," when we asked where we were going and we explained that we were just walking like the other pelerins on the trail. He walked with a great deal of enthusiasm and effort, I'll have to admit, and he rode only half of the way on my husband's shoulders. I, however, was tired and thirsty -- we'd brought too little water -- and the only thing that kept me going at the end was the thought of a cool glass of fresh juice from the shop at the garden orchard where we'd parked. Then we rounded a corner, and La Romieu's steeple appeared in a break in the trees.

"Look, Mommy!" exclaimed le Petit, grabbing my arm. "Look! It's the Abbey of Flaran!"

"No, it's La Romieu," I corrected, but he would have nothing of it. Earlier that week we'd taken him to Flaran, and apparently my efforts to explain my love of the place had borne fruit. He was so excited. So he got it, even when I didn't: where you are on the path is sometimes less important than where you decide you want to be.

Le Petit loved the house in Lectoure as much as we did. He spent much of each day in the garden, and every time someone on foot passed, he ran up to the gate and called out a cheerful, "Bonjour, pelerin!" But there was no question for him of not coming back home, and he was concerned to hear us muttering our "If Only" complaints. He didn't want to miss any more school.

High heels and baby shoes

2011-05-28T00:27:00.003+02:00

I used to be the girl who dressed in jeans and ratty t-shirts two sizes two big. I wore sneakers and hiking boots exclusively. I went to the hairdresser only twice a year, if that, and never knew what cut to ask for except "shorter." When I met my husband he saw potential nonetheless, and also saw me in a couple of flowing skirts that flattered my hips and evidently caught his eye. But, as a whole, he was mildly shocked at my so un-French lack of fashion sense or effort.

By the time we got to know each other well enough for him to comment on this -- which was early in the relationship because, well, he's French and not afraid to voice an opinion on such things -- I knew him almost well enough not to take offense.

"Why are you wearing that?" he asked earnestly and with mild distaste one morning as I got ready to go to work in an old, gray t-shirt that hung down past my hips. I wondered the same thing as I then looked in the mirror as if for the first time.

I soon learned that I couldn't defend my wardrobe to him and didn't want to anyway. The old computer geek t-shirts got reconverted as running clothes or tucked, for nostalgia's sake, into the back of the closet. I started to take my husband shopping because unlike every American guy I'd ever dated, he told me exactly what he thought of the clothes I picked up off the rack, and helped me find things that I felt beautiful in.

All this was new for me.

You see, I grew up in Seattle and went to high school in the 90s, and Kurt Cobain and his peers were sort of our anti-fashion icons. I wore flannel shirts that I "borrowed" for my dad or from my boyfriend, and slumped around in hiking boots and parkas. The best compliment I ever received was when I showed up at school wearing my dad's vintage tan suede jacket with an unbuttoned red plaid shirt underneath. "That is totally something Eddie Vedder would wear!" exclaimed my girlfriend, and was I proud.

I can't say I looked feminine back then but it felt better than the years of girlhood and preadolescence that I'd spent trying and failing to be "one of the girls," wearing the wrong kind of jeans, or my hair too short, or skirts when everyone else was wearing pants. In sixth grade, I and all the other girls bought green plastic Maybelline powder compacts at the drug store and spend the breaks between classes giggling in front of the mirror in the bathroom and patting makeup on as thick as we could. I felt like I could never put enough makeup on to hide the ungainly me that was trying to stick out.

Every once in a while I'd find something -- a flouncy shirt, a pale yellow sweater -- that made me feel good. Myself. And beautiful. But mostly shopping was painful self-doubt, where I'd stare at myself in the mirror in outfits that didn't fit my soul or my body and wonder just what was wrong with me.

It's the stereotype, yes, but I can't help but believe still that parisiennes just don't have this problem. This city is filled with put-together women who are stylish from head to perfectly polished toe. Since I grew up already feeling intimidated by all things clothes and accessories, I'm not worse off than I was before. Strangely, even, I'm gaining confidence now. Which runs me straight into an interesting paradox.

I get the feeling -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- that when you become a mom in the US, you're supposed to stop worrying so much about your looks, already. You should be organizing play dates, not shopping for shoes. Forgetting the hairdresser appointment, and wearing a pony tail to the after-school soccer match. Things like pedicures are almost decadently Desperate Housewives, so don't even go there: what about the kids?

In France, on the other hand, or at least in Paris, the pressure is the opposite. After you give birth, you should get back to your pre-baby body, wardrobe, and mindset as quickly as possible. No one should be able to guess from looking at you that you're a mother. That means no giant mom-purses, no low-maintenance hair, and heaven forbid, no sneakers. And that may be fine for other Parisian moms, but it feels to me like it would be denying how much I've changed. I'm more stylish now than I was before le Petit was born, but I'm also more likely to be carrying baby wipes and band-aids.

Is it as extreme as all that? Maybe not. My particular experience certainly warps my perceptions. I'd be interested, however, to hear how other moms live these contradictions here, in the US, and everywhere else. (So feel free, if you wish, to tell me I'm completely nuts.)

Anyway, all this introspective introduction is to tell you that today I had the most remarkable fashion experience. I walked into a loft in Paris with my mother-in-law and Mademoiselle in tow. We were welcomed warmly, all three of us; there were moms and babies just like us everywhere, sitting on couches, playing on the floor. Toddlers toddled around. Infant slept in baby carriers. There was also a rack of brightly-colored dresses and tops in one corner of the room, and a couple makeshift dressing rooms. A photographer's backdrop was set up in the middle of a bright atrium. And in front of three tables set against the wall, professional makeup artists were ready to make us feel just a little more glamorous, and perhaps a little less tired, one mom at a time.

Mamanana, a web site I've blogged about before, was holding their first atelier d'essayage, and they'd invited moms of all shapes and sizes and with babies of all ages to try out their nursing wear. We would pick out outfits from their samples and later pictures would be posted on their web site to help other moms (who, you know, just might not have the same measurements as a typical fashion model) figure out what might look good on them, too.

Well, it sounds kind of cheesy, but I assure you this made me feel beautiful indeed. I found two dresses and two tops that I fell in love with. I'd brought along shoes from my closet for the pictures -- love-match shoes, the ones you never wear for anything real because you either can't or don't dare walk anywhere in them -- and they were perfect. For once, I felt like I might just compete with the parisiennes. I also felt completely comfortable stopping to nurse Mademoiselle, because everyone else was nursing, too.

Maybe that's half of beautiful is, anyway: feeling natural about it. That's pretty much what my mom's being trying to tell me all these years, anyway... and that's probably what I'll tell Mademoiselle some day, too.

[Since this reads like one big advertisement for Mamanana, I just wanted to clarify that 1) they didn't ask me to blog about it 2) that wouldn't be much of an investment if they had, since not many people actually read my blog and fewer still live in France or are currently breastfeeding, but 3) for participating in the atelier I did get a small gift and a gift certificate, which 4) I've already spent (and more) as a Mother's Day present to myself. Because, you know, I deserve it and all that.]

Stalling out blues

2011-05-22T23:07:00.003+02:00

I've been in a funk these last few days for no good reason, but it's kept me from writing anything on my blog, until now. Those that know me personally may tell you that silence is a heck of a lot better than listening to me whine. This time I know I have no real reason to complain, so I've been making an effort in real life -- no, honest! -- to tone down the unwarranted self-pity.

"I'm sorry I'm in a funk," I apologized to Mademoiselle on Friday, continuing in a cute sing-song voice, "Mommy's in a funk. Oh yes I am! And it isn't your fault, oh no, and it isn't fair to you." She looked at me and smiled her little uncertain tell-me-again-why-I-chose-this-family smile that makes me both melt and feel a bit guilty at the same time.

I know I haven't been playing with her as much as I should. I also don't go pick her up quickly enough when she starts to cry in her crib, so I'll find her flipped over and squished up in a corner, either making what my husband calls 'little prairie dog noises' or out-and-out wailing. Today I actually forgot to turn on the baby monitor when I put her down for her morning nap, and as I was cleaning the kitchen, I heard what sounded like a baby crying somewhere outside. "I can just ignore that," I thought to myself, "It can't possibly be Mademoiselle," and I let a couple minutes pass before I thought, "Gee, I should go check on her just in case" and realized what I'd done. I felt bad, but then I felt worse that I didn't feel as bad as I thought I should. (Some of you mothers out there must follow my twisted emotional reasoning, right?)

Why all this? Because I had one long week last week that I handled somewhat haphazardly. My father and stepmother were in town for a couple of days, a good visit, but one that as usual left me a bit homesick. Then on Wednesday, le Petit had minor surgery to remove a mole from his ankle. Since he's still little, the surgery had to take place under general anesthesia, which made it very scary for a number of family members (but not, against all expectations, for le Petit himself, who handled it with aplomb). I wasn't particularly worried myself, but the long afternoon at the clinic wore me down. During the procedure I left Mademoiselle at home with my in-laws without a sufficient quantity of pumped breast milk. She's a remarkably patient girl but she's nobody's fool, and the look she gave me when I got back said it all: I won't be parking my car in the mother-of-the-month spot in June, I'm afraid.

Speaking of cars, the highlight of the week was my first attempt at passing my French driver's license exam on Thursday. I'm 99.9% sure I failed. They're notoriously picky, you see -- the other candidates from my driving school were all on their second or third tries -- and I managed to be so anxiously concentrated on a maneuvering truck at a stop sign that I started out into the intersection without noticing a second car, a mistake which I'm pretty sure disqualified me instantly. Which is a crying shame, since I otherwise managed to parallel park on only my second try. (Go, team, go!) At least now I can almost laugh at myself while I wait to get the results in the mail, hopefully tomorrow. Then I'll go down to the driving school and write a hefty check for more obligatory hours of driving practice at 46€/hour and wonder just when I'll get this miserable process behind me. I'm upset because driving is something I as a good American take for granted, kind of like breathing, or like being able to find a fast-food restaurant to pull into when you need to use the bathroom. Now, humiliatingly, I can't drive and I'm not sure when I'm going to be able to drive again.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I actually blinked back tears of defeat as I took the train back home. Afterward I loudly moped around my in-laws' house for an hour (they were graciously looking after the kids) before going home to mope some more at my place. Mademoiselle and le Petit were cuddly and adorable as usual, didn't understand what my problem was and to their credit, didn't worry about it much. I've had to ask myself just what lesson I want to teach my kids: a) to give up when it gets hard; b) to give up when you start embarrassing yourself; or c) to stick with it, because after all, it'll make a good story some day.

My husband, who by now knows when to solicitously tiptoe around my wounded pride, found time this Saturday to straighten the house, do the dishes, and cook lunch on in between taking le Petit to the market and to the hardware store while I worked out, napped, and tried with limited success to stop feeling sorry for myself.

"You never know, maybe you passed," he told me hopefully. "Your problem is you don't have my first-hand experience with failure," he asserted. How my husband, who is no failure in anyone's book, had his ego bruised and toughened by the French educational system is a post in and of itself. Suffice it to say that the system forms a tiny, smug elite and teaches everyone else to get used to swallowing their pride. So he can laugh, more or less, when he remembers failing the driving exam on his first two tries, twenty years ago.

Today he decided to drag me and the kids all the way to southern Normandy to visit a garden in the Perche and change my attitude. That (and this blog post) is what finally cured me of my blues.

And the kids, well, they're being themselves, which is the other incentive I have to stop moping and be an adult already. (Kind of step out of myself and, slapping myself a few times in the face, sternly say, "You think you've got problems? Sheesh! Look at these beautiful kids! Now, whatcha complaining about again?")

So, backing up a bit: on Tuesday, Mademoiselle laughed for what I'm pretty sure was the first time. So cute! It may be a warm-up for laughing at her mother, but that's OK. In time, she'll surely help me laugh at myself.

Anyone else got stories of taking yourself too damn seriously, then snapping out of it thanks in large part to your kids?

From the mouths of babes

2011-05-09T22:43:00.002+02:00

[Irate note: This is the very last time I'll ever attempt to compose a blog post on an iPad. After an hour of painstakingly typing away on the touch screen with its irritating busybody of an automatic spell-check, the damn browser ate my post. The moral of the story: some technologies are great for reading the Economist in the dark while nursing your baby to sleep, and not so great for enabling personal expression. I'm back on my good old-fashioned laptop now.]

Le Petit is now making disarmingly frank observations about the world, usually when I least expect them, like in between quoting Sesame Street and announcing that he's washed his hands all by himself. Or from the back seat of the car, when I thought he wasn't listening to our conversation. For instance, on our way back from vacation, I mentioned to my husband that I wanted to take the kids to Alsace for the Christmas holidays one of these years.

"But, Mommy," le Petit interjected urgently, "Alsace is really far away. And you don't even have your driver's license yet!"

That made both of us laugh. True enough.

Then this weekend he told me, "Mommy, in French, it's crêpe. And in English, it's... in English, it's..." He hesistated. Sometimes you can almost hear the gears turning in his brain as he processes the language that matches his thoughts, and I wait in amusement to hear the result.

"In English, it's... burrito!"

I was baffled where that came from, since we were all in the car, we weren't talking about dinner, and we'd already had lunch. Also, I was certain I'd never served him a burrito. Part of the charm of his observations is that they are often apropos of nothing, or at least nothing other than the new, mysterious connections he's constantly building in his own head. Preschool wisdom is impenetrable.

They also make me laugh, which is a good thing, because many of my recent days have been a long, exhausting slog. Right now Mademoiselle has two brand-new teeth, a runny nose, and a singular obsession with learning to crawl, which have all (along with the phases of the moon and the alignment of the planets, I assume) been seriously screwing with her sleep. On good nights she wakes up twice and on typical nights she wakes up four or five times. Even if propping myself up on a pile of pillows and scooping her out of her crib to nurse has become so hazily automatic that I'm usually unsure just how many times I've had to intervene, I'm still tired and grumpy and guiltily aware that if I just hauled myself off to bed after dinner (instead of, say, after writing and rewriting a blog post) I'd solve much of my problem.

One day last week I was especially exhausted, and started yelling and stomping around over several unrelated annoyances at once -- le Petit's recalcitrance on something or other, a package that arrived damaged in the mail, the Legos strewn about my living room floor. When I finally managed to regain my composure, I apologized to le Petit.

"I'm sorry I yelled. Mommy's just frustated. Everybody gets frustrated sometimes."

Le Petit accepted this, reflecting on it for a moment.

Then today, I put Mademoiselle down on her play mat on the floor of the living room while I started throwing dinner together. Eventually she flipped herself onto her belly and started to fuss, and as whenever we don't pay her proper attention, attempted to scoot off and take her business elsewhere. Failing, she began to cry in earnest.

"I'll be right there!" I called from the kitchen. She hears me say this at least fifteen times a day, and I suspect that her received language comprehension has caught up to the point that she now understands that it means "That's it, Mom's abandoned me for longer than my undeveloped short-term memory capacity." When I finally did poke my head in, I saw le Petit lying on his belly next to her, his arm wrapped protectively around her back.

"It's okay," he said reassuringly, "You're just frustrated. Everybody gets frustrated sometimes."

A la mode

2011-04-27T23:21:00.002+02:00

France has been enjoying weeks of unseasonably warm weather. Our recent trip to La Rochelle and the Tarn was an illicit April glimpse of summer vacation. The karma will probably swing back and it will rain all August just like it did in 2007, but I don't care at the moment.

And le Petit discovered ice cream.

It's not as if we'd been trying to keep it from him all these years. I'd offered it to him plenty of times, even the deluxe stuff from Berthillon, but he regarded it suspiciously as if it were steamed broccoli and refused to try so much as a spoonful. In one memorable parenting moment in the summer of 2009, he even threw a fit in a crêperie when we dared to order him a sundae from the dessert menu.

Strange, yes, but I made peace with it. I decided it just meant more dessert for me, and was that such a bad thing?

Then my in-laws offered to take us to a trendy ice cream shop on our visit to Ile de Ré, an island across from La Rochelle, midway down France's Atlantic coast. It is the French equivalent of Martha's Vineyard, with cute million-Euro cottages, expensive boutiques, calm beaches, salt marshes and kilometers of bike trails. In May, hollyhocks bloom along every whitewashed village wall, and from Easter vacation through September, the tourists line up to eat real ice cream at the port in Saint-Martin.

"I don't want ice cream," le Petit whined. And in impeccable three-year-old logic, if he doesn't want it, no one else should want it either. So I tried to change his mind.

"But they have ice cream cones, just like in your book."

"Ice cream... in a cone?" Le Petit was suddenly intrigued. His favorite book right now is a German picture book with detailed scenes of a village in the summer. There's an ice cream vendor, and children and even a dog are enjoying ice cream cones. So although ice cream was out, an ice cream cone was a whole other matter. Once at the counter, he informed Grandma that he wanted raspberry ice cream because it was pink, his favorite color. He then ate his cone with great concentration and without allowing himself to be distracted, like a Michelin reviewer at a starred restaurant. And he loved it. Three stars for sure. The next day, when we drove back to Ile de Ré, he started asking for another ice cream cone at ten o'clock in the morning, though he had to wait more or less patiently until after lunch.

A week later, my husband and the kids and I were in Puycelsi, a fortified medieval village in the Tarn near Gaillac, in southwestern France. We fell in love with Puycelsi, with its lovingly restored houses perched on a hill with a sweeping view of forest, field and vines. I'll admit it's perhaps just a tad over-restored, with expensive cars with foreign plates parked all about, but it would be hypocritical of me to care too much: I'd be that rich expat, if I only had the means. My husband and I fell in love with the biscuiterie on the main square that made spiced butter cookies, apple cakes and fresh bread. To keep le Petit happy during our slow stroll through the streets, we promised him an ice cream cone. But when we finally got back to the café that advertised ice cream, we discovered it was closed.

The owner was out front doing work on his patio, and when he saw le Petit's face fall at the news he'd have no ice cream that day despite Daddy's solemn promise, he stopped and offered to go in and put an ice cream cone together after all. I was almost more giddy than le Petit was, for there's nothing better than seeing the world turn unexpectedly magic for your child. The raspberry sorbet was made on a local farm, and though I didn't get a bite, it looked delicious.

A few days later we were back in La Rochelle. We couldn't walk past the ice cream shop in the center of town on our way to the port without demands for more pink ice cream. Grandma obligingly bought a pint to take back to the apartment, and even bought a cone to go with it. Le Petit insisted on eating the ice cream before his dinner--his "growing food," in the family parlance--and I was too tired and lazy and amused to fight it.

"Mommy, is ice cream growing food?" Grandpa had helpfully suggested that it was, but le Petit, covered with pink sticky stains from cheek to cheek, wanted to double-check.

"Um, not really. But you know what? That's OK."

The next day, once we decided we'd go back to Ile de Ré, le Petit was determined to get yet more ice cream. It was Easter Sunday, and the lines at the ice cream vendor were even longer than before. Le Petit hugged my leg as we waited our turn.

"I want the green one, Mommy," he said, pointing at the pistachio bin in the freezer case. My mother-in-law was skeptical, knowing le Petit's infamous reluctance for novelty.

"Plutôt framboise, non?" she asked, urging raspberry.

"Oui, framboise!" he answered with enthusiasm. But once he got his cone he burst into tears because he'd wanted raspberry and pistachio, and the world was suddenly entirely unjust. Luckily I had a second scoop of pistachio on my cone, and I quickly spooned it onto le Petit's. Tantrum averted. We all licked and munched pensively, and when le Petit's cone was all gone, he tugged on my arm.

"Next time we'll get red and green ice cream," he said resolutely.

Then he tugged again a minute later.

"Mommy, I want another ice cream cone!"

"No, hon," I laughed, "You only get one."

