And a little child shall lead them

One of the things that I love the most about living in France is its proximity to other countries, which makes international travel a breeze. Thus, we do a lot of it. Our latest trip took us to Bavaria, a very reasonable 6-hour drive from Paris. Le Mot Juste is not an adventure blog, so I won’t delve into the delights of the region (which are many). Instead, I’d like to focus on one particular aspect of travel that has been part of our experience since 2013 and will continue to be part of our experience until we lose our minds and give up altogether: travelling with small children.

Now, I will admit that I once used to be somewhat child-intolerant, but a) that was pretty much limited to screaming babies on public transportation, and even then they had to REALLY be screamy, and b) as the French say, il n’y a que les cons qui ne changent pas d’avis (only idiots never change their minds). I am not an idiot, generally speaking; therefore, I am not averse to changing my mind. With regard to children, I have definitely changed—for now I am on the other side of the aisle, as it were, and find myself frequently confronted with varying degrees of child intolerance.

But this most recent trip took it to a whole other level.

I was not prepared for the amount of blatant anti-child nastiness we encountered on our journey. Blank stares, outright glaring, impromptu lecturing, knocking on our hotel room door to tell us to pipe down…. At one point, we had just arrived in a crowded restaurant whose decibel level was off the charts, and yet we STILL managed to piss off a couple seated at a table next to ours, simply by our encroachment on “their” sphere of existence.

Are we unnaturally obnoxious? We make more noise than a couple, that’s for sure. But we are not insane, shrieking, out-of-control freaks, either. We’re what one might call a “family,” with these things called “children,” which, contrary to what many folks apparently believe, are not in fact miniature adults whose primary goal in life is to conform to other people’s unrealistic expectations. They make noise, and cannot understand why everyone keeps telling them to shut up—or better yet, go away—in a more or less aggressive fashion. 

My little girl, who is three, was “shhh’d” at with irritation in a church in Munich, simply because she was running. Not racing around screeching and knocking statues over, mind you. Just pitter-pattering her little feet as three-year-olds are wont to do. You know, because she was feeling joyful. Did Jesus not say, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these”? I should have said as much to the shhh-er, except my German is limited to dankeschön—and this was not a dankeschön kind of moment.

But lest anyone think that I am singling out Germans, don’t worry; our ability to aggravate is truly without borders.

We have been scolded and scoffed at on the TGV in France on many occasions, simply because our kids were existing too loudly in the library-like silence of the “family” coach.

We travelled to Scotland two summers ago and were dismayed at the number of cozy, welcoming-looking bed and breakfasts that formally refused families. 

Italy is the exception that proves the rule: our kids are treated to a chorus of Che bello! Che bella! at every corner and so UNUSED are we to warm smiles and spontaneous displays of affection from perfect strangers that it often takes us a few days to acclimate. Do Italians have bigger hearts than everyone else? I think they just might!

Contrast that attitude with all the “anti-stroller” restaurants (I’m looking at you, NYC), kid-free zones on trains, and the very real demand for childless flights. Never mind how demonstrably loud modern living is; apparently the sound of a disgruntled baby is so disturbing to some that they would happily pay a premium, just to shield their delicate senses from the nuisance. 

What does it say about our civilization as a whole that we are ready to go to such lengths to exclude entire swaths of it, simply because we find something about “them” insufferable? If we had any sense left in us, we would recognize and cherish the very old and the very young for what they are—our greatest treasure and our greatest hope. Instead, we have turned them into pariahs. The elderly, the sick, the weak: we don’t want to see them. The young, the high-spirited, the willful: we might be okay with seeing them, but we sure as hell don’t want to hear them. We’d rather embrace the insanity of imagining that it was never and will never be our turn—that “they” are nothing like “us.”

How many so-called woke people who pride themselves on their open-mindedness and inclusive attitude toward other cultures, ethnicities, and religions see no hypocrisy what-so-ever in turning up their noses at children? Today, being blatantly intolerant is uncool—unless your intolerance is directed at a child, that is. Then it’s justifiable, for how dare that child not comply with your idea of what she should be? 

You do realize that hating someone because he has ancestry that you don’t like is EVERY BIT AS LUDICROUS as hating someone because she’s a child acting how normal children act, right? Saying “I don’t like children” is NO BETTER than saying “I don’t like short people” or “I don’t like foreigners” or “I don’t like redheads.” All of it is intolerance, and all of it is unacceptable.

