French Children Don't Throw Food Read online

  Very few women make a fuss about this. French mums often ask me where I plan to deliver, but never how. They don’t seem to care. In France, the way you give birth doesn’t situate you within a value system or define the sort of parent you’ll be. It is, for the most part, a way of getting your baby safely from your uterus into your arms.

  In France, giving birth without an epidural isn’t called ‘natural’ childbirth. It’s called ‘giving birth without an epidural’ (accouchement sans péridurale). A few French hospitals and maternity clinics now have birthing pools and giant rubber balls for labouring women to hug. But few French women choose to deliver this way. That 1 or 2 per cent of non-epidural births in Paris are, I’m told, mostly crazy Anglophones like me, or French women who didn’t get to the hospital in time.

  The earthiest French woman I know is Hélène. She takes her three kids on camping trips and breastfed them all past age two. Hélène also had an epidural at each delivery. For her, there’s no contradiction. She likes some things au naturel, and some with a giant dose of drugs.

  The difference between France and America crystallizes for me when, through mutual friends, I meet Jennifer and Éric. She’s an American who works for a multinational company in Paris. He’s a Frenchman who’s in advertising. They live just outside Paris, with their two daughters. When Jennifer got pregnant for the first time, Éric just assumed that they would find a doctor, choose a hospital and have the baby. But Jennifer brought home a stack of baby books and pressed Éric to study them with her.

  Éric still can’t believe how Jennifer wanted to script the delivery. ‘She wanted to give birth on a balloon, give birth in a bath,’ he recalls. He says the doctor told her, ‘It’s not a zoo here, or a circus. Basically you will give birth like everyone else, on your back, legs open. And the reason is that if there is a problem, then I can do something.’

  Jennifer also wanted to deliver without anaesthesia, so that she could feel what it was like to give birth. ‘I’ve never heard of a woman wanting to suffer so much to have a kid,’ Éric says.

  What stands out for both Éric and Jennifer is what I’ve come to think of as the ‘Croissant Story’. When Jennifer went into labour, it became clear that all her birthing plans were for naught: she needed a Caesarean. The doctor sent Éric into the waiting room. Eventually, Jennifer delivered a healthy baby girl.

  Afterwards, Éric came into the recovery room, and happened to mention that he recently ate a croissant. Three years later, Jennifer’s blood still boils when she thinks about that bread roll. ‘Éric wasn’t actually physically present [in the waiting room] during the whole thing. He went out and got a croissant! When they rolled me into the operating room, Éric walks out of the clinic, goes down the street, goes to the bakery, and buys a couple of croissants. He comes back, eats his croissant!’

  This is not what Jennifer had envisioned. ‘My husband needs to be sitting there biting his nails, thinking, “Oh, will it be a boy or a girl?”’ she says. She mentions that there was a vending machine near the waiting room. He could have bought a bag of peanuts.

  When Éric tells his own version of the Croissant Story, he gets mad too. Yes, there was a vending machine. But ‘It was very stressful, I needed some sugar,’ he says. ‘I was sure there was a bakery just at the corner, and the bakery ended up being a bit far away. But they took her in at seven. I knew that they had one hour of preparation and things like that, and I think she came back out at eleven. So in all this time, yes, I spent at least fifteen minutes going to eat some food.’

  At first, I see the Croissant Story as a classic Men-are-from-Mars tale. But I eventually realize that it’s an Anglo-French parable. For Jennifer, Éric’s selfish pursuit of the croissant signalled that he wouldn’t sacrifice his own comfort for the sake of his family, and the new baby. She worried that he wasn’t sufficiently invested in the project of parenting.

  For Éric, it signalled no such thing. He felt thoroughly invested in the birth, and is an extremely involved father. But at that moment, he was also calm, detached and self-interested enough to walk down the street. He wanted to be a dad, but he also wanted a croissant. ‘In the US sometimes I have the feeling that if it’s not difficult for you, you have to feel bad about that,’ he says.