"But I want another!"

We walked slowly around the port.

"You know, you can't have too many ice cream cones at once. If you do, you'll get sick."

"But I want to get sick!"

A few rogue clouds were slinking across the sky plotting showers, but the sun was magically bright in the late afternoon. Le Petit kept repeating his request.

"You know, ice cream is 'sometimes food,'" I said finally with my best wise parent impersonation.

"But Mommy, I want 'sometimes food' all the time!"

And I thought, I just want to hold hands with my kid and walk along slowly having these illogical conversations, ice cream optional. And although le Petit kept on asking for ice cream, he didn't seem too unhappy just talking, either.

The cloud just above us started leaking sparse, heavy drops onto our heads, but no one seemed to care.

Do the locomotion

2011-04-11T22:04:00.005+02:00

Let it be known for posterity that on Friday, April 8th, 2011, Mademoiselle flipped over from her back to her tummy.

We'd been waiting for this for a long time. She'd almost make it over, and then foiled one too many times by that pesky arm, she would seem to give up to work on other things, like grasping objects and directing them to her mouth. But flipping over was still on her to-do list, and like that final annoying item you only attack when you have no further excuse to avoid it, she'd redouble her efforts when she was already tired, annoyed, and frustrated. Inevitably she'd end up shrieking and crying.

I couldn't quite understand her motivation, to be honest. If I were her, I'd be resting on my laurels in my comfy baby chair, content to smile at people and gum soft plastic objects. But I always did want children with more ambition than I have.

On Friday afternoon, I was trying to get both kids out of the door, le Petit to my mother-in-law's, and Mademoiselle with me to her monthly pediatrician's appointment. I put Mademoiselle down in her bed to assemble the ten trillion items that accompany such expeditions: diaper bag, change of clothes, checkbook, health record book, vaccines, le Petit's helmet and scooter. Most likely le Petit's inability--err--refusal to put on his own shoes slowed us down further. (I'm thinking of you with pity, all you second-born children, cursed to wait while your older siblings dawdle.) My mother-in-law kept checking on Mademoiselle, and when she started to cry, told me not to worry, just let her fuss a little bit. When we finally got back to her, O my patient youngest child, she was on her tummy in her crib, with back arched, arms bent to each side, and head raised high in startled indignation.

We cheered. And picked her up and righted her, promptly. The pediatrician was duly impressed and told me this is usually a five or six month milestone. That's my girl. Of course, it wreaked havoc on her naps and she woke up three times last night, but it's hard to live in proximity to genius.

She seemed to spend all weekend and all day today working on this newly acquired skill. When I went to look for a diaper and left her for a moment in her crib, she flipped over and scooted herself a full foot down to the far end as if she were in combat training. An early crawler, perhaps? A new recruit for the French foreign legion?

On Sunday, we took the family to the Parc de Sceaux for an afternoon stroll. In a calculus I can't entirely explain, the gardens, the canal, the fountains, the immense lawns and the shaded forest paths of this park add up to magic for me more than another other. It isn't Versailles; it isn't even Vaux le Vicomte, and to the best of my knowledge, it was never the object of particular intrigue or envy. Just another French-style park and garden, rescued from the Revolution and now invaded by the third estate and company on weekends. Located not far from working-class Parisian suburbs, it is packed with people of all ages and backgrounds. There are joggers, picnickers, young couples arms in arm, and children positively everywhere. The first time we discovered it was early March 2010 when the weather was unseasonably cold, and as we walked up the grassy hill to the chateau I felt like a pathetically inadequate parent, since le Petit couldn't possibly be dressed warmly enough. The winter sun still seemed to make everything sparkle. We went back in May for a picnic under the cherry blossoms, and just barely missed a sudden rain shower.

This Sunday, in the midst of the summery April that has hit Paris this year, the park was filled with people like I'd never seen it before. Unlike most Parisian parks, however, the crowds weren't oppressive, just festive. Or maybe it was my mood. There were new spring-green leaves under a sun worthy of July. My husband carried Mademoiselle in the Bjorn, facing out, taking it all in. I planned to chase le Petit but ended up instead cajoling him into walking as best I could by scolding, pleading, inventing games, and instructing my husband to play hide-and-seek behind trees. Halfway around the canal, I started getting seriously frustrated with his stubbornness -- he wanted to go his way to the fountain, not ours, which I eventually accepted if he would just start walking at a reasonable pace already -- I realized that we'd expected him to walk six or seven kilometers. That's a long way for such a little guy, and he was doing pretty well!

(The next time you happen to be wandering greater Paris and you see two parents, one of them carrying a baby, walking diagonally while linked together by sticks held by a three year old with the mother making "choo choo" noises and pretending to be a train, that's probably us. If you can picture that at all, that is.)

I'm like Mademoiselle flipping over and scooting her way to the end of the bed with this post: I don't have any idea where I'm going, but I keep moving.

My husband is in Germany on a business trip this week, and I feel like super mom because I managed to get both kids fed, bathed, and asleep in bed all by myself tonight, with minimal crying from Mademoiselle (that's life as a second-born) and no crying from le Petit, or even myself. Yay! Tomorrow my feat will be to pack up the family for our first vacation. It may sound small, but we take more stuff on vacation that Napoleon when he invaded Russia (though hopefully with greater success). On Wednesday, my in-laws are taking me and the kids to La Rochelle for three days of fresh salt air and -- hear my plea, Météo France -- sun. My husband will meet us at the end of the week and we'll head off for the Tarn where I will discover a new corner of France's southwest.

And with a little luck, my driving school should be calling me to schedule an April or May date to finally take the driver's license exam.

We're moving here, I'm telling ya.

[Brief note: y'all know I love reading your comments, right? Even if I rarely have the wherewithal to write a comment back, because either my brain is fried from lack of sleep or the computer has been requisitioned by Elmo. So please, keep commenting, because reading what you have to say makes my day!]

Because how can I sleep, Mom, when I've just found my own feet?

2011-04-07T22:49:00.007+02:00

Sleep has been kind of touch and go here at chez parisienne. The kids are happy enough to sleep, but on their own terms.

This weekend we went to Troyes, our first trip as a family of four. Or make that seven, for we joined my mother- and father-in-law and my husband's aunt. As my husband rightly predicted, it was just the adult/child ratio I needed, recovering as I was from some the same flu-like crud that le Petit brought home from school last week. (For the record, when he told me that his tummy felt "funny" and his throat hurt, it turned out to be a very apt description.)

We'd planned to sleep upstairs in the two attic bedrooms, with le Petit in one of the very same cozy twin beds my husband had slept in as a child, my husband and me in a double bed under the eaves, and Mademoiselle in a pack-n-play. Le Petit, who is always skeptical of novelty, was game at first, then for some reason that was never elucidated but must've been blindingly rational to a three-year-old, he changed his mind. Right before bedtime.

We, of course, decided to make it into a You-Have-To-Because-We're-The-Parents teachable moment that lasted a total of two hours. We tried bad cop/good cop, then switched roles as we got nowhere and frustrated. As I was nursing Mademoiselle to sleep, I heard my husband speaking remarkably calmly with le Petit, trying and failing to find out just what the heck the problem was.

"Why don't you want to sleep here? Are you afraid of something?"

"Yes. The light in the stairway."

"OK, I'll hide that. Anything else?"

"Yes, that." Le Petit was apparently pointing at something on the wall.

I listened as my husband fixed up the room taking all the pictures off the wall, methodically hiding objects and turning frames around per le Petit's instructions. I alternately thought "I could handle this so much better" and "better him than me." I knew I should and later would find this oh-so-amusing. I also suspected there was something we were supposed to be learning here, some new parenting skill that we couldn't acquire any other way. Trial by caprice.

The two solutions we offered -- either sleep with Mommy, Daddy and Mademoiselle upstairs, or sleep on a mattress on the floor next to Grandma and Grandpa's bed downstairs -- were entirely unacceptable. Le Petit was so tired he could barely keep his eyes open, but he kept whining the good whine, fighting for his cause. "Tout le monde en BAS," he insisted, then repeated, "Everyone DOWNstairs," in English, for good measure. Meanwhile, Mademoiselle woke up.

That was when we realized we'd lost, and we moved the entire family downstairs. My father-in-law carefully negotiated the narrow stairs with one of the twin mattresses as my mother-in-law graciously changed everyone's sheets, and neither complained of their exile to the attic. Le Petit was soon snoring like a freight train in the middle of the floor, where I had to grumpily tiptoe around him after nursing Mademoiselle down for the second and then the third and last time that night.

Sometimes you've gotta give in, I guess. Lesson learned: better to do it earlier, before you feel like a complete idiot and before an excellent pot-au-feu is cold.

Troyes was otherwise fantastic, and just the break I needed. Mademoiselle was wide-eyed with surprise most of the time as if we'd taken her to another planet. For a baby born in the dead of winter, a warm afternoon spent in a garden watching nodding yellow and red tulip blooms can be a bit overwhelming, I suppose. She wasn't sure what she thought of the pack-n-play and napped only reluctantly. Meanwhile, le Petit ran around the garden with the watering can, enthusiastically dousing plants. He was overjoyed when he figured out how to turn on the outdoor faucet and flood the path to the front door. He planted carrots and peas with preschool-sized handfuls, and when we tried to show him how to sow in lines he formed precise mounds of seeds instead.

Now, back in Paris, poor Mademoiselle still can't always nap, since yesterday I made the mistake of having a cup of real coffee in the morning. I'd been suspecting the caffeine hypothesis I'd made back in December was just superstition, and got the bright idea to test it. On a Wednesday, when le Petit was home all day from school, as I'd later regret. As a result, Mademoiselle didn't nap from 10:30 in the morning until four o'clock in the afternoon, and I guiltily put the whole family in front of the television to zone out to BBC nature DVDs. This morning, under what was perhaps still the lingering effects of her unwitting café au lait binge, Mademoiselle was up for the day at five-thirty in the morning.

Or maybe it's all just foot-related excitement. Mademoiselle, now allowed to be barefoot regularly for the first time in her life thanks to the balmy spring weather, has found her feet. She can grab them! And feel the toes! And they seem to be attached, which makes them so much more convenient than all those other toys that keep disappearing mysteriously! And whenever she grabs them, there's Mommy cooing and cheering and taking pictures. What could be more exciting than that?

I'm sure that if I were in her bare feet, I would hardly be able to sleep, either.

Because you've got to be tough to bake real bread

2011-04-01T22:42:00.005+02:00

When I dropped into the local bakery this evening to buy a loaf of bread the baker himself was at the counter instead of one of his cashier assistants. I've noticed the guy before when he occasionally stopped to serve customers between shoving clattering baking sheets in and out the oven, and remarked how ill he fits the American stereotype of a French baker. Young, muscled, and with two bare arms covered with elaborate tatoos, I think he'd look more at home as a drummer in a rock band.

Tonight, as he politely wished Mademoiselle and me bonsoir and served us our baguette, my eyes wandered to patterns decorating his forearms. He had Chinese characters on one, what looked like geometric forms on another, and across the back of one hand the letters P-A-I-N.

So I left wondering: is this an English word, a badass emblem of his toughness?

Or is it French pain, a homage to his calling?

The French take their bread seriously enough that the second possibility just might be the case, but I doubt I'll have the nerve to ask next time and find out.

Nighttime in the City of Lights

2011-03-28T23:20:00.003+02:00

Damn you, time change! Europe "sprung forward" yesterday morning, and my exhausted but no longer feverish child needed to go to bed as early as possible this evening, but refused to because it was still light outside.

"Je ne veux pas dormir! Je ne veux pas qu'il fait jour!" he repeated over and over, angrily and grammatically incorrectly. My husband and I were both too weary to correct his non-use of the subjunctive. First he refused to take a bath, then he compromised and insisted that Mommy do the bath. Then, once Daddy was kicked out of the bathroom, he started his tantrum over again in English.

"I don't want to sleep! I want to wait for night!"

I patiently pushed the bedtime routine along as best I could, thanking the heavens for our roll-down shutters.

(Reason number 37 I'm happy I live in France: light-blocking shutters are nearly universal.)

He was in his pajamas and we'd almost cleared the final hurdle when I made the mistake of suggesting a particular book for his bedtime story.

"Do you want to read the nighttime book tonight?" I asked, pointing to a detailed picture book of a neighborhood at night. The whining started back up immediately.

Damn. Foiled again.

I ignored it, he finally settled for Hop on Pop, we snuggled in and ten minutes later, he was sound asleep.

Still not the "spring fever" I had in mind

2011-03-25T21:32:00.004+01:00

It looks like le Petit won't be able to participate in his nursery school's Carnival celebration tomorrow. I could probably dope him with ibuprofen and he'd be energetic enough to go, but then I'd be one of those parents who send their kids out to infect all the others. Even if this flu or flu-like virus most likely came home from school originally, I feel no need to send it back. I think I'm more disappointed than le Petit is. I was seriously looking forward to seeing him parade through the neighborhood with his classmates disguised in his school-made wolf costume.

For the last three days, he's been grounded by a moderate to high fever, exhausted enough to spontaneously turn off computer and abandon sesamestreet.org to curl up on the couch. For the first four hours after he's taken fever-reducing medication he's almost himself, and then he crashes as if at the end of a very bad trip, ornery and utterly worn out. I do my best to help him through the next two hours, rubbing his back and snuggling up and offering sips of water.

My father-and-law and I took him to the pediatrician today. I carried him the four blocks to the office because he wanted Mommy as his only mode of transportation, only Mommy, not Grandpa and not the stroller. ("I'm too big for the stroller!" he now asserts proudly.) The pediatrician told us essentially what our GP told us three days ago: flu-like, not worrisome as of yet, nothing to do but wait it out.

He's barely eaten in the last three days. I offer the most tempting treats I can think of, pudding, chocolate, cookies, at all hours of the day with no success. I'm not too worried. The pediatrician was even less worried. Then, when we got back home, le Petit started attentively paging through his book of rainbow-colored fruits and vegetables.

He looked at the picture of the spinach.

"I want risotto," he declared. Spinach and risotto are associated in his mind and he expects them together, even if at his healthiest he barely picks at the green stuff. It was four o'clock in the afternoon, but I'd been so busy taking care of the kids all day, even with plenty of help from my mother-in-law, that I hadn't had lunch. Le Petit shepherded me to the kitchen.

"Let's make risotto! But first," he told me in a serious tone, "We have to wash our hands."

"Do you want pretend risotto or real risotto?"

"Real risotto!"

And so he watched intently from his little step stool as I prepared a simple risotto. He then ate a decent portion of it along with a bowl of gazpacho (and spread another decent portion of rice on the floor). "Healthy and delicious!" he declared, and I was flattered, even if I knew he was merely quoting a piece of Sesame Street social engineering. I enjoyed the risotto, too. Proof that you can pull a small victory out of even the hardest days.

Spring days

2011-03-24T21:35:00.005+01:00

Spring arrived in Paris this week, complete with daffodils and cloudless skies. Parisiennes are shedding their winter coats and knee-high boots, and babies in strollers are the only ones on the street still bundled up. I'd be outside soaking it all up, generating a little vitamin D for myself and Mademoiselle, but, alas, I've been inside with le Petit, who's come down with the flu.

I'm not used to my go-go-go three-year-old to suddenly be spending his entire day on the couch, refusing to eat, drifting in and out of naps, his fever and his mood fluctuating with each dose of medication. I'm hoping he'll be himself again in time for his school's Carnival celebration on Saturday.

Meanwhile, Mademoiselle is thankfully very much herself, having so far avoided whatever bug has laid low her elder brother. She's wearing summer outfits in our sweltering apartment and finding ways to wiggle her feet out of her socks. We found her in her bed with one sock in her mouth.

Mademoiselle also seems to have decided that rolling onto her side is good enough for now, and is no longer working on rolling all the way to her belly. Which, given her tepid enthusiasm for tummy time, seemed like an odd goal anyway. As a mother, I can only applaud such precaution, and I'm hoping it lasts when, oh, I don't know, she starts driving a car or meeting boys. Right now she's more interested in her musical whale crib toy and her brand-new activity mat, which gives me plenty of time to psychologically prepare for whatever comes next.

The perils of bilingual tantrums

2011-03-16T11:45:00.001+01:00

The other day, as le Petit was crying and flailing about upset about something too boring to mention, a breakthrough occurred. He finally -- finally! -- told me how he was feeling. He used his words, and English words at that, instead of just screaming and crying.

Or so I thought.

"I'm very very 'ungry!" he told me.

"You're angry! That's right!" I said enthusiastically and I hoped empathetically, thrilled to be getting somewhere with all of my intuitive parenting techniques.

"No! No! I'm very very 'ungry!" he repeated.

"Yes. You're angry because Mommy told you [...], and you can't do [...] because [...]," I said calmly.

"No, not 'ungry! 'UNGRY! I'm very very 'ungry!"

Le Petit kept crying and at the same time seemed to almost sigh and shake his head at his mother's inability to understand something so simple.

Then it clicked.

"Oh... you're hungry!" I said, almost slapping my forehead, "You're very very hungry!" It was after all dinner time, but I still wondered where this had suddenly come from. One minute he was throwing a tantrum about [...] and the next he was demanding to eat, and his slight French accent with the dropped 'H' threw me off.

I mentioned it to my husband yesterday.

"[Le Petit] was telling me that he was angry..." I started to explain.

"...and he wanted to eat," my husband finished, laughing. He shrugged. "Moi, j'ai compris tout de suite." He understood right away.

It reminded me of an incident years ago when my husband and I stood in the kitchen, having what I thought was a deep conversation about our feelings.

"I'm very 'ungry," he confessed.

"You're angry? But why?" I asked, deeply concerned.

I eventually figured it out that time, too.

Growing up

2011-03-15T10:57:00.003+01:00

Mademoiselle has started singing.

The other morning, when she woke up at 6 a.m. and we grudgingly decided that we had to, too, my husband changed her diaper, set her back down in her crib, and she started crooning. It wasn't crying. It wasn't the sometimes plaintive "areughs" that we'd heard from her until now. It was a song, kind of like a cowboy ballad, an almost-melodious lament: The Ballad of the Lonely Baby.

I think she could land a recording contract, if she could only learn to play guitar.

Also new in her repertoire is improved grasping. She concentrates on hanging objects and, with studious effort, directs her hands to them, grabs, and pulls them toward her face. She can spend hours -- OK, minutes -- at a time working on this. The mobile above her car seat has her transfixed for most of a short car trip: the car turns, the mobile sways, and she bats at it with singular purpose.

I hesitate to call her toys "toys," since so much hard work clearly goes into manipulating them.

She's also trying hard to figure out flipping over to her belly. She arches her back, twists to her side, and tries to hoist herself over by pressing down on one foot. The pajama foot slips on the sheet and she slides back to prone position. She shows none of the frustration I'm sure I'd feel if I were her. I'm considering buying her little baby cleats so she can cheat a bit.

Of course, being a baby is all about frustration, and I must say, she's handling it with aplomb. I'm sure it gets a bit better every day as she slowly masters her movements, learns to communicate with us, and familiarizes herself with her new world. Sometimes, when she's crying and I can't do much to help, I hold her and tell her I understand.

"Yes, I know," I say gently, "It's hard being a baby. It's really hard."

But she's doing a very good job.

Gratitude, gratitude

2011-03-11T09:08:00.002+01:00

I'm feeling more grateful lately. Which given my propensity to whine and complain, may not be obvious to all observers. It has nothing to do with my new year's resolution, I'm afraid, for I'd forgotten about it until this morning. It has everything to do with my family: the kids who keep things just challenging enough for me to remember what's important, my husband who's always steadying me, my in-laws who back me up in the daily tasks that risk overwhelming me.