How does this even need to be said? And yet clearly it does.

Meanwhile, look around you the next time you’re out. How many couples and even entire families sit together in absolute silence, eyes glued to their telephone screens? The art of human interaction is rapidly fading away; we appear to be more at ease with Siri than we are with one another. And yet we find that normal.

We invite dogs into our restaurants and no one bats an eye. Quite the contrary! Oh, how sweet. Can I pet him? But a child—or worse, a baby? Immediate wariness. Nine times out of ten, when my husband and I enter any restaurant other than a fast food joint with our kids and are shuffling around getting ourselves situated, there are multiple pairs of eyes staring disapprovingly at us. I swear I can feel the judgement like hot coals on my skin. C’est in-sup-por-ta-ble.

How bad is it for you really, childless person? Is someone else’s kid (mine, for example) doing a tap dance in the middle of your dinner plate? Knocking over your cocktail? Setting your hair on fire? Probably not. His PARENTS, on the other hand, are undoubtedly exhausted in every sense of the term. Why? Because nothing—NOTHING—is harder than parenting. It is, to quote Jerry Maguire, “an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will NEVER fully tell you about.” 

On behalf of all parents, try to have some empathy. We are fully aware of the disturbance that our kid(s) can cause, and are trying our best to keep things as calm as possible. We do not need your dark looks, your audible sighs, your eye-rolling, or any of your other insensitive, self-superior, and frankly childish theatrics. You don’t like kids? By all means feel free not to have any. But leave your reverse ageism at home. Better yet, stay at home yourself: it is guaranteed to be quiet and totally free of those small creatures you seem to loathe so much—who, incidentally, also represent the survival of your own foolhardy species.

I was on a plane not that long ago from New York to Paris. A baby cried intermittently throughout the 7-hour flight. It wasn’t fun for anybody—but do you know who it really wasn’t fun for? The mother. She spent the entire time rocking her clearly suffering child, singing to him, and trying to soothe him as best she could while also caring for his sibling seated next to her. When the plane finally began to descend toward the runway, and the ill child’s whimpering intensified, one woman seated two rows up distinctly said, without a shred of irony, “Decapitate him.” 

Decapitate him.

That’s where we are today. And we should be absolutely ASHAMED to have let our “enlightened” values sink so low as to justify pointing our finger at a beleaguered single mother and her sick baby instead of pulling our heads out of our own cold, disdainful asses and going over to ask her what we can do to be helpful.

Naturally, no one took the mother’s defense. So I did. And my husband did. And together we told that passenger and her bloated ego to STFU or go buy herself a spot in first class instead of on a low-cost red-eye that only the heavily drugged would ever have managed to sleep through in the first place.

Tell me this: is it the child whose behavior is truly destructive? Or is it yours, the so-called adult who refuses to accept the nature of children and would rather condemn them for somehow offending your over-privileged sense of decorum?

As we head into the Christmas season, a season that still smiles fondly on children, let us remember why we celebrate it in the first place: because God so loved the world that He took the form of a tiny child in order to save us from ourselves.

But we’d rather smirk at such a notion and write it off as myth, all the better to justify our refusal to love one another in return, whether adult or child—even when deep down, we know better.

The plight of the working SAHM

Here it is September. And I am not writing this from a jail cell or a psychiatric ward, meaning that I have officially survived my son’s first grandes vacances (summer break). Hooray! The French public school system can now resume its life-saving role of civilizing him encouraging his deep sense of right vs. wrong to win out over his possibly deeper urge to wreak havoc on his mother’s fragile sense of self-worth. 

I will let you in on a little-uttered secret among us working SAHMs (Stay At Home Moms): YOU HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO DO THIS. Seriously, who does this? Kinda no one. Why? Because it’s absurdly difficult! Working from home while trying to be a passably decent mother means that your brain is on constant overdrive and yet you never seem to actually accomplish anything. You pour your whole heart into making sure that your kids are rested, fed, safe, clean, and entertained; that your clients are satisfied and faithful; that your husband is … like your clients; and that your house is cozy and relatively free of clutter. Without forgetting your own appearance of course (because c’mon now—French women manage to drop their kids off at school at 8:20 am looking bloody perfect in their 10-piece outfits and sexy-yet-somehow-bicycle-friendly heels).