  I’d like to think I’m the sort of wife who wouldn’t be bothered by the croissant, or at least that Simon is the sort of husband who would hide the crumbs. I do submit a PG-rated birth plan, stating that under no circumstances should Simon be permitted to cut the umbilical cord (he can barely cut the chicken). But since I tend to scream when I get my legs waxed, I don’t think I’m a great candidate for natural childbirth. I suspect I’ll have trouble viewing the pain as a cultural construct.

  I’m more concerned about getting to the hospital in time. Following a friend’s advice, I’ve registered to give birth at a hospital all the way across town. If the baby makes a break for it during rush hour, there could be trouble.

  And that’s if I can get a taxi. The rumour among Paris’s Anglophones (who, being here temporarily, tend not to have cars) is that French taxi drivers refuse to pick up women in labour, for fear that they’ll end up scraping placenta off their seats. A back-seat delivery wouldn’t be ideal for other reasons. Simon is too spooked to even read the instructions for emergency home deliveries in What to Expect.

  My contractions begin around eight o’clock at night. That means I can’t eat the steaming Thai food we’ve just picked up (I will fantasize about pad thai from my hospital bed), but at least the streets are clear. Simon calls a taxi, and I’m quiet while getting in. Let the driver – a moustachioed man in his fifties – try to pry me out.

  I needn’t have worried. As soon as we’re on the road and he hears my yelps from the back seat, the driver becomes ecstatic. He says he’s been waiting his whole career as a taxi driver for this cinematic event.

  As we cross Paris in the dark, I open my seatbelt and slide to the floor of the taxi, moaning from the mounting pain. This is no leg wax. I ditch my faux fantasies of a natural childbirth. Simon opens the windows, either to give me some air or to drown out the unpleasant sounds I’m making.

  Meanwhile, the driver speeds up. I can see the streetlights zipping past overhead. He begins loudly reciting the story of his own son’s birth twenty-five years earlier. ‘Slower, please!’ I plead from the floor, between contractions. Simon is silent and pale, staring straight ahead.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ I ask him.

  ‘Dutch football,’ he says.

  When we arrive at the hospital, the driver pulls up at the emergency entrance, jumps out of the car and sprints inside. It seems he may be planning to join us for the birth. Moments later he’s back, sweaty and panting. ‘They’re expecting you!’ he shouts.

  I lurch into the building, leaving Simon to pay the fare and persuade the driver to leave. The moment I see a midwife, I declare in my clearest French: ‘Je voudrais une péridurale!’ (I would like an epidural). If I’d had a wad of cash I would have waved it at her.

  It turns out that despite the French passion for epidurals, they don’t just perform them on demand. The midwife takes me into an examination room to check my cervix, then looks up at me with a bemused smile. I’m barely three centimetres dilated, out of a possible ten. Women don’t usually ask for epidurals this early on, she says. She won’t summon the anaesthetist from his pad thai for this.

  She does put on the most soothing music I’ve ever heard – a sort of Tibetan lullaby – and rigs me up to a drip that softens the pain. Eventually, exhausted, I fall asleep.

  I’ll spare you the details of my very medicated, very pleasant birth. Thanks to the epidural, pushing the baby out has the precision and intensity of a yoga move, without the discomfort. I’m so focused that I don’t even mind when my obstetrician’s teenage daughter, who lives around the corner, pops in after the delivery to ask her mum for some cash.

  As it happens, the anaesthetist, midwife and doctor are all women
. (Simon, stationed far from the business end, is there too.) The baby comes out as the sun is rising.

  I’ve read that babies look like their fathers when they’re born, to assure the dads of their paternity and motivate them to go out hunting (or investment banking) for the family. My first thought when I see our daughter is that she doesn’t merely resemble Simon; she has his face.

  We cuddle with her for a while, then they dress her up in a chicly understated French outfit, supplied by the hospital, complete with an ecru-coloured beanie on her head. We do give her a proper name. But thanks to the hat, we mostly just call her Bean.

  I stay in the hospital for six days. Staying this long is standard French practice for normal deliveries. (In public hospitals, the national insurance covers just about everything. Private hospitals charge more, so the national insurance only covers part of the total.) In any case, I see no reason to leave. We haven’t yet ordered from the extensive room-service wine list, which includes champagne. There is fresh-baked bread with every meal (no need to go out for a croissant) and a sun-dappled garden where I steal away for walks. On day three, I can’t stop telling Bean, ‘You weren’t born yesterday!’ Simon doesn’t even pretend this is funny.