And yet. Can I complain just a little bit about the nights?

Mademoiselle came home from the hospital sleeping very well for a newborn. She's still sleeping very well -- for a newborn. But she's three months old now and selfish me, I was hoping for a little improvement. She wakes up once about four hours after she goes down for the night, then again two hours later, and then again an hour or two later (and again an hour later, if we're all still in bed). This makes three wake-ups in a night and no long period of sleep for me, unless I go to bed right when she does, something I'm grudgingly admitting I must do. The wake-ups are fairly short, but I often fall asleep with my back propped up against the pillows in my bed and Mademoiselle in my arms. I'll wake up an hour later and try to put Mademoiselle down in her crib which is next to our bed; she'll sometimes wake up, so it's lather-rinse-repeat until she settles down again. Then I throw the nursing pillow to the foot of bed, slide down into my pillows and, with a sigh, fall back asleep for some undetermined but brief period of time.

On the infrequent bad nights, which are usually a sign that Mademoiselle is coming down with a cold, she wakes up every hour and sometimes won't nurse back down at all. That happened earlier this week and although Mademoiselle is thankfully feeling better, my grumpiness is due to the resulting sleep deficit.

I was complaining about all this to my husband. He has plenty of sympathy, but he was reminding me that:

1) Le Petit didn't sleep this well until he was five or six months old. Not that we remember precisely.

2) Mademoiselle isn't awake for two to three hours at a stretch in the middle of the night like le Petit was during his infamous java du petit matin dance parties. (Just re-reading that post makes me feel better now.)

3) This time around he's never watched the sun come up, both despondent and relieved because at least the sleepless night was over, finally.

To which I'll add:

4) Mademoiselle can be transfered to her bed with ease, most of the time. Even when I fumble and her head hits the mattress with a gentle flop, or when she's fallen asleep on my lap on the couch and I have to get up and carry her from the living room to the bedroom.

5) Mademoiselle naps in her bed during the day. Not according to any reliable schedule as yet, but I often get at least one 45 minute nap and one two-hour nap.

6) I fall back asleep easily at night. Heck, I fall back asleep sitting up. My mother-in-law, whose second child slept like Mademoiselle through all of his first year, can't fall back asleep easily at all and still remembers the exhaustion thirty-some years later.

7) I have backup during the day. My mother-in-law was a stay-at-home mom with no local family and a husband who traveled for work. She used to try unsuccessfully to nap while her cheerfully-awake son jumped on the bed next to her or on top of her.

I feel the worst when I give in to common perceptions of how my baby should be sleeping. Half of the people on the street think that at three months a baby "should" be sleeping through the night or you're doing something wrong. (The other half of the people on the street have horror stories to share about how badly their children actually slept, but never mind.)

So, to finish this post, here are a few things I'm grateful for right now:

1) A husband who does the dishes and straightens the house while I'm nursing my baby to sleep. There's no sweeter sound than that of Legos being picked up off the living room floor.

2) A mother-in-law who comes over to look after the kids so I can run errands or nap, and who folds laundry and straightens the house to boot

3) Mademoiselle's healthy appetite, and the ease with which breastfeeding was established

4) Long-term parental leave. This should probably be first on my list.

5) Le Petit's remarkable acceptance of his baby sister (even though, yes, his "hugs" would sometimes look a bit like WWF wrestling if I didn't intervene)

6) Legos and the hours of relative calm that they provide

7) My kids, their hugs, their smiles

So there.

That felt good.

Lost in translation again

2011-03-09T19:03:00.003+01:00

Le Petit now speaks with me almost exclusively in English. He will do simultaneous translations when necessary -- for his grandparents, most of whom are only comfortable in one language, or even for my husband, who speaks English fluently.

Yesterday when le Petit and I were home together in the afternoon, we tried to go on sesamestreet.org. The site wasn't responding, and I saw a keyboard-smashing tantrum brewing (I can hardly blame him, since I'm guilty of such tantrums myself) so I tried to calmly explain the situation to him.

"Sesame Street is down, hon," I said sympathetically. "I wish I could fix it, but I can't." Then I blabbered some largely nonsensical explanation about how the computer that lives on Sesame Street was broken. None of this helped much, but what did help is when I thought fast and quickly Googled "Lego" to find new games to play on lego.com.

Last night at dinner, le Petit announced to my husband, "Aujourd'hui, Sesame Street était tout en bas!"

My husband looked at him oddly, and it took me a moment to parse the sentence and realize that he was translating "down" literally, saying "Today Sesame Street was all the way down below."

Logical. Cute. But in the interest of cross-cultural communication, I'll have to remember to never declare "It's raining cats and dogs" in front of him...

Good days

2011-03-09T18:51:00.003+01:00

As is often the case, when something feels especially difficult, it turns out to be the ideal opportunity to learn just what I needed to learn, just when I needed to learn it.

Yes, three and a half is hard. But Friday was a very good day. And so was Monday. And so was today. (Yesterday, Mademoiselle was sick with a cold and I was recovering from a night awake with her every hour, on the hour. The day went well all things considering, but it still doesn't count.)

I picked le Petit up from school late Friday morning and we walked back home at our usual snail's pace. I started off in a bad mood because le Petit had lost yet another one of his winter hats; a cashmere one, a gift from Grandma. In the middle of grumping at him, I realized that I was probably overdoing it. He was only, after all, three and a half.

My mother-in-law stayed to help me prepare lunch, then left the three of us alone for the remainder of the afternoon. Selfishly, I wasn't particularly looking forward to hours alone in the apartment with two kids. I like the peace and quiet I get when someone else is looking after le Petit and all I have to do is nurse Mademoiselle while sitting on the couch with a book or the computer. Yet I suspected that an afternoon together was just what le Petit and I needed.

First, I let le Petit spend an hour on sesamestreet.org. He's learned to use the mouse by himself, and I've learned to stop obsessing over too much screen time. I set the kitchen timer for an acceptable amount of computer time, then kept an eye and ear on le Petit while I did dishes and started to prepare lamb stew for dinner. Then, when the buzzer went off, I calmed down a very disappointed le Petit (and avoided a tantrum) by offering to make dessert with him. We made a raspberry tart. OK, I made most of a raspberry tart, while le Petit "reorganized" a kitchen cabinet full of jars and cans. We both had fun, and I was downright joyful at the end of the day.

On Monday afternoon, we spent some time on lego.com, then transitioned to playing with real, not virtual, Legos on the living room floor. We don't didn't do much, and I can't even remember most of the details, but it felt good to be together. Oh, and both winter hats were miraculously recovered at school that morning.

Today the living room floor is instead covered by a network of wooden trains. A tall Lego crane is standing ready to build a "tower" -- an upside-down wicker wastebasket. Le Petit and I spent the morning together today, before I took Mademoiselle off to a doctor's appointment in the early afternoon and left le Petit in the able care of Grandma. He's still at her place now. I'm enjoying the peace and quiet, especially since Mademoiselle is napping in the baby carrier, but...

I miss him.

(But no worries. He'll come bounding through the door any minute now. And we've got until September to learn from one another like this, daily.)

Pâtisserie: the revenge

2011-02-28T14:03:00.004+01:00

Two years ago, I confessed to a minor culinary disaster. For New Years 2009, I tried to bake a bûche de noël, and the results were, er, less than satisfactory.

I'm happy to say I've finally redeemed myself, thanks to some help and encouragement from my stepmom. We took a macaron-making class together on her recent visit to Paris, then employed our newly-learned professional pastry techniques to whip up a batch of almond macarons with lemon curd and chocolate-almond macarons with orange ganache filling. In my very own kitchen. I know, I'm still as shocked as you are.

Voilà the results of our efforts below.

(And they did taste as good as they look.)

Yes, I'd already taken a macaron-making class on my own, and no, I hadn't even begun to master the technique. My first attempt last spring produced mustard yellow, soft almond wafers that were entirely unlike macarons but which my husband cheerfully ate a few of to make me feel better ("They aren't macarons, but they're good anyway!" he helpfully offered). My mistake was to follow not the recipe given in class but a different one from one of my cookbooks (d'oh!), thus completely missing the proper technique to use with the egg whites.

As you may know, egg whites are crucial in macaron-making. Our teacher made us beat them by hand, which made it much easier to see their evolution, and also made the class somewhat of a workout, though nothing strenuous enough, alas, to compensate for the calories consumed afterward.

Now that the secret has been revealed, I can indulge my macaron lust without spending a fortune at Ladurée. This may or may not turn out to be a good thing. Luckily, the recipe is as complicated and time-consuming as my free time is scare, so I am still not likely to overindulge.

I left the macarons that we brought back from the class on the dining table overnight, where le Petit found them the next morning. He ran up to me, crumbs ringing his mouth, as I was brushing my teeth. "I like macarons a little," he informed me, "But not too much."

He then gave me the other crushed half of his half-eaten macaron. I didn't take it personally, since after all, this is the kid who still won't eat ice cream -- not even ice cream from Berthillon on Paris' Ile Saint Louis, which is as far as I'm concerned the best ice cream on the planet. A few days later, he had changed he tune, and deftly applied his preschool persuasion skills to wrest the final chocolate macaron from me.

He looked at me, looked at the macaron, said "No, mine!" and like any good mother, I gave in and gave it to him immediately. With a pleased, indulgent smile, of course.

Oh, three and a half

2011-02-26T17:53:00.003+01:00

Le Petit is suddenly, irritatingly three and a half.

He's got a textbook case of the age, just as the weary moms who've gone before me have described. He's testing limits, pushing buttons, making loud noises. He's implementing a demonic strategy to undermine my housekeeping, grind the daily schedule to a halt, and drive both of his parents to distraction.

It's cleverly simple, involving just three principles:

1) If you can do it by yourself, refuse.

2) If you can't do it by yourself, insist.

3) If you know you're not supposed to do it, do it anyway.

Principle Number One leads me to ask him, five, six, seven times, to put on his shoes, eight, nine, ten times a day.

I say something like, "We're going to leave the house. Soon. Now. Don't you want to go to the store/park/Louvre/Versailles/Grandma's house? You do? Then shoes. [Le Petit], YOUR SHOES!"

Then, inevitably, I put his shoes on for him.

However, when someone is about to leave the house solo on some time-critical mission -- say, my husband is going to the basement for a bottle of wine to serve with dinner, or heading out to get bread before the bakery closes -- le Petit desperately wants to come along. On those occasions he rapidly crams his feet into his shoes himself, closes the velcro, and in ten seconds is ready to go.

Now, Principle Number Two has me biting my tongue, trying encourage self-sufficiency without losing my mind.

Sometimes, le Petit knows how to do something, but decides to improvise in fun ways. I try, for example, to limit collateral damage to my bathroom from I-can-do-it-all-by-myself hand washing. Le Petit knows how to turn on the water, soap up his hands, turn off the water, and dry off with a towel, but sometimes that script is too boring, and that's when he starts by locking himself in the bathroom, then proceeds to finger paint the mirror with wet hands. (I keep a screwdriver handy so I can quickly unlock the door from the outside.)

Sometimes, he doesn't yet have the knowledge, practice, coordination or physical strength to do something, and doing it himself becomes all the more urgent. Take pouring a glass of water from a nice, full plastic bottle.

Sigh.

Principle Number Three is the worst at the moment. That's how he'll finally succeed in undermining my sanity once and for all. The other day he disappeared into the kitchen with a crayon, then came looking for me afterward with an mischievous smile.

"Viens voir ce que j'ai fait, maman." Come see what I did! He proudly showed me where he'd scribbled all over one of the cabinets. I told him calmly that we didn't do that, that he knew that we didn't do that (as obviously he did), and then shrugged and handed him a sponge to clean up.

I feel like this behavior never stops. When I ask him to be quiet, he does everything to be louder; when I ask him to eat with a spoon, he shovels his food in his mouth with both hands. I know what he primarily wants is a reaction, so I try to make mine as firm and as boring as possible. I rely heavily on natural consequences when appropriate, taking things away that are misused, or involving him in clean up, if only symbolically. I also try to explain why something isn't possible. Against all expectations, that often works the best.

The other night, le Petit was making a break for the front door, which we'd forgotten to lock. I was trying to hold it shut, telling him that it wasn't time to go outside, that it was bedtime, that there was NO WAY I would let him out the door. He was having none of it, and was about to launch himself into a tantrum. Then I had an idea. I calmly mentioned the two kids that live down the hall, and told le Petit that they were probably sleeping and that we wouldn't want to wake them up. To my surprise, le Petit accepted that, and the story was over.

I don't know how well I'm dealing with all this. Before, le Petit often frustrated me, but it rarely felt intentional, so I was able perhaps a bit better to take it in stride. Now I know this is all age-appropriate limit testing -- not his fault, in the great scheme of things -- but man, it's wearing me down.

Any other stories of three-and-a-half? Commiseration, perhaps?

Grandpa and Gramby

2011-02-22T23:01:00.005+01:00

Le Petit and I were in the midst of a power struggle over hand-washing the other day when Grandpa walked in the door. Suddenly the squirmy, recalcitrant three-year-old was all sunny and eager-to-please. The metamorphosis was startling and immediate, and a moment later the hands were clean as well.

My father and stepmother were visiting from Seattle, and for five days le Petit got a daily dose of Grandpa and Gramby. It was like a boost of healthy vitamins for him, or better yet a special dessert, like the cake you only get once a year on your birthday. Le Petit was beside himself with excitement. There were new toys, and new books to read, and two new voices to read them out loud. Best of all, there were two new laps to sit in.

Of course in no time at all he expected them both to be at his beck and call and often they obliged. They take their job as grandparents very seriously. Le Petit got "surprise plates" at lunch with his favorite foods sliced into bite-sized cubes courtesy of Gramby. He sang songs with Grandpa -- often the same song, over and over again -- and was accompanied to the park, to the merry-go-round, to the square with his scooter.

"It's not square!" he informed us. "It's a circle!"

Because, sure enough, his English blossomed during the visit, enough to pick up new ambiguities in his "mother" tongue. He was right, I replied; the nearby square *is* round.

He quietly recited his new Dr. Seuss books to himself and I listened in, amused and encouraged. Then tonight, Grandpa and Gramby's last night in town, he ran around the house madly (preschoolers, like cats, have an early-evening 'witching hour') singing an approximation of 'America the Beautiful.' He's an American after all, thanks in large part to an American family who loves him and won't let him forget it.

Le Petit learned, too, that family from any corner of the globe will accept you as you are. Once their novelty wore off somewhat, he treated Grandpa and Gramby to plenty of his signature three-year-old stubbornness. He even threw his first-ever tantrum in English, screaming repeatedly "I want my hat!" -- his winter hat, scandalously left at home on a table -- on the sidewalk outside the apartment and refusing to go hatless one block to the nearby pharmacy. Grandpa took him inside to get the hat, then calmly escorted him back to meet me and Mademoiselle at the pharmacy. Grandparent patience often magically kicks in when parental patience is wearing dangerously thin.

Meanwhile, during the visit, Mademoiselle was serenely observing these two intriguing people. She seemed to know already, instinctively, that they love her immensely. For five days there were extra arms to hold her and two new faces to smile at, with voices attached that sounded a lot like Mommy's. She took this all in calmly as another reassuring truth in her new world.

I, in the middle of the whirlwind of life with two small kids, was grateful for an anchor, a steadying presence, and a reminder of where I come from. I was also grateful for ready help with the dishes and the ever-accumulating laundry. Perhaps best of all, I didn't feel like I had to act perfect, or be anything other than a mom winging it in the middle of everyday, comfortable chaos. To me, a recovering childhood perfectionist, this was a gift.

I cried when they left. I held Mademoiselle on my shoulder as I hugged them both goodbye, and wondered if she or le Petit would notice the sadness in my voice or the tears on my cheeks. That's OK, I decided: they'd simply learn that sometimes the best visits end in (joyful) tears.

I guess he won't be a shopkeeper when he grows up

2011-02-15T17:51:00.004+01:00

Since I've been on maternity leave and le Petit has been spending so much time at home with me in the afternoons, his spoken English has taken off. (Or perhaps it's since he's been spending so much time playing games on sesamestreet.org. I should share some of the credit with Abby and Elmo.) He's always understood my English perfectly, but all of a sudden the child who used to respond to me exclusively in French is instead stopping, thinking, and putting together full sentences in English. I can almost see the wheels turning as he picks words from what I just said and combines them with the vocabulary he already has. Sometimes he has trouble with the syntax -- he tries to use "not" as a grammatical replacement for "pas", which makes for some oddly structured sentences -- but it is finally falling into place.

Just in time for my father and stepmother to visit!

His imaginative play is also taking off. Yesterday le Petit wanted to play "market" with me. He set up a stand that reminded him of the local weekend open-air marché, arranging plastic cups full of musical instruments, disassembled Legos, wooden fruit, plastic eggs, and other miscellaneous toys. I gave him some small paper vegetable bags and came by with a shopping basket.

"Bonjour, I'd like three apples," I asked politely.

"No, I'm not ready!" le Petit answered curtly.

I looked over the Legos, asked him what they were, waited a bit, then tried again to buy something. He refused. I tried again. No luck.

"Well, in that case, I'll take my business elsewhere," I said, and went off to do the dishes.

Le Petit loved this. He made me repeat my sentence three or four times.

He wanted to play "market" again with me today, so I waited for him to set up the stand again and find me a basket. Then I tried in vain to buy something.

"Six eggs, please."

"No."

"OK. How about three eggs, then?"

"No. No. You take your business elsewhere!" insisted le Petit, with the most charming preschool French accent. He even showed me where 'elsewhere' was by taking my hand and leading me into another room. Is he, for fun, just modeling the worst (and now rarest) kind of Parisian customer service? If so, at least he's doing it in a language most tourists will understand.

Plays well with others

2011-02-14T15:38:00.000+01:00

Le Petit just got his first report card.

It wasn't a real report card, of course -- after all, he's only three, and while the Education nationale takes its job quite seriously, they don't exaggerate. It was simply a list of social, intellectual and artistic skills that le Petit is expected to learn within the year, with a letter code indicating if each skill is acquired, in the process of acquisition, or (presumably) nowhere near the mark. Le Petit's teacher only used the first two letter codes, and left other skills blank; it appears that many are not slated until the second half of the school year.

I read it with great interest, looking for the proof every mother craves that the greater world appreciates my child as much as I do. Most skills were marked "acquired." That's my boy, I thought to myself. It turns out there are things he can do at school, like draw a circle, that I've never seen him do at home. It also appears that the outgoing, outspoken le Petit that I know and love is timid and reserved at school: his self-expression is "in process." I'd already heard this from the teacher, so it wasn't a complete surprise, but I was a little concerned to read that the skill "playing with others" is also "in process."

My worried mother mind jumped straight to the worst conclusions: does he have friends? Is he alone at recess? Do the other kids shun him? It doesn't help that I was a misfit from nursery school on, the kind of kid that naturally got bullied and excluded, and I don't want my children to experience the pain that I did.

So the other night at dinner, my husband and I gently questioned le Petit to learn more about the école maternelle social scene. It went about as well as any interrogation of a preschooler, and his responses were less than illuminating. We eventually went through the entire list of boys in his class (the school notebook with pictures and first names just came home and facilitated the task) and tried to figure out who he was friends with.

"Is E your friend?"

"No, E is not my copain any more."

"Why not?"

"He fights at recess."

"Is A your friend?"

"No, A is not my copain any more."

"Why not?"

"He hits other kids."

His response was the more or less the same for nearly every boy in his class. "Whoa, I guess it's a jungle out there," I said to my husband, under my breath.

