French Twist (3 page)

One result of this is that, for the first four years of her existence, Daphne found her way to our bed
every
night. Another by-product: Although my kids eat relatively well (that is, compared to many of their pals, who tend to consume only things that are white—mainly noodles, cheese, and more noodles), dinnertime hardly resembled the organized, well-mannered family meals of my own youth; most of all, I was tired of negotiating over
everything
.

I needed to get French.

I’ve already introduced you to the three most important people in this story, but there are many others.
Il faut tout un village
, as Hillary Clinton might’ve said were she born in Paris.

As mentioned earlier, there is no shortage of French families for me to investigate, as the French seem to be very fond of Brooklyn. In addition to the many French
children who attend my daughters’ school, there are abundant restaurants, boutiques, and cafés teeming with willing subjects.

Then there is also France.
Que peut-on faire?
I had to spend some time in the native land of the well behaved. I just had to. Not sure I had to do all of that shopping in Paris, but, again, what can one do? (In English that time.)

Luckily for me, the French are a proud people, and I have yet to encounter a Frenchie unwilling to discuss their inborn ways at length, with the exception of a trio of moms at French-English story time at a library on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but I blame that on the bilingual American mom who poisoned them against me with her skepticism. Of course, I also had my inner circle of French confidants, always available to guide me on my quest. However, although most French people are endowed with a healthy dose of pride, for the most part I found that they are also rather private, so I’ve christened all of the Frenchies in this book with new names as well.

As you will see, I turned to a veritable French army to help me navigate this brave new parenting world. But that’s not to say I agree with and think we should emulate everything the French do. There is plenty we Americans get right—I am a big believer in the can-do part of our cultural DNA—and I certainly don’t suggest throwing the baby out with the bathwater, no matter how poorly behaved the baby might be.

For instance, although they discussed a spanking ban in French parliament a few years ago,
la fessée
, as it’s
called, is very much alive in France. Spanking is still legal here as well, but I saw more spanking in one week in France than I’ve seen in the last ten years in Brooklyn.

The paddle aside, it is not so surprising that I zeroed in on the French. My mother passed down to me a bit of Huguenot blood and, along with it, boasting rights to a rebel affiliation with the French. Perhaps it is from her own grandmother Rose Chabot (Wait! That’s her real name. New rule: The dead keep their given names in this book. The French love rules) that my mom acquired a respect of French customs. When I was a kid, both of my parents would often point to the “grace” and “poise” of the French as something to behold—and imitate. When one of my brothers was born with a physical disability, my parents chose to bring him to Lourdes in the French Pyrenees, out of all of the holy sites in the world, with hopes of landing a miracle. There was an attitude in the house I grew up in that the French knew how to do things right. I am sure that I internalized this bias, and my feelings toward the French also developed into something a little stronger—a bit of a fetish, I’ll admit. But let’s just call it a healthy case of Francophilia, shall we? Sounds much nicer and less suggestive of dungeon-dwelling spankers and thigh-high boots with too many buckles. I first visited Paris when I was sixteen, and that’s when the love truly took flight. It. Is. So. Beautiful. When I look around my home today, I count no less than eight replicas of the Eiffel Tower.

I knew I was going to marry my husband on our first Halloween together, sixteen years ago, when he dressed up
as Tintin, who, while technically the creation of a Belgian writer and illustrator, has been embraced most passionately by the French. (Oona recently discovered Tintin in our stacks and, of course, took to the stories like Captain Haddock takes to booze. I had to ask myself,
How would a French parent respond when their six-year-old asked
, “
What’s an opium den?
” Thanks a lot, Tintin.) At the baby shower for my first child, we received two copies of
The Red Balloon
in French, one in English, and then later came the Criterion Collection DVD of the movie as well. My “good” plates are the Pillivuyt Brasserie Collection, featuring the original menus—with prices in francs—of French restaurants and cafés from the 1920s.

My Francophilia spiked even higher when I began looking to the French for parenting wisdom. Early on in my quest, it took on strange forms and I began to see even my most quotidian experiences through Franco-tinted lenses. Last summer, for instance, the girls, Mac, and I spent a week on the Jersey shore. This was before I’d waded all that deep into the French end of the parenting pool, so we acquiesced when the kids said they would rather swim in the overly chlorinated and packed hotel pool than the wide-open ocean, which beckoned only a couple hundred feet away. But the French approach was very much on my mind.

So we sat on the side, dangling our ankles in the weirdly warm water, while Daphne called, “Look at me, Mommy! I’m a shark, Mommy!” And Oona hollered, “Watch me go down the slide, Daddy!”

Over and over again. And then once more. Oh, okay, and then once more.

It was while sitting there one afternoon that I eavesdropped on a handful of older kids—young teens—playing a pool game. From what I could gather, here’s how the game worked: One kid held the wall at one side of the pool, with all the others grouped at the far end. The lone swimmer—or catcher in the tide, if you will—gave the group a topic: favorite movie, say, or favorite food. The group then decided among themselves on a collective answer and told the catcher to guess what it was. When the catcher guessed correctly—
Ace Ventura
!—the group of swimmers took off for the opposite wall and the catcher tried to … catch as many of them as he could.

I watched the game progress with mild curiosity between my poolside cheerleading duties, until one round sucked in my interest. The category was favorite food.

Catcher: “Chicken!” No one in the group budged. Catcher: “Chicken parm!” No budging. Catcher: “Chicken parm with linguini!” The group practically emptied the pool of water, their paddling was so explosive.

Chicken parm with linguini? That was their favorite food? And the catcher knew that? Perhaps this was a regional anomaly—but somehow I didn’t think so. It was more likely that, all across this great land of ours, small packs of teen swimmers were splashing about, incited by the mere mention of chicken parm with linguini.