  As if to emphasize that there are universal parenting principles in France, babies born here come with instructions. Each newborn is issued a white paperback book called a carnet de santé, which follows the child until age eighteen. Doctors record every check-up and vaccination in this book, and plot the child’s height, weight and head size. It also has commonsense basics on what to feed babies, how to bath them, when to go for check-ups, and how to spot medical problems.

  The book doesn’t prepare me for Bean’s transformation. For the first month or so, she continues to look just like Simon, with dark brown eyes and hair. She even has his dimples. If anything’s in doubt, it’s her maternity. My fair-haired, light-eyed genes seem to have lost out to his swarthy Mediterranean ones in a first-round knockout.

  But at about two months old, Bean undergoes a metamorphosis. Her hair turns blonde, and her brown eyes morph improbably into blue. Our little Mediterranean baby suddenly looks like a Swede.

  Technically, Bean is American (she can request French citizenship when she’s older. Simon wasn’t born in Britain, so we can’t immediately make her British either.) But I suspect that her French will surpass mine within a few months. I’m not sure whether we’re going to raise a little Anglo-American girl, or a little French one. We might not have a choice.

  3

  Doing Her Nights

  A FEW WEEKS after we bring bean home, neighbours on our little courtyard begin asking, ‘Is she doing her nights?’ (‘Elle fait ses nuits?’)

  This is the first time I hear the French formulation of ‘Is she sleeping through the night?’ At first I find it comforting. If they’re her nights, then she’ll inevitably claim them. Whereas if they’re just the nights, she might not.

  But I soon find the question irritating. Of course she’s not ‘doing her nights’. She’s two months old (and then three months, and then four). Everyone knows that tiny babies sleep badly. A few of my Anglophone friends have babies that age who go down at 9 pm and wake up at seven. But this seems to be sheer luck. Most parents I know don’t get an uninterrupted night’s sleep until their kids are around a year old. Heck, I know four-year-olds who still wander into their parents’ rooms at night.

  My Anglophone friends and family appreciate this. They tend to ask the more open-ended question: ‘How is she sleeping?’ And even that isn’t really a request for information; it’s a chance for us to vent.

  For us, babies are automatically associated with sleep deprivation. A headline in the Daily Mail declares: ‘Parents of newborns miss out on SIX MONTHS worth of sleep in their child’s first two years,’ citing a study commissioned by a bed company. The article seems credible to readers. ‘Sadly this is true,’ one comments. ‘Our one-year-old daughter hasn’t slept a single night in twelve months, and if we have four hours’ sleep it’s a good night.’ A poll by the National Sleep Foundation in the US found that 46 per cent of toddlers wake up during the night, but just 11 per cent of parents believed that their child had a sleep problem. A toddler’s T-shirt I see in Fort Lauderdale says simply, ‘Party tonight at my crib 3 am.’

  My English-speaking friends tend to view their kids as having unique sleep needs, which they just have to accommodate. I’m walking around Paris with a British artist one day when her toddler son climbs into her arms, reaches under her shirt to hold her breast, then falls asleep. She’s clearly embarrassed that I’ve witnessed this ritual, but whispers that it’s the only way he can nap. She carries him around in this position for the next forty-five minutes.

  Simon and I had of course chosen a sleep strategy. Ours was premised on the idea that it’s critical to keep a baby awake after she feeds. Once Bean is born, we go to enormous lengths to do this. As far as I can tell, it has no effect.

  Eventually, we ditch this theory and try other ones. We keep Bean in the daylight all day and in the dark at night. We bath her at the same time each evening, and try to stretch out the time between her feeds. For a few days I eat almost nothing but crackers and Brie, after someone tells me that fatty food will thicken my breast milk. A New Yorker who stops by says she read that we should make loud whooshing sounds, to mimic the sounds in the womb. We whoosh obediently for hours.