Eventually he identified two boys as friends, although what that meant wasn't clear. Did they play ball together at recess? my husband asked hopefully, and got no intelligible answer. (Future Supreme Court nominees take note, for adopting a preschool response style may be the easiest way to make it through Senate confirmation.)

"Do you like school? Are you happy?" we ultimately asked.

"Oui," le Petit stated simply.

"What's the best thing about it?"

Le Petit thought for a moment.

"Painting."

We noticed that a book entitled "Je ne suis plus ton copain" (I am no longer your friend) is on the reading list for this semester. I wonder if it isn't the latest catch phrase in le Petit's class.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure that I play so well with others, either. I'm timid and nervous with new acquaintances, and I have never managed to surround myself with a tribe of friends. I guess at age 34 it's still a skill "in progress" for me, too.

Smile, baby, smile

2011-02-13T00:16:00.003+01:00

With Mademoiselle, I feel a serenity I didn't feel when le Petit was tiny.

Le Petit and I were and are still all Lewis and Clark. We're setting out in unexplored territory together, searching for mountain passes, paddling rivers upstream, carrying our boat around unexpected rapids. We have no map but the one we're hastily sketching. At our worst, we're bickering over the direction to take; at our best, the adventure and newness of it all bonds us.

With Mademoiselle, I feel that instead of heading out into the wilderness, I'm starting out on a stroll down a well-trodden path in a park, and we're walking together in step in the same direction.

According to a colleague of mine, the late famous pediatrician and author Françoise Dolto, who transformed French childrearing (kind of the French Brazelton; the first to say, "Gee, children are individuals, too"), your firstborn is your brouillon, your "scratch" child. You will inevitably make mistakes that you'll iron out for subsequent children. I don't find this reassuring, perhaps because I'm an only child myself. Does the eldest always get such a raw deal?

I know that I wouldn't be as good a mother to Mademoiselle if le Petit hadn't taught me everything I know about babies. I also know he has suffered from my initial ignorance about everything from infant sleep to potty training to discipline. And yet, we're getting good at learning as we go along, or maybe just at faking it, and doubling back to correct things when we get too far off course. And at some point in the future, my experience with le Petit will lead to mistaken assumptions about Mademoiselle, for she's not the same child, and won't need exactly the same parenting. I'll face plant -- I'm getting used to it -- and pick myself up and try again. I'm learning the process as much as I'm finding any actual answers. And as my best friend says to me, in this parenting gig, we're not aiming for perfection, just a solid "B."

In the meantime, I'm loving the serenity, as long as it lasts. I know how to listen to babies now, even if Mademoiselle isn't the same baby le Petit was. I'm hoping that I'll keep listening adequately to le Petit as he grows, because that's the only way we'll keep finding our way.

(If I'm brave, I'll ask them both in 20 years how well they thought I did.)

* * *

Yesterday, Mademoiselle smiled at me for the first time. My mother-in-law's seen smiles for weeks, but while I'd seen beatific expressions of well-being, I'd seen nothing I could unquestionably qualify as a smile. I tried talking, and cooing, and singing, and stroking her arms and patting her belly on the changing table, but no smiles would come, and I was beginning to feel just a bit pathetic and unentertaining as a mother. Then yesterday Mademoiselle was sitting in her baby swing -- not even swinging, just chilling out -- and I was doing something at a nearby table, and I looked over and she was grinning ear to ear.

Her lips were together, the corners of her mouth turned up wide, and her eyes were sparkling. The smile flickered and disappeared, then came back a second time even stronger. I wish I thought I'd done something to incite it, but I'm afraid it was some sort of inside baby joke.

Or maybe she was looking at me and saying to herself, "Yeah, that's my mommy!"

I haven't seen it again since, and I must admit, I'm waiting for it impatiently. And still cooing, of course.

At sea

2011-02-07T18:21:00.002+01:00

Note: this story sounds, and certainly felt, dramatic. But everyone is fine. Mademoiselle is home from the hospital, and nothing turned out to be seriously wrong: just a cold plus a minor bacterial infection. I, however, am still recovering from the experience of having my littlest one hospitalized, and writing this will help me, I hope.

I felt the sensation of losing footing, of treading water with my head barely at the surface. I was in a hospital room like an aquarium, a row of windows into the nurses station, another large window to the gray, wintry outside. Mademoiselle was sleeping inclined in a smaller aquarium, a crib with clear plastic sides. I sat in a chair, shaking with fever, dull worry throbbing in my aching head.

It was Saturday afternoon, or Saturday morning, I was no longer sure. The only time that mattered was the time it would take for someone to come and give us news of the tests that had brought us there and to tell us something rational and reassuring, magic words to break the spell. Periods of intense activity -- like the blood tests that seemed to take hours -- punctuated long periods of nothing. Occasionally a nurse or assistant would knock softly at the door and come in to take Mademoiselle's temperature or check the beeping monitoring screen. We asked few questions and got fewer answers.

It started on Thursday, when Mademoiselle's cold had kept her awake and unhappy through most of the night. She only slept fitfully and in our arms, and had trouble nursing. She was running a slight fever. We called the hospital and our concerns were summarily dismissed. We eventually split the worst of the night in two: my husband held a sleeping Mademoiselle for the first part of the night while I slept in bed, then I held her in the wrap, alternately pacing around the room, staring at the computer or dozing upright on the couch until morning came. I had a driving session in the morning, and I'm still not sure how I managed to safely drive in circles around Paris with my mind numb from the night I'd spent.

Meanwhile, my husband and mother-in-law took Mademoiselle to see our family doctor. His verdict: a cold. The same one le Petit and I were suffering from, unsurprisingly. As long as Mademoiselle continued to nurse, her fever didn't climb too high, and no other symptoms appeared, we needn't worry. Sure enough, the day went well. Mademoiselle napped for much of it. We went to the pharmacy and bought what we needed to clean her nose.

I dreaded the night to come, however, because I was exhausted and sick myself, and worried that I could neither calm Mademoiselle nor think rationally if I had to. I asked my mother-in-law if she could stay with us to second my husband if things got rough. It was a good thing I did, for aches and a bout of nausea kept me in bed while Mademoiselle fussed and my husband and mother-in-law comforted her, paced, and fretted. I was suffering from pain and guilt (what a useless mother! Sleeping -- or trying to -- when her little one needs her!), but the pain won out. Mademoiselle's fever started to climb again. We called the hospital again and were temporarily reassured. But by early Saturday morning, long before dawn, we decided to go to the emergency room.

The emergency room was thankfully deserted and we were seen quickly, then transferred to the pediatric unit at the hospital a few blocks away, the same where I'd given birth just weeks ago. We declined an ambulance and my husband carried Mademoiselle in his arms. We were greeted and assigned to a room. More tests were carried out, and we explained our story to more people than I remember. Then we were left alone with the feeling of being lost at sea. I coughed into a surgical mask and sat and shivered in my winter coat.

At first, I was simply grateful that Mademoiselle was being taken care of, and that it was no longer just us and our uncertainty alone in the middle of the night. For some reason, I didn't doubt that she would be OK, not at first. Before long, however, the chief pediatrician came in, and in the speech he must give thousands of times about the difference between viral and bacterial infections and the particular risks associated with the latter in young infants, he mentioned meningitis. He used words that I never think about, much less know how to translate into English, to explain that they would be taking a sample for testing from Mademoiselle's spine. Tears welled up as panic hit me full on, and my husband's panic mirrored my own. I no longer ached, or shivered, or was even aware of myself or how I felt. Shortly we were sent downstairs. We couldn't stay for the procedure. We sat in a hallway near the delivery room and made frantic phone calls, then held each other and cried, and waited.

When we went back upstairs, the first thing we both heard and recognized was Mademoiselle's cry. When the nurses brought her back, she had a large, square bandage on her head covering a catheter for later IV treatment. She calmed down quickly enough and slept. We sat, and waited and watched, and made hushed phone calls to family and friends, and felt useless. At some point in the early evening, the news we'd been waiting for most desperately arrived: the meningitis test was negative. Whatever Mademoiselle was suffering from could presumably be treated, and the terror started to recede, at least for me. Night began to fall.

I remembered the Breton coast in the summer, standing on the top of rocky cliffs on a clear day and looking down at the waves crashing below, able to vaguely imagine what it must be like to be in the same place, in a boat, far down below and during a storm. We were safe, but what could be have been perilous was now all too real to me. So many parents face so much more terrifying realities, and they start in hospital rooms like the one where we'd anxiously waited that afternoon.

We took turns going home to eat and shower. The night staff arrived on their shift, and the new pediatrician explained that they would start an IV of antibiotics that night. There were no beds for parents, but we'd brought some old blankets and pillows and made a bed on the floor. From time to time, I started sobbing, feeling sick once again and useless and guilty. The children's nurse took me aside and told me that it wasn't my fault, that germs were everywhere, that this happened all the time and my little one was in good hands, and that I needed to rest and take care of myself if I wanted to be able to take care of her. I noticed that she and I both had the first name, which reassured me for some reason. She was serving as the my rational side when my own ability to reason had fled.

I wanted to stay awake and take care of Mademoiselle for the first part of the night and let my husband sleep, since he hadn't slept at all the night before, but when I picked up Mademoiselle my back hurt terribly. I fell asleep in the chair beside her bed and when I woke up my ribcage hurt with each breath. The night nurse overheard me complaining about the pain, and took my temperature and blood pressure. They could help me if I needed it, they insisted, and I started to realize that it would be critical for me to take care of myself, too. They gave me something for the pain, and I went to sleep on our makeshift bed, where my husband joined me as soon as Mademoiselle fell asleep. I was dimly aware of the night nurses coming in and out of the room, checking Mademoiselle's temperature, watching over us sleeping like businesslike guardian angels.

Another day passed in a daze, and the second night arrived, and I didn't dare go home for more than a shower lest Mademoiselle need me or my milk. It was Sunday, and I couldn't see a doctor anyway. Le Petit came down with a fever and woke up on Saturday night terrified that we weren't there, even though my in-laws were staying with him, so my husband and I decided that he should spend the night at home on Sunday. I worried. Would Mademoiselle sleep? I wasn't feeling much better, and I knew I had to rest. Mademoiselle's fever, however, had dropped and we were much less worried. There were still no explanations from the test results, but either the antibiotics were working or a viral infection was clearing on its own. Either way, we might be home in as soon as 24 hours.

On Monday, I saw my doctor, who ordered tests for me. I was afraid that whatever I had I could give to poor Mademoiselle if she didn't have it already. I trekked downstairs to the hospital lab and waited for over an hour for tests which should have been immediate, while my mother-in-law sat with Mademoiselle. I wanted to shout, "My child is hospitalized! She needs me!" but instead dully leafed through old magazines and tried not to cough. The results, when I got them hours later, indicated that I had a cold, not the flu, but accompanied by some sort of bacterial infection. It was probably a sinus infection, my doctor explained over the phone, but I should start antibiotics immediately and go in as soon as possible for a chest x-ray.

In the evening, we were transferred out of our fishbowl room and into a shared room. A family with an 18-month-old daughter politely greeted us and went about their business, speaking in hushed voices. The mother was seven months pregnant, and I was glad I was still assiduously wearing surgical masks and constantly washing my hands, since the last thing she needed was to get sick. I knew logically that we were transferred because Mademoiselle was doing better, but I irrationally feared being moved from the room where I'd started to feel safe. My husband brought me food and my antibiotics and helped me make a new bed on the floor. I nursed Mademoiselle to sleep and tried to sleep myself.

I was too hot, I was too cold, and the dreams I had that night were vivid and frightening. I dreamed at first that the new night nurse had told me something important but I couldn't remember it, and it seemed so real that I confusedly asked her about it when she came in to check on Mademoiselle in the wee hours. I then had a violent dream cut from Lord of the Flies, and when I woke up around five o'clock with aches and nausea it was almost a relief. The dream faded. The nausea continued. By seven, it was clear that I had to go home, and I called my husband to tell him as much. I called my doctor again, who speculated that I might be allergic to the antibiotics. When I stopped by his office an hour later to pick up a new prescription, it was clear instead that I had the stomach flu. He gave me another prescription to treat the nausea and other symptoms, and I went home to curl up in bed and sleep as best I could.

When I started to emerge from the fog late that afternoon -- it was a mercifully short-lived stomach flu -- I first disinfected everything I could in the entire house. Then, I pumped milk. Ever since I'd precipitously left the hospital that morning, Mademoiselle was for the first time in her life drinking formula, and by all reports was not liking it. I wanted her to have my antibodies, and was also afraid I'd lose my milk, so we rented an electric breast pump and I did my best to give her at least a little bit that could be taken over to the hospital. Le Petit spent the day with my in-laws, but was overjoyed to have me home that night. We were alone in the house on Tuesday night -- my husband stayed with Mademoiselle at the hospital -- and I felt oddly like we were alone in the world. We both slept long and well.

On Wednesday morning, we waited anxiously for news of whether we could take Mademoiselle home. I also went in for a chest x-ray and discovered that I had a lung infection, une infection du poumon. My doctor instructed me to continue the antibiotics and see him again in a week. Finally, Mademoiselle was released, and her mystery diagnosis revealed: a cold, with a bacterial sinus infection. The antibiotics she'd received at the hospital were enough for her to be declared fully healed. Le Petit and I would continue ours, since poor le Petit, not to be left out, got his first ear infection. I would continue wearing a surgical mask, just in case.

Now, almost a week later, I feel I'm finally recovered, physically and mentally. For the first few days, I cried without reason. We'd never lost sight of the shore, and yet it felt like we'd been so close to being lost at sea.

Belle

2011-01-28T10:45:00.000+01:00

"Elle est tellement mignonne," my father-in-law says of Mademoiselle, cooing over the tiny head that is visible in the baby carrier.

"Non," my mother-in-law corrects him, "Elle n'est pass mignonne. Elle est belle."

She's not cute, she insists. She's beautiful. I don't know whether to agree or not, for to me she's both, but I am warmed to see how passionately loved she is already.

My mother-in-law sees smiles that I still can't quite see. Mademoiselle's expression of well-being, when she's happy and comfy and steadily looking at another person in her world, comes close, but I'm not sure I really think it's a smile. She doesn't smile in her sleep, either, and I haven't seen the famous, vague "sourires aux anges," or "angel smiles" of newborns.

She's been here less than two months and I already have a hard time remembering life before. I think I'm not the only one.

First cold

2011-01-27T10:27:00.003+01:00

Is there anything more cute and at the same time more ominous than a baby sneeze?

Le Petit came home from school with another cold, and I saw it as my maternal duty to catch it before Mademoiselle did so that she could get the antibodies in my milk. Well, despite my best intentions (and probably because of my constant coughing), she's now got the antibodies AND the cold. I feel guilty because le Petit didn't get a single cold for the first nine months or so of his life.

Yesterday evening she started to sneeze, with that precious expression of startled confusion that I so love. Then her tiny nose started to run. By bedtime she was breathing loudly. In the middle of the night, I woke up to her labored breathing and tossing and turning; I nursed her, then lay awake anxiously listening for her to stop breathing altogether.

I know that a cold is annoying, not life-threatening, but at two in the morning the distinction wasn't too clear in my head. I also selfishly wondered how the rest of the night would go. Her breathing eventually evened out and she fell back asleep for a long time, and I did, too. She's still breathing through her nose, so things aren't so bad.

I put her baby swing in the bathroom this morning while I took a shower, giving her the benefit of steam to open up her nasal passages while I chatted with her about hairstyles and beauty secrets. (Should I admit that? Does anyone still believe I was ambivalent about having a girl?) Of course, she's already beautiful ("And don't let anyone tell you otherwise," I insist) and she's still bald, so I doubt either were of any use as of yet.

Here's hoping the ominously adorable baby sneezes pass fast.

Cuisiner with maman

2011-01-17T22:40:00.002+01:00

Le Petit loves to cook with me, even when "cooking" is simply dumping pre-measured cups of flour into bowls and pushing the buttons on the food processor under my strict supervision. I'm grateful for this simple activity together, because it keeps us both happily busy for an hour when we're stuck inside the apartment. Plus, a new batch of freshly-baked cookies adds to my relative feeling of accomplishment at the end of a weekday, even when the laundry remains unfolded, the birth announcements unmailed, and pine needles from the long-gone Christmas tree are creeping out of their hiding places to invade the living room floor.

Today we made pizza dough together. I thought that le Petit would adore kneading the dough and covering himself with flour, but once the measuring and counting was over, he tentatively patted the sticky, floury mound, then wiped his hands on his shirt and headed back to his Legos. Meanwhile, I felt like some sort of modern-day goddess of the hearth kneading dough and swaying back and forth with Mademoiselle curled up under my chin in the baby wrap.

Since I can't use the stove or the oven with a baby strapped to my chest, I plan our cooking projects for when Mademoiselle is reliably napping in her crib. However, 75% of her naps right now are in the wrap, and the rest of the time I never know how long the nap will last and I'll be hands-free. Today Mademoiselle woke up just as I was preparing to turn the dough onto the countertop. It'll be some time before le Petit and I attempt any delicate or time-sensitive recipes, like a soufflé.

Le Petit rarely eats anything we cook. As a young toddler, he ate everything, or almost: mushrooms, broccoli, carrots, risotto, quinoa. I don't know if I was smug, but I do know I took this luck for granted. Since then he's become progressively more picky, and he now typically only eats three vegetables (avocado, corn, and peas), one kind of cheese (parmesan), and carbohydrates in limited forms (crumpets, brioche, baguette with butter, and, naturally, pasta). He's better with fruits and animal protein, but nothing is a sure thing. He won't eat yogurt, or ice cream, or pretty much any form of potato, and yesterday he even turned his nose up at duck confit. Who wouldn't eat duck confit? I console myself that at least he doesn't eat junk food or munch mindlessly between meals. This must be the bad karma I deserve after many years of mocking parents of picky eaters before I became a mother myself.

Cooking with le Petit is part of my strategy to educate his unadventurous palate. I'm betting that the more he's involved in making the food we eat, the more curious he'll be to try it himself. So far I'm not seeing results at the dinner table, but I'm not without hope. Earlier this week le Petit grabbed a raw slice of sweet potato from the kitchen counter, popped it in his mouth, chewed, then spit it out in disgust. Today he took a huge bite out of a half of an onion that was waiting to be sliced. Both times he made a face, and both times I was floored by his sudden and bizarre curiosity.

My husband's strategy is to take him to the local market, point out everything under the sun, and let him choose what he'd like to try. He's having better luck so far.

The pizza was delicious and I was almost happy I only had to share it with my husband. Le Petit and I paged through a cookbook together and I showed him all of the recipes with pictures, hoping to happen upon something that would interest him. He pointed at every one and said earnestly that yes, he wanted to make it. Right away. Tout de suite. But did he want to eat it? Non. That's for maman et papa, he insisted.

* * *

Here's an unrelated question for any readers of my blog who are or were breastfeeding moms: do you or did you use a breastfeeding pillow and, if so, what kind?

With le Petit, I used a hand-me-down pillow that was a sort of a C-shape and filled with little foam seeds. I liked it because it was small and light and could be shaped to support me differently depending on my position. Alas, the cover ripped apart and it kind of started losing its loft and is now almost useless. I decided to buy another one and, scandalized by the prices charged for something so simple and after much deliberation, got the cheapest one I could find. It is filled with hard stuffing and won't mould to my body, is way too long to wrap around me when I'm sitting, and has a bizarre bump in the middle of the C, exactly where you don't want it to be to correctly position the baby. I'm considering giving it to le Petit to play with and buying a new one that will actually be useful, but... what to get? One of those long sausage-shaped ones that I could potentially use to sleep comfortably during pregnany if we decide to have another kid? Another C-shaped one, but with a more "squishy" design? Any brands to look for? Any brands to avoid?