Before I knew it, sitting there at this New Jersey motel pool, my mind had wandered far beyond the Atlantic. Perhaps
at that exact moment, a similar game was going down in a hotel pool on the western coast of France. Only, instead of chicken parm with noodles, it went something like this: “Duck! Duck Margaret! Duck Margaret
avec
sauce orange!” I remember thinking that it might not be too late to shape kids who’d turn into young teens with sophisticated tastes and interesting ideas about food. Of course, the French don’t say “duck.” I had a lot of work ahead of me.

I never did find out what kind of swimming-pool games French kids play, but I unearthed much, much more.

Incredibly, for an American mom used to fast-changing parenting trends, French child-rearing techniques didn’t seem to have changed all that much over the years. In some ways this was scary—that whole spanking business—but in most others I have to say it was a relief. What new mom or dad, after all, has not been utterly baffled by the teeming shelves of the local Barnes & Noble’s parenting section? Even what you think is the simplest question—how the hell do I get my kid to sleep through the night?—morphs into a bloody battleground of conflicting information. No pressure though: Choose the wrong approach and you are only setting your kid up for a life of misery, abject failure, and—
mon Dieu!
—a non–Ivy League education.

The best part? We are expected to make these incredibly huge, life-altering decisions while experiencing terrorist-suspect levels of sleep deprivation. It’s a wonder any parents at all make it through alive—never mind the kids.

So, as you might imagine, I quite literally cried tears of
immense, body-shaking joy when, five years into parenthood, I began to think there might be another way. A French way.

Was every idea suggested by my posse of French informants a resounding success? Of course not. Was I able to implement all the good advice I received? You’re a parent—or know one. You tell me.

But this much is unequivocally true: After surprisingly little Frenchifying time, Daphne’s McEnroe moments were diminishing (not much to be done about those Belushi tendencies—the kid is spirited!). There was also a perceptible decrease in Oona’s supercilious eye-rolling. Now, as I write this, many months and months into the big experiment, the girls are even exhibiting an unmistakable fondness for the French. We’ve talked about spending a future summer in Paris—and both girls light up discussing
how delicious
the pastries will be. Not long ago, Oona discovered the French–English dictionary on our bookshelf and started thumbing through it with great interest. Soon after, my husband and I heard her giggling over the palm-sized book in the next room. What, we asked Oona, could be so funny in a dictionary? She demurred for a moment, uncertain if she should share her finding. She feared we would think it was inappropriate for a seven-year-old. That’s okay, we assured her, just tell us.

“Okay,” she said, drawing a breath.
“C’est une garce.”
Translation: “He/she is a bitch.”

Oona and Daphne cackled and did a little dance together,
delighting in the tiny transgression. The French had done what not long ago seemed impossible: They’d brought Wharton and Belushi together.

What other miracles were they capable of? I was determined to find out.

Chapter Two
 

My God. I love this place
.

I often feel that way when I’m in Paris, but my heart practically exploded when a pregnant French friend announced that she was passing on the salad course at our lunch out in Montmartre. With a glass of red wine in hand because “the iron is good for the baby,” she explained, “In France, we try to limit the raw, especially green leafy vegetables.” If I am ever pregnant again (the longest of long shots), I am so going to be French about it. I like vegetables as much as the next girl—maybe even more, depending on who I am standing next to—but when I was pregnant I hated them with a zeal usually reserved for things like blisters
or bad haircuts. I was nauseated all through both of my pregnancies and really would have been happy eating nothing but instant mashed potatoes and oatmeal. However, I obsessively choked down as much kale, chard, and romaine as I possibly could. For the baby! I would have dutifully done the same with goat eyeballs if someone told me I had to—for the baby.

In retrospect, it is almost embarrassing that it took me so long to pay attention to the French. I should have known it the moment I began reading
The New Basics
by Dr. Michel Cohen (a Frenchman, of course). After a steady diet of the utterly alarmist
What to Expect
books and the all-too-tender sentiments of the Sears family of pediatric writers, I was ready for the direct, far more laissez-faire attitude of
le bon docteur
. I was eight months’ pregnant with my first child when a friend—a childless pal, now that I think about it—randomly sent me the book, which presents Cohen’s take on the early years of child-rearing. I read it eagerly and then, when I’d finished, I did what any other American mother would do: I read about eight more books on the topic. Because that is how we do it—we approach pregnancy like a job, gobbling up everything we can on the subject so that we are experts on every theory. And, as with most jobs, a certain amount of drudgery accrues. I have discovered that, in addition to ensuring mastery of these theories, this strategy to parenting also, unfortunately, results in utter confusion and frustration.

Instead, in
The New Basics
introduction, Cohen writes, “I hope that reading this book will help you relax
as a parent.” The book came out just one month before my first child was born, but it took me nearly seven years to really pay attention. Relax! Such a simple idea, and yet one I’d completely overlooked whenever my baby developed even a low-grade fever or a hint of diarrhea or, heaven forbid, dropped her pacifier out of reach of a sterilizer.

Now, as I am going back through all of the literature I consumed in the early years, trying to figure out how my generation of American parents arrived in our current state of tumult with our kids, I see some of what I missed. The directive gleaned in entry after entry from the good French doctor suggests that we all chill out a little. For instance, here is what he has to allow for parents who worry about bowed legs: “I don’t know of any babies with straight legs. They all have slight bowing, and some have a little more than others. But their legs always straighten with age, although some adults keep a slight residual bowing, which is of no concern, especially if you’re a cowboy.” This is the tone of his book, and, good God, I love it. And Cohen’s book, written for Americans, is like an inflamed polemic compared to the baby manuals most French parents-to-be consult.