  Nothing seems to make a difference. At three months old, Bean still wakes up several times a night. We have a long ritual in which I nurse her back to sleep, then hold her for fifteen more minutes so that she doesn’t wake up again when I put her back in her Moses basket. Simon’s forward-looking view of the world suddenly seems like a curse: he’s thrown into a nightly depression, convinced that this is going to last for ever. Whereas my myopia suddenly looks like a stroke of evolutionary brilliance. I don’t think about whether this will last six more months (though it will); I just live night to night.

  What’s also consoling is that this is all to be expected. Parents of infants aren’t supposed to get any sleep. Almost all the American and British parents I know say that their kids began sleeping through the night at eight or nine months, or much later. ‘It was really early,’ a friend of Simon’s from Vermont says, consulting with his wife about when their son’s 3 am wake-ups stopped. ‘What was it, at one year old?’ Kristin, a British lawyer in Paris, tells me that her sixteen-month-old sleeps through the night, then adds: ‘Well, when I say “sleeps through the night”, she gets up twice. But each time, only for five minutes.’

  I take great comfort in hearing about parents who have it much worse than we do. They’re easy to find. My cousin, who shares a bed with her ten-month-old, hasn’t gone back to her teaching job, in part because she’s up feeding the baby much of the night.

  The worst story I hear comes from Alison, a friend of a friend in Washington, DC, whose son is seven months old. Alison – a marketing expert with an Ivy League degree – explains that for the first six months of her son’s life, she nursed him every two hours around the clock. At seven months old, he began sleeping four-hour stretches. Alison shrugs off her exhaustion, and the fact that her career is on pause. She feels that she has no choice but to cater to her baby’s punishing, peculiar sleep schedule.

  The alternative to all this night waking is supposedly ‘sleep training’, in which parents leave their babies alone for ‘controlled crying’. I read up on this, too. It seems to be for babies who are at least six or seven months old. Alison tells me that she tried this one night, but gave up because it felt cruel. Online discussions about sleep training quickly dissolve into brawls, in which opponents claim the practice is at best selfish and at worst abusive. ‘Babies are designed to cry when they need something and mothers are designed to respond,’ a mother writes on mumsnet. Another, whose son was waking up every ninety minutes, feels she must justify having done controlled crying. ‘I know that many people will think me intolerably cruel, but I
was losing my sanity,’ she writes.

  Although sleep training sounds awful, Simon and I are theoretically in favour of it. But we’re under the impression that Bean is too young for something so militaristic. Like our Anglophone friends and family, we think Bean wakes up at night because she’s hungry, or because she needs something from us, or just because that’s what babies do. She’s very small. So we give in to her.

  I talk to French parents about sleep too. They’re neighbours, work acquaintances and friends of friends. They all claim that their own kids began sleeping through the night much earlier. Samia says her daughter, who’s now two, started doing her nights at six weeks old; she wrote down the exact date. Stéphanie, a skinny tax inspector who lives on our courtyard, looks ashamed when I ask when her son, Nino, began doing his nights.

  ‘Very late, late late!’ Stéphanie says. ‘He started doing his nights in November, so it was … four months old! For me it was very late.’

  Some French sleep stories sound too good to be true. Alexandra, who works in a French nursery and lives in a suburb of Paris, tells me that both her daughters began sleeping through the night almost from birth. ‘Already in the maternity ward, they woke up for their bottles around 6 am,’ she says.

  Many of these French babies are bottle-fed, or they drink a combination of breast milk and formula. But that doesn’t seem to be a crucial difference. The French breastfed babies I meet do their nights early on too. Some French mums I meet tell me they stopped breastfeeding when they went back to work, at about three months. But by that time their babies were already doing their nights.

  At first I think that I’m just meeting a few lucky French parents. But soon the evidence becomes overwhelming: having a baby who sleeps through the night early on seems to be the norm in France. Just as stories of terrible sleepers are easy to find in the Anglophone world, stories of spectacular sleepers are easy to find among the French. My neighbours suddenly seem less obnoxious. They weren’t baiting me; they actually believed that my two-month-old might already be doing her nights.