(It's amazing the new forms of prise de tête you can find when you become a parent, no?)

Mother of two

2011-01-13T09:46:00.003+01:00

From the bedroom, where I was busy changing Mademoiselle's diaper, I was listening to le Petit's monologue as he finished up lunch.

"I want water," he said out loud to himself. After a pause, he added, "...but I can't. I can't open!"

I pictured the 1.5 litre bottle of water which was sitting on the dining room table. It was heavy and in glass, with a difficult screw cap.

"Hon," I called out, trying to sound encouraging and not alarmed, "If you want water, why don't you go grab one of the bottles next to Mommy's bed?" My husband stocks several half-litre plastic bottles of water on my bedside table to keep me hydrated during Mademoiselle's late-night feedings. (He brings the bottles home from work free, but I love the gesture. When you're awake at 3 a.m., it's nice to know someone has thought of you earlier, even if they're currently obliviously snoring into a pillow next to you.)

I heard an avalanche of footsteps as le Petit tore down the hallway and clambered onto our bed.

Then I heard, "I can't open it!"

Uh-oh. Usually le Petit has no trouble with plastic bottles, but to my luck, he was defeated by the cap just when I was in the middle of baby poop containment procedures.

"Bring it here, then!" Half convincing myself that my hands were still sufficiently clean, I twisted off the cap, screwed it back on lightly and then gave it back to le Petit. He skipped back off to the dining table.

"I can't open it!" He brought the bottle back to the bedroom and we repeated the operation. I almost left the cap off entirely, but le Petit (clearly smarter than I am already) took one skeptical look at the full bottle, evaluated his ability to carry it, and said no. I screwed the top on extra lightly and le Petit rushed back off to the table.

"Oh!" I overheard a moment later, in le Petit's tone of delighted surprise, "Oh! There's water!"

"Did you spill?" I called out in concern. "Try not to make a big mess."

"Oh! My hand is wet!" le Petit continued cheerfully as if discovering some remarkable natural phenomenon by clever experimentation, then added for my benefit, "C'est pas grave. No big deal."

"A lot or a little of water?"

"C'est pas grave. C'est pas grave!"

This is just one example of how caring for two is both harder and easier than I expected. Harder because I cannot control everything, even less than I had convinced myself I could control it before. Easier because I care much, much less than I expected to care. How bad could a bit of spilled water be? Or milk, or applesauce? What's a few more crumbs on the floor?

I've discovered one surprising thing: when you're a parent to two children, looking after just one feels like a vacation. My mother-in-law has been coming over frequently to take either Mademoiselle or le Petit off my hands (to let me go out of the house by myself, for example, which I still don't dare do with both kids in tow). Every time I feel positively giddy with freedom.

Lest it all sound too easy

2011-01-10T22:40:00.003+01:00

After staying up too late writing a blog entry, I found myself gripped by irrational new-mom anxiety in the middle of the night last night at Mademoiselle's first wake-up. As someone who periodically suffers from anxiety, this was, alas, familiar enough -- a side effect of things going too well, perhaps, and my mind wanting to give me something impossible to obsess over.

Then, this morning, thirty minutes into Mademoiselle's nap, someone in the building started drilling a wall and... Mademoiselle woke up crying, and didn't get a decent nap in the rest of the day. She dozed in the wrap or in my lap or my mother-in-law's arms, but by the end of the day she had dark circles.

She spit up all morning. A lot. And I grudgingly realized I'd probably been nursing her a bit too often, and not burping her assiduously enough.

Le Petit was patient and sweet through it all. I took him out in the early evening, leaving Mademoiselle with my mother-in-law, and he was thrilled to finally get me all to himself. We ran together to the Métro, laughing, admiring the Christmas lights, looking for the moon. Then I let him run along the short wall that borders an empty fountain in a nearby square. I held his hand and was dismissing a vague worry that it wasn't such a good (or safe) idea, when *I* tripped and fell and pulled him down with me. He had a bloody nose and a split lip, we both had a scare, and I hated myself, my terrible judgment and my incompetence.

We both felt better later this evening. He ate a healthy dinner, with plenty of green vegetables -- my formerly adventurous eater has become so picky these days, this is worthy of note. Then we got the fussy and exhausted Mademoiselle off to bed early. She nursed for a long time, but didn't seem to want to drift off to sleep in my arms. So I put her down and waited anxiously as she fussed and shuffled in her crib, and slowly -- miraculously! -- wound down and soothed herself to sleep.

So perhaps my anxiety isn't wearing off on my children. Thankfully.

I put some calming Gregorian chants on the stereo, hugged my husband, and told myself that this would all get better and easier, and soon.

Just me, Mademoiselle, and le Petit

2011-01-09T23:09:00.004+01:00

I think I can do this after all.

My husband took two wonderful, busy weeks of paternity leave over the holidays, giving me a chance to catch my breath. Thank you, French government, for such progressive family policies! At the end of the two weeks, I was rested, less hormone-bound, and finally over the terrible cold that I'd had since before I gave birth, but I still wasn't sure how I'd handle things on my own all day with both kids.

Well, I'm happy to report that the first week was a success. My confidence grew, and I even managed to get some things done; some of them important, like taking both kids to the pediatrician, and some of them trivial, like (gasp!) vacuuming. The best part, however, was that contrary to all my pessimistic expectations, I actually had fun.

I spent at least one afternoon doing nothing more elaborate than playing with Legos. We didn't have any exciting adventures. We stayed close to home, we read books, and we played quietly in the living room. The highlight of our week was baking a galette des rois with le Petit for Epiphany: he adores cooking with me, and takes his tasks of measuring cups of flour or, under my strict supervision, pressing the buttons on the food processor very seriously. I spent my mornings sleepily nursing Mademoiselle, or organizing the apartment as best I could with her in the wrap. By the middle of the week, I realized that we three were a winning team. I didn't want to do anything more than just be focused on the two of them for eight hours, and they seemed to be blooming under my constant attention.

Le Petit is particularly patient and attentive to his little sister. He runs to her crib when she cries and winds up her musical mobile. He asks me if she wants "lolo" (milk), and if she does want to nurse, graciously suggests that I sit on a pillow on the ground and play Legos with him at the same time. He's even starting to understand how to be quiet -- or at least quieter than usual -- while she's napping in the next room.

So I didn't lose my cool or even (so far) resort to Elmo videos. My mother-in-law came over to help with the most delicate part of the day, from le Petit's pick-up at school through our lunch. Since I can hardly use the stove and comfort a crying baby at the same time, I was grateful, to say the least. She also looked after one child while I shuttled to the other to the doctor's office, and took Mademoiselle for an hour one afternoon while I ran errands with le Petit. I don't have to be completely self-sufficient, thankfully.

I'm looking forward to this week, and now I think -- no, I'm certain -- the next eight months are going to fly by fast.

* * *

We ate lunch at my in-laws today. In the French tradition, we spent several hours at the table, so it was already dark outside by the time we walked home.

Le Petit joyfully ran home. He still only has two speeds: "mach 10" and "dawdle," but the latter is the one he employs most often with me (especially on the way home from school), so I was surprised to find him in such a hurry.

He suddenly stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and stared up at the sky, a huge smile on his face.

"Monsieur Lune! C'est Monsieur Lune!" he exclaimed.

I looked up, and sure enough, a crescent moon was hanging in the narrow strip of night sky above the street. I would never have noticed it on my own. But le Petit did. He kept stopping and looking up every few feet all the way home, just to see whether Mr. Moon was still peeking at us from between the outlines of the office and apartment buildings.

One month

2011-01-02T19:47:00.004+01:00

I'm experimenting with a new pseudonym for la Petite, Mademoiselle. I don't know whether you all have been finding it as difficult to follow as I have found it difficult to type, but "le Petit" and "la Petite" seems challenging to me. Let me know what you think in the comments.

One month ago right now I was an hour away from going into labor. It feels like an eternity ago now, the final days of my pregnancy, and yet the last month has gone by so fast I'm afraid I missed half of it in the rush.

Mademoiselle has already lost the look of a newborn. She's more alert now, with none of the perpetual sleepiness of the first two weeks. She's no longer tiny, and her legs and arms don't look fragile and alien like they did at birth. She's already controlling and partially supporting her head, eager to look around and take everything in. Her movements are still jerky, however. She still shakes her head in random directions when she wants to nurse, and half the time she turns away from the breast instead of toward it, twisting the corner of her mouth wide open in search of the target.

I felt guilty that I was sitting on the couch writing a blog entry while Mademoiselle sat quietly alone in her baby seat. I can trust her to call me to order, however: she started to fuss, and now she's snuggling into my shoulder while I awkwardly try to type.

I'm barely getting enough sleep, or spending enough time with her, or paying sufficient attention to le Petit, or to my husband. But this month has been simply beautiful, and I know that's the only thing I'll remember (I hope).

La vie en rose

2010-12-29T11:28:00.004+01:00

I'm ashamed that I ever felt ambivalent about having a girl. Now that la Petite is here, so beautiful and so herself, I feel ashamed that I ever could have doubted, even abstractly, that I wanted her to be who she is. As her mother, I already feel a fierce feminine solidarity, ready to defend her as absolutely perfect to anything who dares say otherwise. She's been nursing well and gaining weight, and when my husband proudly pointed out her "fat," I irrationally jumped to her defense. It isn't fat, I countered, it's 100% beautiful baby! (Never mind that baby fat is actually biologically necessary.) Similiarly, when he mentioned that with her thin, short hair she looks like a boy, I protested. To me, she's obviously a girl. And a gorgeous one.

I'll have to tone down that knee-jerk response a bit as time goes on.

Before she was born, I had visions of walking out of the hospital with her wrapped tight next to me in a baby carrier, confident as I hadn't been with my firstborn. The day we actually went home, although she was snuggled up in the wrap just as I'd imagined, I was feeling shaky. Exhausted. Unsure of myself, although not nearly as much as the first time around. We walked half a block to the car and carefully buckled la Petite in her car bed, then drove ten minutes to home with her fussing in the back seat.

I cried, as I'm wont to do in such situations. My daughter was coming home. When we'd left, she was a mystery, a quantity of questions, an imminent event, a stranger. Now she was real.

And I, skeptical as I'd been of all things pink, pointed out with joy that, as we turned the last corner to our apartment building, the radio was playing "La vie en rose."

Merry

2010-12-25T19:50:00.002+01:00

On the first day of Christmas, my family gave to me:

My mother-in-law's homemade foie gras

Showers, by myself, taking as long as I want in the bathroom

A chestnut bûche de noël

A chocolate-coffee mousse cake from the best little chocolate shop in Paris

A nap, while le Petit and my husband went out to run errands

Complements on my (nursing-compatible) holiday dress

...and on my shoes

Five hours of uninterrupted night sleep (thank you, Petite!)

Perfumes and creams aplenty, for when my stubborn cold departs and I can smell again

A monkfish and shellfish feast (for which my mother-in-law waited in line at the poissonnerie hour and a half)

Time to nurse and cuddle la Petite

Time to read

Time to blog

Time to make cookies

Dishes that magically get done while I'm in the other room

A statue of the Virgin Mary (the original is from the 14th century, now in the Musée Cluny in Paris) nursing the infant Jesus

The joy of watching le Petit open his presents slowly, one by one, blocking out everything to concentrate on each marvelous new thing

The nurturing I needed to emerge from the fog of the last few weeks and feel competent as a mother

* * *

This year, with la Petite still so tiny and the weather so terribly cold and unpredictable, we decided not to go to the big family celebration in Troyes and instead stay home. My mother- and father-in-law came to celebrate, bringing just about everything, from the foie gras to the bûche to the baguettes to their able hands for preparing and setting up and minding the kids and cleaning the mess. I felt like I was still a bit disconnected, unsure where I should be or what I should be doing or saying, but by the end it all clicked. Today for the first time, I felt like I've found my groove with the new baby. I still don't know how quite to say thank you. (Probably not by staying up blogging until 1 am and thus ensuring I'll be a grump tomorrow...)

Sleep (and random thoughts on newborns)

2010-12-22T22:49:00.005+01:00

I should be sleeping, but instead I'm writing about it.

Perhaps to compensate us for stealing so much of our own sleep, newborns make the most wonderful sounds in theirs. I didn't appreciate this the last time around. I was too exhausted, frustrated and desperate for my life to return to normal, but my brain still stored the sounds somewhere and now I can recall them with nostalgia anyway. La Petite's crib is next to our bed, wedged against the wall on my side so that I can lean over and scoop her up to nurse in the middle of the night. As I was falling asleep last night, I listened, reassured, to her squeaks and sighs. Newborns smack their lips as if they were dreaming of nursing, and from time to time they make a contented noise that sounds like they're simultaneously clearing their throat and purring. I should record it so that I can listen to it again, when I'm well-rested myself.

* * *

We were all convinced, from my second day at the hospital on, that la Petite was less "high needs" than her brother at the same age. She seemed to sleep better, she could be put down in her crib, and she could be soothed easily by both me and my husband. Now I wonder, however, if it is just that we're more competent this time around. When she wants to nurse three times in a row, I don't question it. When she only wants to fall asleep in my arms, I hold her, or find my baby carrier. When she wakes up four or more times at night (as she still does more nights than not), I'm unsurprised. When le Petit was born, I spent the first month desperately trying to impose a feeding schedule, to teach him self-soothe himself to sleep, or to make him fall asleep in places he didn't want to. I was bitter and exhausted, and I wondered when and if normalcy would ever return. Then I spent the second month admitting what a real newborn is like, and learning new strategies to make it work. This time that competency is already in place. I'm still waking up four or more times a night, but I sit up, pick up la Petite, lean into the mound of pillows at the head of my bed, put her to breast and close my eyes, unworried and usually very shortly asleep myself.

The broken nights are still getting to me, though. That's the other big difference, however: this time I know that it will get better soon enough.

* * *

La Petite has dark blue eyes, a thin fold line at the bridge of her nose, and a soft cap of scarce, downy hair. Her feet are delicate and proportionally tiny, and her fingers slender and surprisingly long. She looks wise when she's awake, peaceful when she's asleep, and I imagine that right now she could explain the meaning of life to me but will forget it all before she learns to talk. When she's upset, she turns red, scrunches up her eyes and nose and opens her toothless mouth as wide as she can -- but in that, she's simply like every other newborn.

(Why don't we ever think to take pictures of them crying? Are we afraid of documenting our own incompetence? Now that we've got two kids to try to simultaneously capture on film, there are a few unfortunate pictures where la Petite is noticably unhappy--or le Petit has his finger in his nose--duly documented for posterity.)

I once asked my dad if I was cute when I was born. He replied, "No, but you got cute fast." He meant well, but I was highly unsatisfied with this response. OK, I admit, I took it a bit too personally.

If my children ask, I'll tell them what I hold to be true. They weren't cute at birth. They were beautiful.

* * *

Before la Petite was born, if I tried to sleep in after le Petit and my husband were both awake, le Petit would run into our bedroom, climb onto our bed, clamber up next to me, jump on my back and yell into my ear, "Wake up!" He repeated himself loudly until I finally, reluctantly, got out of bed. He usually speaks to me in French, but for this important task he resorted to English.

Now that la Petite has arrived and is often sleeping in her crib or on my lap when le Petit wakes up, he makes a quieter entrance. He still climbs on the bed and jumps onto my back, but then he asks quietly, "Tu peux laisser [la Petite] dormir?" He wants to know, can I let her sleep without me or does she still need me? No matter how short the night seemed, I usually pull myself up and stumble off to a family breakfast, much less reluctantly than I did before.

Dans le pays de maman

2010-12-19T17:09:00.003+01:00

Le petit is sick, I'm sick, and the weather is miserable, so we're all home watching Planet Earth on blu-ray today.

The camera flies over the Rockies. "C'est le pays de maman!" my husband tells Le Petit. That's Mommy's country.

Le Petit turns to me and marvels, "Ton pays est très pointu." Your country is very pointy. My husband and I both chuckle.

"Beaucoup plus pointu que l'Alsace!" Le Petit continues. A lot pointier than Alsace (currently his only reference point for mountains).

A little bit later, he runs off to his room to build a waterfall flowing out of his bed with his blanket, and a river across the floor with his pillows. The teddy bears are fishing for salmon, he explains. He carefully places a couple of stuffed animal ducks on the river.

I have to admit, it looks just like chez moi.

Playdough year

2010-12-15T17:09:00.003+01:00

When we planned how to space our children, we agreed that three and a half years would be perfect for our family. Le petit would be well into his first year of nursery school, and I'd have my days free to take care of the new baby. School would last until four o'clock and extended day to seven, and we duly signed Le petit up for both. I figured my infant caretaking experience would be more or less the same as last time, at least until five or six in the afternoon. On Wednesdays, a day off from school in France, I'd have both kids, but I figured I could make it work with some pinch hitting from Grandma and Grandpa.

The best laid plans, eh?

Le petit wasn't entirely ready for school in September. We went ahead with half days, and crossed our fingers that the potty and discipline issues would straighten themselves out. They did, and Le petit loves school. In the meantime, however, Le petit has definitively given up his naps, and afternoons at school are only lunch and naptime. The teachers have a lot of kids on their hands, and one who won't nap is problematic, to say the least.

I can only imagine, too, how Le petit would react to suddenly being signed up for full days, essentially kicked out of the house upon the arrival of his little sister.

So here I am, a newborn and a three-and-a-half-year-old on my hands from 11:30 to 6 on weekdays, and from 9:30 to 6 on Wednesdays. Paris is gripped by a cold spell, and at any rate, I don't dare go out on my own with both kids just yet, because what on earth do I do if a sudden tantrum hits and I need to wrangle (gently and respectfully) the preschooler? Le petit has decided that now that Mommy is back from the hospital has a lap again to sit in, he no longer wants to spend any time at Grandma's house. I go to bed as soon as La Petite is nursed down for the night in order to take advantage of her first, longest sleep stretch and thus hold onto the shreds of my sanity.

Did I mention I also have the worst cold in recent memory?

At first, I was on this super mom trip. I wouldn't use TV as a crutch. I'd engage Le petit in educational activities. His English would improve. We'd bond. That lasted one day last week, Thursday. By the end of the day, when my husband came home, I was in tears in front of Elmo on sesamestreet.com, Le petit beside me ordering me to click the mouse, La petit nursing on my lap. My mom had just called and left a message, and I had neither the strength nor the mobility to get up and answer the phone.

Now I'm using TV, and planning on ordering more Sesame Street videos. They'll be in English, and thus I console myself.

Today was hard again. I'm living a contradiction: on the one hand, I'm not attempting anything that moms everywhere haven't done before me. On the other hand, I know that this will be hard. Exhausting. Going back to work in nine months may seem like a huge break (and again, I'm counting my blessings to have that kind of parental leave). I think there will inevitably be huge rewards, bonding, and understanding if I make it, but can I really do it? Well? At all? I'm lucky that La Petite is relatively low-key at the moment, and Le Petit relatively cooperative, but still, I may not be up to it all.

Gotta go. Elmo is over, and La petite is waking up. Here we go again.

Elisabeth Badinter has it (only) half right

2010-12-14T10:29:00.004+01:00

The French feminist, intellectual and author of the recent book Le conflit: la femme et la mère argues that the pressure to breastfeed, to stay at home, and to excel as mothers is leading women in the industrialized world to renounce motherhood altogether, or at least find it less than fulfilling. According to Badinter, by setting the mothering bar so high, women are being pressured out of the workforce or forced to choose between work and parenting, often surrendering their self-sufficiency. Meanwhile, men are off the hook, not expected to be equal partners in parenting because they supposedly lack the biological equipment and mental wiring.

I read the book this spring, expecting to be irritated. And yes, her stance on breastfeeding (Oh, the pressure! Oh, the limitations of it all!) bothered me. But she has some very good points, starting with the complaint that most men still do not feel like they need to roll up their sleeves and do their fair share. Yet she wrongly blames breastfeeding, among other things, for this.

Over and over, I hear the same refrain: breastfeeding excludes dads. If you want Dad to be involved, pump your milk! Let him take a feeding! Otherwise, his attachment to the baby may suffer. I know it seems that newborns spend 24/7 on the breast (just ask me at four a.m.), but, hey, guys, there's lots more to do. There's bathing the baby. And changing diapers. And teaching her new ways to be soothed to sleep. There's taking her off for long walks when Mom just can't hack it anymore and desperately needs to nap. There's taking care of the older kids, and going grocery shopping, and if you really can't find anything else to do, there's always laundry.

There are men who want to be involved, and they will be, whether their wives breastfeed or not. There are men who, under the pretext that they've mixed up a few bottles of formula in the middle of the night, consider themselves off the hook. And then there are men who, like a colleague of my husband's, think like this:

"Is your wife breastfeeding?"

"Yes," my husband says proudly (he's become somewhat of a breastfeeding evangelist).

"Well, you're lucky, then. There's nothing for you to do."

Baby journal

2010-12-13T19:46:00.003+01:00

La petite is, thus far, less "high needs" than her brother was as a newborn. Which is globally saving my sanity, for I don't know what I'd do with a three-year-old and a baby that will not be put down. Muddle through with my favorite baby carrier, I suppose.

The nights are easier, too, since La petite wakes up, nurses, and usually falls back asleep easily, but she's still nursing a minimum of four to five times a night. She seems to have her days and nights a little mixed up, because her naps can lengthen to three or four hours. And the old advice about "sleep when the baby sleeps" doesn't work for me right now, since Le petit is only in school until eleven-thirty, and on school days I have lunch duty plus half the day alone with both kids before Daddy comes home. I've never been one to deal well with sleep deprivation, and the fractured nights, the post-partum hormones plus a ferocious head cold have me holding on by the skin of my teeth.

But I'm in love. With both of them. When I thought I wouldn't "get" parenting a girl, I was wrong, so wrong. At eleven days old we haven't hit Disney princesses, or mean girls or Gossip girls or whatever bumps in the road may lie ahead, but I don't care, my daughter and I are a team already, I know it. And she looks absolutely adorable in pink.

When I was pregnant, I had nothing but time (and rest!), but I'd lost the inspiration to blog. Perhaps as my belly button disappeared my need to navel-gaze diminished along with it. Now that I'm once again caught in the whirlwind of infant parenting, I have so, so much to say and no time to say it. So I'm going to try to write something every day or two, most often just a few lines, quick and off the top of my head. Thoughts that come to me while I'm nursing La Petite at four in the morning. Things I want to remember, and fish out from the haze of the next few months. I won't spend much time rereading or editing, and I won't make any promises on timing -- who am I kidding, I can't find time to vacuum the floor -- but I'll work on putting out enough that you can glimpse my world right now. And I'll be able to come back and remember it later, when I'm feeling sad that it passed by so fast.

La Petite est arrivée !

2010-12-07T11:07:00.003+01:00

Just a very quick note to let everyone know that "la Petite" (which I'm testing out as her Official Blog Name) arrived on the evening of December 2nd. We both just got back from the hospital yesterday, and we're sleepily, joyfully settling in as a family of four. I have tons to write now and not yet the time to actually do it, but stay tuned!

Still waiting

2010-11-15T21:34:00.002+01:00

Anyone who reads me in a reader was undoubtedly confused when I posted, then deleted, something to the effect that I thought I might be going into labor. False alert -- the nausea and frequent contractions disappeared once I curled up on the couch with a few strategically placed pillows and a DVD of "The West Wing." Which is just as well, for I'd honestly like another week to rest up and relax, give my in-laws a chance fully enjoy a trip to Venise next weekend for their 40th wedding anniversary, and give my daughter the opportunity to be a Sagittarius (so we'll raise our ratio in the house).

I decided, however, that it would be prudent to do my end-of-pregnancy bloodwork ASAP, and track down the last of the items I needed from the pharmacy for my suitcase for the hospital. So, in the late afternoon, I hauled myself off the couch and out into the real world, took the Métro one stop to the medical lab, where a distracted woman asked me the very best question of the day while she labelled a series of blood vials.

"You're pregnant, madame?"

I looked down at my enormous belly and wondered if I should trust this person to find a vein.

Then I answered, simply, "Oui."

By the way, new hospital policy is to arrive wearing stockings designed, I assume, to maintain proper circulation in the legs. The only ones they had at the pharmacy were black with lace trim at the top. I'm wondering what in my late pregnancy wardrobe could possibly coordinate with these. A little black dress? Black pumps or strappy sandals? I had to chuckle just a little at the thought that I am expected to wear to the birth something perhaps more appropriate for the conception.

Only in France.

What's your favorite late pregnancy story? And anyone have any brilliant ideas for arranging pillows to avoid nighttime back pain?

Sugar and Spice, part II

2010-10-19T14:18:00.006+02:00

"Is it a girl or a boy?"

This time around, I don't hesitate to respond.

"A girl," I say with a satisfied smile. Most of the time, the person who asked knows that I already have a little boy, and I let them wrap the warm blanket of simplistic assumptions around me: 'How wonderful!' 'One of each!' 'Think of all the shopping for pretty things!' and 'No need to go for number three!'

Just after we found out we were expecting a girl, I would protest a bit at such remarks and insist that we would have been perfectly happy either way. Lately I've given that up, and whatever anyone chooses to say I nod and say warmly, "I know, we're excited," and leave it at that. They mean well. They've said nothing that I haven't said myself many times before I became a mother. I no longer add what I really think: that people don't come in two models, pink and blue; that the child I'm carrying is an individual, and thus a mystery that knowing their gender ahead of time can't change. I certainly don't admit what I've admitted here before: that having a girl intimidates me just a little bit.

There's a contradiction there, and I've spent the last months turning it over in my head.

I haven't met my daughter yet. The endearing kicks in the ribcage, the startlingly realistic 3D images on the ultrasound, they feel intimate but they tell me nothing. Nothing will teach me anything about her personality before I hear her cries, before I lull her to sleep in my arms, before I gaze into her eyes. How that personality will evolve as she grows will remain a mystery for even longer. Will I recognize my "baby" at five? At fifteen? At thirty? Le Petit is three, and while he has personality traits that I insist were there from the beginning, he still surprises me. As a parent, I want to avoid constraining him with assumptions from the past, for if I do, he loses the chance to explore and change with confidence, and I lose the chance to see him as he truly is.

Make few assumptions. Let them be who they are. Let that change over time. I don't have a parenting manifesto yet, but if I did, it just might start there.

Enter the gender card, and thus the contradiction: becoming the mother of a girl opens the door to thousands of assumptions, both positive and negative, from fears about "mean girls" and an aversion to Disney princesses to hopes about sharing rites of passage into adulthood and motherhood. I imagine myself stringing sparkling beaded necklaces or planning sewing projects with her. I dream (before telling myself not to rush too far ahead) of a daughter who might -- just might! -- consider attending Mount Holyoke, my alma mater. I imagine late-night calls when I listen, as only a mother can, as she makes important choices in her life. I wonder if we'll shop together for shoes; if she'll be ashamed of her frumpy American mother or, on the contrary, initiate me into the secrets of being chic and more authentically French.

Nonsense. All of it. I sweep it aside as best I can. She'll be who she is. It was easier to say this before le Petit was born, when I assumed that I knew nothing and that his father would just have to fill me in as we went along. Maybe this time around my husband feels the way I did back then. Yet when I remember my own experience -- an imperfect and perilous guide for any parent -- I wonder just what understanding it could possibly bring. I was a misfit, but no tomboy; my own mother chided me for throwing a baseball "like a girl." I loved sparkly things and art projects. I excelled at math. I dreamed of being a princess. I dreamed of being an architect. I climbed trees but rarely knew how to get back down. Of the millions of variations on "girl," I was but one. Unique. No guide for anyone.

I'm not sure where I'm going except to say that my goal, in these last few weeks before I give birth, is to leave some written trace of this: I'm excited to meet my daughter. Not because she's a girl, and not despite it. She will be cherished and welcomed with all my heart. She may read this and understand some day why fabric and beads and mother-daughter art projects were foisted on her at some point in her childhood, and why application to a certain women's college in rural New England was mentioned repeatedly when she turned 16. And she will hopefully forgive the baggage I carry. As two women, we will share many things, and that excites me. But I will try not to let it blind me.

And now, while no one is looking, I'll secretly look over the pink pajamas in the baby girl section of the store. Me, the girl who always hated pink. There are still some things I can't explain or justify.

Alphabet soup du jour

2010-10-13T21:52:00.003+02:00

Le Petit is currently learning his letters and numbers. Since I happen to love to point them out to him, sometimes stopping along the street on our walks to decipher the license plates of parked cars, I'm proud to say he knows them at least as well in English and he does in French. Which still isn't all that well: he can recognize numbers a bit better than letters, but nothing yet with anything approaching real accuracy. We're in the thick of learning still, and it's fun.

He's soaking it all in, and sometimes notices letters and numbers in strange places.

The other day, it was the tiny code engraved in the beak of the stainless steel faucet in the bathroom sink.

"Five. Five is for hot water! Four is for hot water, too!" he announced as we were washing his hands (or something approaching this) and I was confused until I followed his gaze.

And that's when we spotted the letter 'A', if I remember correctly, which le Petit also pointed out to me.

"Very good! What starts with the letter 'A'?" I asked.

He thought about it for a second.

"'A' is for... pomme!"

In one sentence, his reasoning jumped from 'A' to 'apple' to 'pomme,' the French word for apple. I was amazed and proud, and just a little worried that his bilingualism was going to leave him hopelessly confused at first. We'll see.

Still here

2010-10-08T22:25:00.004+02:00

Whoa, what a week. Make that month. Things are happening so fast I don't feel like I have time to keep up, much less sift through and analyze enough to put any of it into meaningful text. But I also feel like I should make some attempt to bring everyone up to date with my life.

So, first: Wednesday I felt that something was just not quite right, so I went to the hospital. And as in my previous pregnancy, I was prescribed immediate bed rest. I'm concerned, but I'm not terrified because the last time around le Petit waited to arrive until nine minutes before his due date. I'm hoping the same will happen this time. La Petite is expected on the fourth of December. I'm talking to her about it, selling the advantages of being a Sagittarius and having a festive holiday-season birthday. Bed rest is more complicated with a three-year-old, alas. Once again I'm grateful for my mother-in-law, because without her help I don't know what I'd do.

Meanwhile, we're still struggling with preschool. The good news is that le Petit is making great potty progress. He's also gaining new language skills and forming more complex sentences. He's showing better self-control, and we're daring to take him out to restaurants and museums, relying on him to be a grand or "big kid."

Unfortunately, all that progress is coming with considerable transitional stress, both for le Petit and for us. The teacher, concerned by several incidents of running out of the classroom or writing on the walls and one spectacular tantrum in "time out," asked us to meet with her and the school director. Our first parent-teacher conference, at three-years-old! She was also concerned that he didn't maintain eye contact with her, and rarely explained himself clearly when she asked him what happened. My interpretation is that, although le Petit is far from shy, he's intimidated by new adults and new situations. School is huge, busy, full of new rules and new people, and his teacher could, in my opinion, be a bit more warm, reassuring and understanding. I made sure that the teacher knew that we wanted to work with her and reinforce her authority, but privately, I made the promise to myself keep monitoring the situation. For the moment, le Petit loves school and literally runs to the front door in the morning. I would hate for that to change.

Meanwhile, le Petit came home from school twice in two weeks with bite wounds. I know that little kids sometimes bite, of course, but seeing it happen to my little baby is terrible. Le Petit, for his part, is stoic. He didn't even complain or explain the incident to the teacher.

I'm doing my best to keep this all in perspective. My current perspective is from the couch, stretched out on my left side, observing the world as a mother who worries perhaps just a little too much.

Life ring

2010-09-13T16:32:00.004+02:00

Things are getting better, honestly, or so I keep repeating to myself. I still want to escape. I haven't felt this anxious to run away from everything in years. This unable to cope. It stinks. I know some of it is probably pregnancy-related anxiety, and I talked about it to my doctor at the hospital when I had my monthly check-up last week. He confirmed my suspicions and gave me a week's rest from work. It didn't solve anything directly, but it helps to be understood and it helps to have some extra time to breathe.

I had my third driving session on Saturday. It was painful. I was reminded of how hospital personnel ask you to rate your pain on a 10-point scale. Last time my anxiety was a 10, and this time it fluctuated from 7 to 8. Improvement, yes, and the good news is that the improvement came because I was learning to both integrate the important information contained in the barrage of negative comments from the instructor while at the same time maintain some of my own self-confidence.

I'm beginning to understand some things:

1) Constant negativity is the driving instructor's modus operandi. When he isn't screaming at me about my braking or my shifting gears, he's asking me why I've turned on my headlights already ("Can you see? Or do you want to be seen? Turn on the parking lights, then!"). Some of it is valid. Some of it is gratuitous. I will do my best to take the useful stuff and leave the rest. Incidentally, I'm certain I'm braking and shifting gears better than ever, even if he won't admit it.

2) This is fundamentally a good growing experience for my perfectionist, take-everything-to-heart personality. Let's face it: a thicker skin can only help me. And it is probably a good thing for me as a driver, too: if I can learn to deal with this kind of stress while driving in Paris, I'll be that much more able in everyday situations.

3) There's no way I could have dealt with this at all seven years ago. Or even, I suspect, before the birth of my first child: motherhood has taught me a few things.

4) I can do this. It won't be easy, but it will get easier.

My husband doesn't quite get why this is stressing me so much, although he's supportive. If any of my readers have gone through this process here in France and can validate any of my experience, please do so.

Meanwhile, there's le Petit's school. Which is wonderful, and stressful, and still a big huge unknown in many ways. It is wonderful because le Petit loves it. He wants to go every day, even Saturdays and Sundays. We obviously can't compete with painting and recess and all the other fun new things he's discovered. He's one of the only kids who doesn't cry at drop-off time and who doesn't rely on a lovey or pacifier. If I didn't know better, I'd give myself a big pat on the back, but I'm learning in this parenting gig to only give credit where credit is due.

It is stressful because he's still having some trouble listening to the teacher, although from her comments and le Petit's own comments I think we're making progress. Today the teacher told me that everything went well, très bien passé, those magic words, although she did mention that today he briefly hid somewhere in the classroom. I made it clear that I want to help the transition and that I fully back her authority, and I think that was all she was looking for. Le Petit, for his part, listed a bunch of rules for me that I didn't even know about: when the teacher asks, he says, he knows it's time to sit down or put away toys. Go le Petit!

I went to the parent meeting on Saturday morning and fully understood something I'd been starting to suspect: the school is great. They truly care. But they are overwhelmed with kids. There are 30 kids in each class and only two adults. Most kids stay for lunch, nap time, and after-hours extended care. Both the director and the teacher strongly encouraged any parents who could to do only mornings, the only "academic" portion of the day, and pick up their child before lunch. Given the iffyness of potty training and discipline and le Petit's general reluctance to nap, we decided that it would be better if we hired an afternoon babysitter for the three weeks I'll be at work before I go on maternity leave. This is adding a new unknown -- will we find someone good? Will it work out? -- but it feels like the right decision.

So, free government nursery school is a very good thing. But, dear Sarkozy-and-the-other-powers-that-be, why not fund another adult per class? It would make the transition to school that much easier for parents, teachers, and children, and it would make another small dent in unemployment. A good idea, no?

The seven year itch of my life in France is catching up with me more than ever. If I could do it this week, I think I'd turn tail and move back to Seattle. Find my wooden house with a front porch. But I'm far too far from that shore to think of swimming in that direction. Instead I'm clinging to my life ring and keep paddling back, in the only direction I can go.

Back to (driving) school

2010-09-08T20:44:00.003+02:00

I almost never watch TV. I've never before followed a reality television show in either France or the US. Yet somehow over the last few weeks I've become hooked on Masterchef.

At first I thought it was somehow uniquely French, with contestants who dream not of becoming pop stars but of becoming famous chefs. Then I learned that it was invented somewhere else -- the UK, maybe? -- and France is only the third or fourth country to launch its own version. So much for the French cultural exception. Still, there's something strangely appealing about watching people from all corners and cultures of France compete to chop onions to the finest and most uniform dice, or to make the best quiche lorraine. I feel like I'm learning something. And I'm in desperate need of distraction these days.

Three judges, two of whom are Michelin-starred chefs and one a culinary journalist, arbitrate the winnowing down of the contestants. They seem to take their job quite seriously, too: their insults and belittling comments are generously distributed, both to individuals and to the group as a whole. These insults make me squirm. I'd rather see honest criticism and encouragement than self-satisfied disdain. I've been trying to decide if the harshness is part of the reality television format, or whether it is just because the show is filmed and aired in France.

As anyone who has worked in a French enterprise or gone through any part of the French school system knows, praise and criticism are seen a bit differently here. Rarely will a supervisor or a teacher explicitly mention one's strengths, but they do not hold off on "constructive" criticism. This stressed me for months when I first started working here. I kept waiting for some sort of reassurance from my boss which never came; I agonized about it until I finally asked my husband what could possibly be the problem. "But he's French," he explained. "He's not going to tell you you're doing a good job." Sure enough, he never did explicitly. Reassurance came as I was given more responsibilities, and ultimately hired full time. Now, aside from my annual review, I never hear anything directly positive from my boss and I never worry about it.

It isn't rare, however, that he tells me I'm wrong, or at least on the wrong track on something. I never (or rarely) take it personally.

School is the same way, I've heard, or worse. And driving school is the ultimate personally humiliating experience, I'm discovering. I keep repeating here (although I'm less and less certain of myself) that I know how I drive, or used to. I had a car and a license for years back in the US, many of them in Boston, which reputedly isn't the easiest place to drive in the lower 48. I never liked to drive, but I was comfortable enough behind the wheel. Now I have twenty mandatory hours with a French driving instructor to re-learn everything I've either forgotten or never knew. I've had two sessions so far, and it is grueling.

Session one: one hour, in which I learn that all along I've been braking incorrectly. I know how to drive a stick shift, thankfully, but I've always done something like this: approximately 50 feet before stopping, put in the clutch. Put the car in neutral. Brake gradually. Leave the car in neutral until starting again. I immediately learned that this made the instructor crazy. It was dangerous, WHAT THE HECK WAS I DOING? Leave the clutch alone! Brake! No, look behind you first! Stay in gear! Madame, s'il vous plaît !

I was already semi-terrified of driving in Paris, even when behind the wheel of a dual-control car, and trying to correct this bad habit on the fly was challenging. I quickly understood that since average French following distances are much, much shorter than in the US, it is important to be constantly vigilant about the rear-view mirror. Yet nothing came naturally, especially after seven years of no (none, zip, zero) time behind the wheel.

The first instructor was harsh, but not unduly so, and I left more confident than when I'd arrived. Then today I had driving session, and instructor, number two.

Comments included:

"You cannot brake like that, madame. Think of your baby!" (He'd asked me how many months pregant I was before we began.)

"You'll be rear-ended for sure."

"What exactly are you doing with the clutch? With the gears?"

"I told you not to brake like that. You say oui, oui, but you still brake like that."

"You didn't stop for the child at the crosswalk!" (Way to make me feel terrible. I did see the kid, who was standing patiently on the sidewalk, so I judged it OK to pass.)

"Why are you stopping for that pedestrian? You have a green light!" (Yes, but the woman looked to me to be about to step out anyway, and she was looking the other direction.)

"How many years of experience did you say you had?"

For two hours at the beginning of rush hour we turned around Levallois, Clichy, Saint Denis, and Villeneuve-la-Garenne, all densely urban outskirts of Paris. I did my best to navigate the construction zones, understand the confusing traffic circles and one-way streets, and anticipate the movements of the teeming pedestrians. I watched the minutes tick by slowly as the tension dried out my mouth and tied my shoulders in knots. Although I drove so slowly that cars swerved around me, I apparently stopped when I shouldn't have, didn't stop when I was supposed to, and basically screwed up.

At the end of the ordeal, the instructor accused me of being too confident. And of braking badly. And of not looking ahead far enough, or frequently enough in my rear-view mirror. But I'd still made some progress, he reluctantly added.

Confident? Me? I felt like an abject failure. And I realized, too, that at 33 years old (and as a mother, for whom every child on every sidewalk reminds me of my own), what I wanted more than anything was not my driver's license, but to honestly feel that I could drive capably and safely. I wasn't sure that this form of driving instruction was going to get me there.

My husband and mother-in-law both shrugged when I described my experience. It's their job to pull you apart, they said. Besides, I had hours more of driving practice to master what they were demanding.

As much as I think I know what to expect here in France, I'm a little bit jarred to be in yet another situation that I don't quite have the cultural reflexes to confront. How many more years will it take me? Probably as many as it will take for me to dare driving around Place de l'Etoile on my own. Which is to say, c'est pas encore gagné : it's not won yet.

Sous les crayons de couleur, la plage

2010-09-07T13:32:00.006+02:00

There’s a general strike in France today.

I'm working from home today -- taking a brief break for a blog entry -- as part of my contingency plan for the first week of maternelle. Since last Friday, le Petit has been doing half days while we assess the potty situation. He loves school. Adores it. Examines Daddy's watch in the morning to determine when it is time to leave. He runs the last block to school to arrive as fast as he can at the front door.

I was optimistic the first few days, or "cautiously exuberant," if you will. But today at eleven-thirty, along with my child, I picked up my first neatly tied plastic bag of wet clothes. This wouldn't bother me so much if le Petit hadn't had three accidents at home with us yesterday afternoon.

When I briefly asked the teacher how things went, she said nothing about the accident, but gravely told me instead that "[Le Petit] has trouble listening" and "He leaves the classroom and runs out into the hallway." I was instructed to explain to him to that this was unacceptable. I, in my typical way, took this all personally and dramatically (with the help of the mood-destabilizing pregnancy hormones that are drowning me right now) as I turned it around in my head on our way home. I would be labeled a "bad mom!" My child would be labeled a "bad seed!" This was the beginning of long-term academic failure!

As I prepared lunch, I snapped at le Petit over things that I would ordinarily handle calmly. It all ended in a teary time-out. When I’m under stress, my most respectful and effective parenting techniques fly out the window.

I don’t quite understand what I’m supposed to do, and I’m wringing my hands over this one more thing that is beyond my control. I can explain to le Petit that he needs to listen to the teacher. We talked about it on the way home as an Important Safety Issue. I went through his maternelle picture book with him before lunch and emphasized the pages that showed kids politely obeying the adults or routinely going to the potty. But there is only so much I can do to impose discipline when I’m not present, and part of me feels that it is also the teacher’s job to find a way to make sure the lesson is understood.

At the same time, I wonder to myself how the French school system, which seems rather directive and disciplinarian compared to its American counterpart, produces such an individualistic people who have almost codified flaunting the rules. Half of Paris is out in the street today, either protesting the retirement age reform or hiking their way to and from work by foot. The other half of Paris is hiding out at home, taking a day of vacation or telecommuting. It is a mess, and no one expects otherwise.

Not for the first time I’m wondering if my son will grow up to be a syndicaliste, and be out in the street pulling up paving stones and calling out to subvert all forms of oppressive authority.

He’s starting in maternelle.

To paraphrase the famous 1968 student protest battle cry and adapt it to his new generation:

“Under the Crayolas, the beach!”

La rentrée

2010-09-02T09:38:00.004+02:00

First day of school.

I'm a nervous wreck, le Petit is whining and knocking chairs over on the floor and refusing to eat breakfast. My husband is keeping his cool, thankfully. I'm sure this is the stuff of good memories, some day. I'll make sure to take pictures.

Le Petit is so excited he wants to walk out the door immediately and not wait another long fifteen minutes. I hope he doesn't see how useless and anxious I am. Meanwhile there's kick after kick in my suddenly imposing belly reminding me that in the not-so-distant future we'll be doing this again as experts (I hope).

Ecole maternelle blues

2010-08-24T21:26:00.003+02:00

We're lucky here in France. I know this. When I explain what makes our quality of life so great in this country, free*, high-quality education from age three to university almost tops my list.

(It comes right after government-funded health care. After working in the tech industry in the US, where I had good health insurance but also the constant fear of losing coverage because of a layoff, I cannot take this for granted.)

Yes, you got that right: free nursery school. I've been looking forward to this for the three years since le Petit was born. I thought that once we got to September 2010, we're be temporarily free of child care-related headaches, and our son would be taking his first steps on the golden road of the French educational system. We even tried to plan a second baby to arrive a few months after le Petit was well-established in his new school, so that I could take a year's mostly unpaid leave and still give an infant the same focused care I gave le Petit.

Well. You plan, and the universe laughs.

One of the requirements of French nursery school -- l'école maternelle -- is that children be propre, or potty trained. We've been working on potty training for what seems like an eternity, and making undeniable but slow progress. Unfortunately, current status is far from perfect, and not, in our executive opinion as parents, sufficient for the start of school next week. We agonized about it over our vacation, often making ourselves and le Petit miserable because of it, which was counter-productive and just plain stupid in retrospect.

So le Petit won't be starting la rentrée with the rest of the class. The current plan is for me to take my last two weeks of vacation (Reason Number 3 I'm grateful I live in France: generous vacation time) to spend two weeks at home with le Petit, enjoying one another's company and -- oh, yeah -- working on the potty thing. And if all else fails, searching for another nanny for the five weeks that will be left before my maternity leave starts. Since we'd assumed that le Petit would start school in September, our beloved nanny has found a new gig. Great for her, inconvenient for us.**

Out of respect for le Petit, who will grow up and may be, heaven forbid, embarrassed by this blog, I won't say more on the potty subject. I will say that he may come by this recalcitrance honestly. Although my parents have forgotten all the details of potty training me, they do often maliciously repeat that they were certain that I'd wear Pampers to the prom.

So, ignoring the potty training part for the moment, I'm surprised at how much ambivalence and even anxiety this is stirring up for me about school in general. Back when I was pregnant with le Petit, I predicted that having a baby in France would tie me to the country in a completely new way. It turned out not to be true: I'm no more French than I was before. But having a child in school in France, that, on the other hand, will assuredly pull me into a new part of French culture. My son will be entering a system I don't understand. In fact, he may understand it better than I do in a matter of months, and be able to decipher acronyms like CP and CE1 that still leave me puzzled. Sure, my French husband can interpret things for me, but how can I, le Petit's mother, fill my role as his advocate? Will I do things wrong? Will I embarrass him?

Other fears of mine are universal mother fears. My "baby" will be walking into a classroom with other kids his age, or older, or bigger. He'll no longer have the close, nearly one-on-one adult attention he's had until now. How will be adjust? Never mind that every child makes it through this transition and most of them grow up happier for it, I can't help but be terrified.

My husband called the school director today, who spent a long time on the phone discussing things frankly and reassuring us. In the flurry of e-mails we exchanged afterward, my husband said rightly, "The stakes are not as high as we think."

A few messages later, I wrote back:

"What stresses me is making the right decision. I should know by now that there isn’t any “right” decision in this parenting gig anyway -- or if there is, you’re spared any certainty of it in hindsight, at least if you’re honest with yourself. I’ve been second-guessing myself since the moment I chose to get an epidural ten hours before he was born, and frankly, I’m sick of it. The important thing is that he grow up happy, and he’s much more likely to do that if he doesn’t see his parents in constant cycles of stress."

Easier said than done. Right?

* University isn't free, but the cost is so low compared to the US that it seems practically free to me.

** If anyone has any good ideas for a parting gift for a nanny, I'd love to hear them. We'll be giving her a bonus (in part mandated by her contract, but still), but I'd like to give her something personal, too. But somehow "you took care of my child for two and a half years, which is priceless; here's a gift certificate" doesn't cut it for me. And gift certificates are kind of not done in France, anyway. I'm at a loss!

Le code

2010-08-20T22:44:00.007+02:00

On Tuesday morning, after months of preparation and less-than-patient waiting, it was time for me to go back to Villeneuve la Garenne to take the written part of the French driver's license exam.

Le code.

I feel I must explain to my American readers this is, in fact, a big deal. Or at least a big pain. Back when I took the written driver's license exam in Washington State, more years ago than I care to calculate, it was trivial: a few questions about drunk driving, a question about stopping for school buses, and a picture of a big red octagonal sign ("When you see this sign, what do you do?"). I was nervous, sure, because I was 16 years old, but I passed easily.

The French written driver's exam is a different matter. Forty pictures of "real world" driving situations that you must analyze and, applying the often arcane rules of the code de la route, use to answer forty multi-part multiple choice questions. The only way to prepare is to plow through as many practice questions as possible, spending hour upon dull, humiliating hour at the driving school watching DVDs and checking A, B, C and/or D on endless pieces of paper.

I'd been at it since December. And I hated it. And by March, I was beginning to get the hang of determining the priority of passage at intersections, so I asked for a date to take the exam. The French bureaucracy being what it is, I was eventually assigned a date in May. That was the first time I'd gone to Villeneuve la Garenne, only to discover that the test inspector was on strike.

Three months later, I was back, confident that no strike would stand in my way, for in the middle of August, everyone is too busy taking vacation to be bothered with labor movements. My husband dropped me off and I joined a growing crowd of anxious adolescents who were milling about, paging through dog-eared copies of driver's manuals. I sat down on a bench in the dimly-lit basement hallway of the less-than-festive Salle des fêtes and waited. It was quarter to ten, and the last crop of hopeful drivers were just coming out of the exam room with their test results.

Three young girls excitedly hugged and congratulated each other before flocking together to the restroom. A kid in baggy pants and a scruffy sweatshirt carefully avoided smiling at his friend, who called out, "Did you get it?"

"Uh, yeah," he replied nonchalantly. "On the third try, it's easy, you know."

I felt old. And tired. And hugely pregnant. And nervous. What if I failed? What if these teenagers were smarter than me at picking out half-hidden yield signs? It was only the night before that I'd finally managed to get a perfect score on a practice exam. I was relatively confident I could get at least 35 correct out of 40, the requisite passing score, but it was far from a sure thing and I couldn't shake an ancient, adolescent fear of humiliation that was welling up inside me.

The test inspector, a gruff, stout woman in her 50s with short gray hair, came out into the hall at ten o'clock and collected stacks of manila folders from our accompanying driving school instructors. She then disappeared back into the exam room, loudly shut the door, and spent the next half an hour alone, presumably entering our personal information into her computer by hand.

The French bureaucracy isn't known for its mastery of modern technology.

Meanwhile my heart pounded, my back hurt, and I tried to look wise and relaxed while I struggled to overhear other students last-minute poring over their books and berated myself for forgetting to bring my own copy.

The test inspector reappeared at ten-thirty and began summoning us in in groups by driving school. My school was second, and among its candidates, I was first. She called out my name, which I failed to recognize. To the French bureaucracy, I am still identified by my maiden name, which is systematically mispronounced and transformed into an guttural monosyllable. The driving instructor nudged me forward, and I picked up a remote-control-like pad with six buttons and a small LCD display.

"Second row, middle seat."

I dutifully sat down and nervously examined the small room. The dim flourescent lights in the low ceiling and the dull beige paint brought back fond memories of 1980s classrooms. Two folding tables were lined up together at the front of the room, where the inspector sat behind a laptop computer, a stack of the remote-control thingys, and a odd, antiquated machine with a thick roll of what looked like cash register paper. A projector screen was deployed behind her.

Once she finished distributing the controls and barking out seating instructions, she stood up in front of us all grimly.

"You each have your response units. You will be presented with 40 questions on the screen behind me. Respond to each question on your unit, then click "validate" to save your response and move on to the next question. Make sure that the number on the display corresponds to the number on the screen. If you get behind, you'll have to catch up, and if you skip ahead, you'll have to wait. It is useless to indicate your problem to me, because I can't help you."

I was suddenly nostalgic for the low-tech pieces of paper.

"Turn off your cell phones. It is unnecessary to remind you, I'm sure, that this is an individual exam. Do not try to share your answers with those seated next to you. Anyone seen violating these rules will be asked to leave the room."

I felt like pinching myself, worried I'd fallen asleep and was trapped in a nightmare of tenth grade.

She started the DVD. The questions appeared one by one and I answered them carefully, obsessively verifying that I was on the right number. They were mostly questions that I was prepared for, not easy but reassuringly similar to the endless practice questions I'd digested over the past eight months. Some were simple: you're at a railroad crossing, the red light is blinking; do you pass? A couple were bizarre, abstract, and (I later verified) utterly absent from my textbook. I answered with an educated guess, shook my head and pressed "validate", hoping I was still afloat.

When the fortieth question faded from the screen and was replaced by the profile of Marianne, emblem of the French Republic (the words liberté, égalité, fraternité and sécurité routière got equal billing below), a collective sigh of relief was heard. The inspector solemnly began to call us individually to the front for our results. She plugged each control into the cryptic machine, which beeped with satisfaction and spit out its verdict on the reel of paper.

"C'est bon," she said to the first few candidates, pasting the results into their manila folder which she then handed to them without ceremony.

"Trop de fautes," she said to several unlucky candidates, whose faces fell. One clutched her folder and left in tears.

She called my name, which once again I didn't immediately recognize.

I scrambled to get up, and handed over my control with a lump in my throat.

"C'est bon." She offered me my folder. I wondered if I'd heard her correctly.

There was no indication of the number of mistakes I'd made, which remains a mystery, the inspector explained, in the event of a passing grade. Only those that fail know the truth. I stared at the printed label with a dot-matrix "VAL" next to my name, the big payback after months of wasted time.

Or maybe not so wasted. One of my husband's colleagues, a medieval history buff and connoisseur of esoteric ritual, claims that the French driver's exam is an rite of initiation. Arcane, seemingly useless, it nevertheless marks a passage into full membership in society; it confers a deeper understanding the rights, responsibilities, and petty annoyances of adulthood -- and of French citizenship.

I spent a few minutes mulling this over in the car as we drove away from charming Villeneuve la Garenne. I've now got twenty hours of practice driving to spend with an instructor before I can take the driving exam. An exam that will likely be easier to pass, but just as difficult to schedule with the préfecture as the written exam. And all of this could have been avoided if, instead of Massachusetts or Washington, my US license had been issued by Florida or New Hampshire. Rite of initiation, lesson one: the arbitrariness of fate at the hands of civil servants, perhaps?

I sighed and admitted one thing: at least with twenty of hours of mandatory driving practice, I might finally master parallel parking.

Becoming truly Parisian?

2010-08-10T20:58:00.000+02:00

When Parisians are rude (which, let's face it, is common in all big cities) or just disrespectful of the rules (a favorite French pastime is the making and subsequent breaking of arbitrary regulations) and are called on it, they seem to have a standard response.

They don't deny wrongdoing, and they certainly don't apologize. They simply haughtily point out something else that is wrong with the situation.

The killer statement, usually only tangentially related to the perceived fault, is not an excuse. If it undermines the whistle blower in some way, tant mieux, but even that isn't necessary. It is simply the verbal equivalent of a disdainful shrug, a way of saying with a flourish that if everything's gone merdique anyway, why criticize little old me?

For example, a woman cuts in line at the produce stand at the local market. The vendor or another customer calls her on it. She either obstinately holds her place or shuffles to the back of the line, but in either case, she complains loudly about the poor quality of the tomatoes.

Or a car speedily rounds the corner at an intersection, narrowly missing an old lady's dog. The old lady yells out "Assassin!" and the driver calls back through an open window, "There are too goddamn many mutts in this city, anyway."

I'm thoroughly fed up with my driving school. I asked to be scheduled to take the written exam back in March. They found a free date in May, which was subsequently canceled by a strike. Now, they've finally managed to find me a new date, in two weeks. It's August now, and given that after I pass the written exam I have to fit in twenty hours of practice driving before taking the driving exam, I'll be lucky if I get my license by the new year. I understand that this isn't entirely or even primarily the school's fault -- the wait at the préfecture is unacceptable, and everyone knows it. But still, I can't help but feel I'm getting the runaround.

I'll finally be taking the written test on August 17, if all goes as planned, so last Wednesday I went down to the school for a few last in-person practice sessions. The ambiance in the exam room is very high school: people regularly make comments out loud, answer cell phones, or slink in late, despite prominently posted signs reminding them of the rules (see paragraph 1).

Sessions start hourly at five past, and I arrived ten minutes ahead of schedule. Usually by then the previous practice video is over, and the participants are sitting bored in their chairs. I went to open the door, and noticed at the last second that a new sign had been added: "Entering during a session is strictly prohibited." I noticed a second later that the video was still on question 39 of the 40-question test. I was already holding the door half open, so I shrugged and started to walk in anyway.

"Madame!" The secretary sternly called after me. "Madame! You can't do that. You can't enter while a session is in progress. You must wait outside." She had a voice like a hall monitor. A former me would have been embarrassed or something, but I was indignant: at thirty-three years old it was already irritating enough to be back in Driver's Ed, but to be treated like an unruly teenager was too much.

So I responded like a Parisian.

"Oh, so you're behind schedule today?" I said with just the right note of annoyance. Then I stonily sat down on the couch to wait.

She didn't care of course. But my husband was impressed.

Cheese for real men

2010-08-07T00:14:00.003+02:00

I love French cheese. The seemingly infinite varieties may according to de Gaulle make the country ungovernable, but what do I care? Bring on the Roquefort, Epoisses, all the cheeses that run and spread, all the round goat cheeses wrapped in chestnut leaves, and the squared-off pyramids dusted with ash.

All the cheeses, in short, that I can't eat right now.

I'm a little bit frustrated, you see. My husband does his best to track down the best of the pasteurized variety, but let's face it, it just isn't as tasty. He rightfully still buys the unpasteurized stuff for himself and le Petit.

Le Petit, meanwhile, has picked up the important question that gets asked frequently at the dinner table: "Est-ce que c'est pasteurisé ?"

He doesn't know what it means and we explain that he doesn't have to worry, that it's just a question important for Mommy and the baby in her tummy.

"You can eat this," my husband explained jokingly, "because this is cheese for real men." He said it in French, of course: fromage pour les hommes.

As we laughed over le Petit's head, he assimilated this new information, as three-year-olds do. And he apparently noticed, too, that "les hommes" is pronounced with an added Z to meld "les" and "hommes" harmoniously together, without the silent H of the singular form.

The next day, we took out the cheese and asked him which one he wanted. He pointed out a block of unpasteurized Pyrenean sheep's milk cheese and said, "I want that one. Because je suis un Zhomme, moi!"

Fermeture annuelle

2010-07-14T00:41:00.003+02:00

So, we're off for two and a half weeks of vacation tomorrow (and how in heck do I have so much vacation these days, you ask? I'm mostly burning through it all before I go on maternity leave, so next year, I assure you, won't be so much of a party.) We'll be in Charente with family for the long Bastille Day weekend, then Brittany for one week, and the Lot for the next. I will be writing, though I doubt I'll have the ability to post anything remotely. I'll have plenty to share when I get back, I hope. We'll be back at the end of July -- just in time for the rest of Paris to disappear for the remainder of the summer.

(I know, given how rarely I've been posting these days, who'll notice my absence? I'm going for quality, not quantity. Yeah, that's it!)

Le Petit did just fine, by the way, during my trip to Seattle. He only missed me from time to time, like when I called up or when he woke up in the morning. My husband loved the one-on-one time with him, and had things running incredibly smoothly when I returned. In fact, I had to learn some of the new routines they'd put in place during my absence.

Le Petit's favorite birthday present was a new trottinette, or three-wheeled push scooter. It has a basket in front and an obnoxiously loud bicycle horn. Le Petit woke up this morning, ran to the sliding glass door in the living room, and checked that it was still out on the balcony.

"Ah, il est là!" he exclaimed. It's still there. And only then did he go back to go potty, get dressed, and eat breakfast. First things first, after all.

Three

2010-07-12T22:57:00.004+02:00

Le Petit turned three today.

Three years ago, at approximately this time of night, I was worrying what the next hour would bring and what the next twenty years would bring, and I was pushing hard, apparently without making anything move forward into the future.

Today we took out the baby book, and I showed le Petit a picture of me with a round belly.

"See, that's Mommy, when you were in my tummy. You were itty-bitty then."

I turned the page.

"And then, three years ago today, you came out of my tummy. See, here we are at the hospital." That babyhood seems long, long behind us now.

Le Petit has grown into a little boy overnight, or perhaps over the last few weeks. I don't notice the changes until they're here. Maybe the transformation happened during my trip to Seattle. Maybe its still happening now, restricted exclusively to the days when I'm at work. Or maybe he's doing all his growing up at night, tucked into his new "big boy bed," curled up and dreaming against a wall of pillows. Wherever or however it is happening, he's growing by centimeters and by complex sentences behind my back. The pediatrician informed us that, according to the French growth charts, he has the height and weight of a four-year-old. His verbal expression is more sophisticated every day. And my husband noticed yesterday that we've hit the "whys."

Except that why, in our household, is still exclusively "pourquoi."

I may change my mind in six months, but right now I'm thrilled to have reached the whys. Bring on the endless interrogations, the chains of questioned cause and effect that will lead me to drag what little I remember of history and physics from the depths of my brain! Bring on the "Mommy, I've been wondering..."! I've been looking forward to this for three years.

This morning, for the benefit of my husband (translated into English, for 90% of le Petit's remarks are still in French):

"Why are there thunderstorms?"

My husband: "Because a mass of warm air meets of a mass of cold air."

Le Petit: "And why does a mass of warm air meet a mass of cold air?"

And for me, this evening:

"Why is the frog fountain [at Versailles, one of his current obsessions] turned off?"

Me [forgetting that the frog fountain still works, as in Louis XIV's time, without electricity]: "Because the frog fountain takes electricity and water, and we turn it off at night to save both."

Le Petit [remembering that electricity is generated by wind turbines, another one of his current obsessions, and gesturing to an imaginary mountain]: "Why are there wind turbines up there, la haut?"

Me: "We build wind turbines to make energy for lights, and music on the radio, and fountains, and other things."

It went on, the conversation circled around wind turbines and fountains and monuments, then settled into a bedtime story, and finished in a monologue that we listened to over the baby monitor as le Petit drifted off into sleep.

I know every age has its challenges, but I have a feeling that I'm going to dig three years old.

The long-haired ghost of Olympia, Washington

2010-07-05T22:18:00.010+02:00

Nearly nine years ago, a close friend and bridesmaid got up to make a toast at my wedding with a glass of champagne in hand, and to rule out premeditation and malice, perhaps several glasses already downed, and began a monologue that made me sink into my chair and try to disappear under the tablecloth.

"Ever since I've known my friend," she began in a clear, loud, and authoritative voice, "she has been with a lot of losers." She paused for effect.

"A whole lot of losers."

My brother-in-law, who was ensuring the simultaneous translation of all English toasts into French, hesitated before repeating what he'd heard. If I remember correctly, he was merciful; "loser" became "mec" or "guy." Only a mild improvement, but he did his best.

"Lots and lots of losers."

I held my breath, wondering if my friend was planning to go into the gory details of my recent past relationships.

"So we," she motioned to the other bridesmaids seated nearby, "We were all quite relieved when she found A." They all laughed on cue. Had they known she was planning to do this to me? I edged up slightly in my chair and shot her a look, wondering if I should try to grab the microphone. But she grinned back at me and I knew she was finished. With a few more words of praise for my new husband, she raised her glass and drank. I breathed deeply and gulped my own champagne in relief, and wondered just how much of the English my new in-laws had understood.

It was true that my recent relationships, although not nearly as numerous as my friend implied, had been all wrong. The worst potential crash-and-burn was my ex-so-called fiancé, who had been easily usurped by A when he came along. But a rapid series of mistakes and narrow escapes had led to my husband, and a relationship that we both recognized instantly as The One. I was ready then to forget the painful errors I'd made to get there, and looking back now, I mostly have. Because while the "losers," as my friend so eloquently summarized, were sometimes nice guys, they were all mistaken paths or dead ends for me. There wasn't a single one with whom I could project myself into the future. One, however, did come very close: S.

S was my high school sweetheart. The prom date, the hero, the obligatory lead romantic role in any American teenage girl's life. Except that central casting didn't plan for one in the filming of my script: I was a nerd and a geek, the girl boys only talked to when they wanted help with their math homework. In the classic high school film comedy, it would have been left at that, but S and I found each other through another medium: computers. This was before Facebook, back when the Internet was restricted to academics and industry, and hapless geeky teenagers found each other behind green screens connected to local dial-up bulletin board systems. Through the reassuring anonymity of pseudonyms (S is not his real first initial, but the first initial of his 'nym), we could discuss, gossip, "geek out," and even flirt, and with enough courage, eventually arrange in groups to meet in person at a local coffee shop.

It was at such a meeting that I first saw S. His bulletin board system was in Olympia, Washington, which was an hour south of my home in Seattle. Olympia passed for a small town, and didn't even have a decent coffee shop at the time, so the local geeks met at Denny's. But my dad lived in Olympia, and I visited him regularly on the weekends, so one day I met S at Denny's on a Saturday afternoon.

He had long blond hair that fell halfway down his back in a ponytail. He had round glasses, and, to me, the look of a handsome American teenage hero, softened by an aura of geekiness. He first smiled and I melted (not that it took much at the time). In the parlance of our generation, we didn't "go out together" right away, and I can't remember when, officially, he became my boyfriend. By the end of high school, we were certain we would be together forever.

He first took me to his homecoming dance in his dad's white Toyota pickup. A year older than I was, he could already drive. I think I remember tentatively exchanging kisses, maybe our first, behind the wheel of that truck, in the muddy parking lot of a restaurant in the foggy darkness of the Port of Olympia. We circled around Olympia's downtown, all five blocks of it, to arrive in the park where he'd arranged a white-tablecloth-covered table in the gazebo. There was dessert, a red rose, and parents with cameras hopping out from behind the bushes to play amateur paparazzi. At age 16, I thought such a date couldn't be upstaged. He surpassed himself nevertheless, not just by other romantic gestures, but by always, always, being there to listen to me. He understood me in a way that no one else has understood me until A.

Soon his dad's pickup was replaced by his very own hand-me-down Volkswagen Rabbit, a gift from an uncle. It was dull chocolate brown and had a sunroof that leaked water, which was mighty practical in the Pacific Northwest, but I loved it, because it was so S. S taught me to fearlessly take apart a computer and put it back together. He introduced me to strange music, from Pink Floyd to German techno. He took me to my first and only monster truck rally, where we sat with John Deere hats pulled down low over our foreheads and watched the action, sharing our half-serious commentary with each other. While faultlessly respectful to everyone, he instinctively distrusted anyone who fit any mold, and was more comfortable than most teenagers in breaking his own. He read voraciously. When he wrote to me, or when we spent hours talking on the phone, we never ran out of things to say.

The next scenes in the film flicker by without surprise: we go off to college, at opposite ends of the country. He goes to a school a three-hour drive away, and I to a school a six-hour flight away. We promise to stay together and I break that promise. We see one another during vacations, briefly get back together a couple of times, but the distance and my immaturity and indecision are always too much for me to conquer. After graduation, I stay on the east coast while he goes back to Olympia, and we lose touch. I meet and marry A, and blush at my friend's toast. Two years later I move to France.

When I visit now, I find Olympia hasn't changed much since I left. Just as before, its status as state capital confers a certain importance and economic stability, and its status as home to the alternative Evergreen State College gives it neo-hippie cred. It has two high schools, a port, a mall, a Costco, a farmer's market, and even several good coffee shops. Perhaps I should stop thinking of it as a small town. Yet when I'm staying with my dad, I'm always amazed that my path doesn't cross S's somewhere. He must shop at the same stores, park in the same parking lots, walk down the same streets. Each time I'm in town, I look for him, not knowing how I'd introduce A or le Petit, not sure he'd want to see me, but ready to run up and tap him on the shoulder nonetheless.

I was in Olympia two weeks ago. For two days, the cold, damp curse that has held the region since spring lifted. It was warm, the sun chased away the clouds, and I finally got out the sandals I'd started to regret bringing in my luggage from Paris. The Olympic Mountains were holding vigil on the horizon, and Puget Sound was luminous in the golden early evening. After dinner I was too restless to stay inside.

I walked along the water, swinging around the end of the bay, crossing through the abandoned lots near the port where sidewalks and new projects have recently sprouted. I passed in front of the empty farmer's market, cut through the port parking lot and rejoined the boardwalk. That was when I started to look for S again. There were people everywhere on land and on water, chatting noisily on the patios of restaurants, dangling their feet over the edge of the pier, pushing strollers, paddling kayaks, throwing stones as far as they could into the still, rose-gold water. In the Northwest, sunshine draws out people like ants to spilled sugar. I felt almost certain I'd see S somewhere.

Years ago, six months before we moved to France, was when I last saw S. We were at a friend's wedding in San Francisco, and although we were both logistically solo for the occasion, we were also both happily together in life with someone else. I told S about A, about our then tentative plans to move to Paris. He told me about his fiancée. He glowed when he spoke of her. After our friend's short, simple, beautiful Quaker ceremony, S turned to me said that that was what he wanted for his wedding. Just what was really important. The essential.

I followed him into the reception hall, grateful that we were the first to arrive and alone. It was the last scene in the film. I told him something I'd heard once, something so trite it would be panned in any review, but it felt true enough to me. You only remember two loves: your first, and the love of your life. You were the first. And A is the love of my life. I wanted you to know that. I then apologized for how I'd treated him, an apology I'd guiltily kept to myself for so long, and let the gaps between the words say the rest. He nodded and squeezed my hands and looked at me in astonishment.

A few years later, I asked for news of S from our mutual friend. A rolling postscript before the credits was all I got: he'd heard from a friend of a friend that things with the fiancée didn't work out. He knew nothing more. I later found S on Facebook and became "friends," but he's apparently even more skeptical of the forum than I am, and rarely updates his status. He has no relationship data listed, but he also doesn't maintain a profile picture, both choices I have to admire. After a brief friendly message, he stopped responding to my hey-how's-life-been-treating-yous. I suppose it is just as well.

I climbed the wooden tower at the end of the boardwalk. In one direction, I could see the Capitol building, the lake, the evergreen forests that hide the greater part of town. In the other direction, the mountains and the Sound were still there, heartachingly beautiful against a sky that was now fading to violet. Such days hold all the elements to make me acutely homesick. A couple of teenagers climbed up the tower after me. The girl held a bunch of balloons and posed in front of the view of the Sound, then laughed. A boy with an earring and a camera took her picture.

I slowly started walking back to my dad's, my sandals pinching my feet. I wondered why I was so intent on accidentally bumping into S. I realized that he represents the path not taken. The me who stayed. The choices that would have kept me in Seattle, or even Olympia, and not led me willing, happy yet homesick across an ocean.

I don't regret the choices I've made, and I can't imagine life without A or le Petit. I know, too, that A is incomparable to anyone else. Certainly not the idealized high school sweetheart, who no matter how right for the role he was at age 17, is not someone I ever truly knew in the way I know A. S and I grew inexorably apart after high school and accepted the inevitable. A and I recognized each other when we met, and fought across timezones to hold onto what we knew was already written somewhere to be true. And, in the twelve years since, we've learned even more about how right we were when we took that chance.

Yet, frivolous as it is, part of me still imagines the Me That Might Have Been living on in a very different and entirely fictional happily-ever-after. It has more to do with my bittersweet, longed-for, self-imposed exile than S himself. Since I wanted S and his fiancée to incarnate that happily-ever-after, part of me is also glad that I never do manage to run into S. I picture him madly in love and married, with kids and a house and a new Volkswagen, and a story he sometimes tells of his half-forgotten first love who now lives in Paris. What would I say if I met him and it wasn't true?

As I turned round the end of the bay heading back, I saw a family of three walking toward me in the distance. The woman was wearing a baby in a Bjorn, and the father had long hair held back in a ponytail. It looked blond. I thought to myself, yes! And then, no, a few steps later I saw it was a trick of the strange late-day sunlight. He was too short to be my S, anyway. They came closer and I confirmed my mistake. I smiled maybe a little too broadly when they passed, overflowing with tenderness despite myself.

They must've thought I was crazy. I prefer to say that I'd just seen a ghost.

Fish seeks water

2010-06-21T05:43:00.008+02:00

"Welcome home. Or I guess I shouldn't say that."

The day I arrived at my mother's, I'd called up a friend who's known me in both Seattle and Paris. No, Seattle is still home, I assured her, in an immutable way, that both is and isn't true. We were planning to get together for dinner the next day. All I could think about were burgers, Alaska salmon, steamed clams and the other things I would never see on a menu in Paris. She could take me anywhere in town, I told her.

I arrived at the airport on Thursday morning, sans husband and child. The ten-hour direct flight had felt almost like a guilty pleasure; I read Le Monde from cover to cover, watched two films, and slowly ate the six macarons that I'd bought at La Duree in the departure terminal. But in the days and hours before I left I had intermittently shuddered with guilt. Before I left, le Petit had just started calling me "Mommy" instead of "maman." It was like a revelation to him, the mysterious power of the word to get my attention.

"Mommy," he said.

"Yes, hon?"

"Mommy."

"Yes?"

"Mommy."

"That's me."

"Mommy."

This went on for a while. Le Petit's eyes were alight, he looked as he'd just discovered the words to a magic spell. What would he think with Mommy gone? He would be in the best of hands -- my capable and generous husband had taken on ten days of full-time kid duty extending over father's day weekend -- and I didn't worry whether he would be all right, just that I was somehow letting him down (and my husband too). We talked about the trip, about the plane, about the fact that Mommy would be home in ten days. Let's count them: one, two, three, four...

Ten days. Ten hour flight. Nine hours of jet lag. Worse than jet lag, I felt the expectation lag of not knowing what awaited me in what should be familiar territory. I called my mom and waited to be picked up at the curb at the arrival level at Sea-Tac. People took long draws on cigarettes in front of the "No Smoking" sign, and cars were parked three lanes deep despite the "No Parking, No Stopping" announcement that played over the PA system on endless loop. What had happened to my courteous, blindly law-abiding fellow Americans? Back in Paris, people were grudging adhering to the indoor smoking ban and, thanks to the ubiquitous radar controls, slowing down on the highway. If no one held to the stereotypes anymore, I'd never remember where I was.

Once home at my mom's, I took a walk up to the small shops on 15th street, searching in vain for enough sunshine to transport me to the correct time or expectation zone. The weather in Seattle was conforming to Paris, too, though a bit colder, perhaps. I was still incapable of mentally transforming Fahrenheit into Celsius. I walked into a drug store, bought some small things including a postcard of the Seattle skyline to mail to le Petit (he'd recognize the Space Needle and search for the Eiffel Tower, no doubt), and fumbled while counting out my change. Why did the currency look so strange? The Euros I had quarantined into a corner of my wallet suddenly looked like Monopoly money.

I walked back through the neighborhood, admiring the brightly-painted wooden houses, their front porches and leaded-glass bay windows, their lush green and immaculately-groomed gardens sloping down to the street. Anything can grow in Seattle as long as it can handle dripping wet from all its leaves for ten months out of the year. If I lived back home, I would live here, and I would have one of these porches, one of these gardens. Except, the Francophile Voice of Reason insisted, if you lived back home, you would never be able to afford a house here. And what about le Petit's school, and your husband's job, and health insurance, and how exactly would you expect to take a year of maternity leave? Burning with jealousy, I discreetly walked around families who were gathered chatting on the sidewalk.

The next day, I met my friend for dinner. We gossiped in French, switching to English when the waitress appeared. I was grateful I remembered the correct American script to order my meal, and was mentally jostled by her 'awesomes' and 'greats.' To her, I was a foreign tourist: when I asked to take the rest of my dessert home with me, she offered me a plastic fork, "to take back to your hotel room."

I belong neither here nor there. A fish out of water both places, although most of the time I hardly notice it. Being "other" is part of what I enjoy about living in Paris. My accent gives me away and gives me permission to be timid or make constant mistakes, something of which in truth I've always been guilty, just never with such freedom. In France, I feel more at home and more daring with this ever-present safety net. But when I am back in Seattle, I am strangely confronted with unsettling familiarity. I belong here. But I don't. And either way, I miss it terribly.

Two days later, I was getting used to being a Seattleite again. I stood at the corner of an empty intersection downtown in the drizzling rain holding my folded umbrella under my arm, waiting for the light to turn green. Although my glasses were specked with drops, I knew intuitively that this rain wasn't worth it. And as if complacency had soaked into my bones along with the rain, I didn't bother scanning to see if any cars were coming, I conformed to the local custom and waited.

What if I just stayed? The Icelandic volcano could start spewing ash again, all transatlantic air traffic could stop, or I could just decide on my own, with no natural catastrophe, not to go back. I could buy a Seattle bungalow. I would paint the cedar shingle siding blue and white. I would plant ferns in the flower beds and hang a swing on the front porch and watch the rain from my front window. Two men, umbrella-less, stood next to me on the curb, wearing their baseball caps backwards and their t-shirts hanging out of their baggy shorts. They impetuously crossed the street against the light and I followed them.

I climbed a few blocks, caught the bus, and sat meditatively as it swayed along its route back to 15th street. I got off at the stop across from the hospital where I was born, from which I walked back to my mom's house. There were no families in the front yards today, no children outside playing, just a few people in Gore-tex rain gear walking their dogs.

I called my husband to wish him him happy Father's Day. He and le Petit were staying in Troyes with my in-laws.

"What's the weather like there?" I asked.

"Cold. Rainy. Windy."

"Same here."

I talked for a while to le Petit. I slipped into French for the benefit of my mother-in-law, who was holding the phone and helping with the simultaneous translation from toddler-speak into comprehensible phone-speak. Le Petit was excited to be helping watering the plants. That's how much his grandparents love him: they let him water their plants in the rain.

"Au revoir, maman."

"You take care. I miss you, little guy, and I love you."

"I love you!" le Petit repeated. Although I tell him I love him every night before I say goodnight, this was the first time I could remember him saying it back to me, and tears almost came to my eyes.

"I love his accent!" marveled my mother-in-law.

It was true, he'd said it exactly -- exactly -- like me.