And yet, despite making what feels like a constant, gargantuan amount of effort, despite multitasking in your sleep (which you get precious little of, incidentally), at the end of the day your kids are dirty and whiney, your clients are requesting last-minute changes, your house is a wreck, you haven’t so much as glanced in the mirror, and your husband, arriving home to pure chaos, surely wonders what in tarnation you’ve been doing for the past 11 hours (other than tweeting insults at Donald Trump, which is a given). Come to think of it, what have I been doing?

I’ve been coaxing little eyes to open, little ears to listen, and little mouths to eat; I’ve been picking out little clothes, wrestling little clothes onto squirming little bodies, washing little clothes, folding little clothes, and putting little clothes away; I’ve been trying to prevent little feet from sliding down the stairs, little hands from getting pinched, little heads from getting bumped, and little fingers from going where they shouldn’t; I’ve been reprimanding for hitting, for not sharing, for drawing on the table for the 50th time, for being rude or crude or mean; I’ve been searching for a lost teddy bear, a lost pacifier, a lost toy car, and a lot of lost marbles (mostly mine); I’ve been taking temperatures, making doctor appointments, going to doctor appointments, picking up medicine, and administering medicine; I’ve been cleaning the floor, the walls, the ceiling, and everything in between with sponges, antibacterial wipes, brooms, and my friend the Magic Eraser; I’ve been changing diapers, changing undies, and explaining how peeing INTO the toilet is preferable to peeing NEXT TO it; I’ve been giving baths, brushing teeth, reading stories, singing lullabies, and promising that witches don’t exist; I’ve been hugging, kissing, swinging, dancing, laughing, and crying too. I’ve been feeling guilty for not seeing my friends more, for not calling my parents more, for not reading more, for not running more, for not doing more, and for not doing it better.

And somewhere in there, I’ve also been managing a business.

The mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion of being a stay-at-home-yet-working mother is impossible to put into words. Normal people know better. Normal people either stay at home with their kids and don’t work, or arrange some form of daycare for their kids and then work. Trying to do both simultaneously is insane. However, my answer to seemingly impossible situations has always been “Yes I Can,” or more accurately, “Don’t Tell Me I Can’t.” And so here I am, with a 4-year-old, a 1-year-old, a writing business, and a new home that we just finished renovating because hey, at this point who’s counting? Add to that the fact that we (still) have no reliable babysitter, no nearby family, and that I promised myself I would only put my kids into daycare after their first birthday, and there you have it: it’s, as the French would say, compliqué (translation: IT’S A COMPLETE SHIT SHOW, BUT I CAN’T VERY WELL GO AND ADMIT THAT NOW CAN I?).

But, and this brings me back to my initial point, I have made it through the summer, i.e. full-time two-kid management while trying to work. Little g is now back in school and Baby c has just begun daycare two full days a week, meaning 18-odd hours of potential concentration time for yours truly. NETFLIX BINGE! Perhaps not, but the next best thing—real, honest-to-God, uninterrupted intellectual work. I don’t much care for the adjective “amazing,” but this calm? This silence? This ability to finish a thought and complete a sentence? It’s amazing. My Bitch-O-Meter is slowly descending from “molten lava” to “somewhat pleasant,” which is a solid win. I’m finally getting stuff done, after what feels like an eternity of bicycling through sauerkraut (pédaler dans la choucroute—a great French expression).

I know that one day I will think back on this period with great fondness and nostalgia—assuming I survive—but I would be lying if I said that it’s anything this side of “stupefyingly hard.” But this is where the little voice in my head pipes up to quote the well-loved line that Tom Hanks’ character delivers in the movie “A League of Their Own,” and it instantly makes me feel somehow lighter: “Of course it’s hard. It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.” I’m not saying that the comparison is entirely spot-on, but the message is: who the hell ever said that playing two full-time roles, that of Super Mom and that of Super Entrepreneur, would be easy? Jean-Philippe NOBODY, that’s who.

The truth is, I’ve never been one to shrink from a challenge; I actually sort of thrive on them (even if I bitch and moan the entire way). So yeah, this is tough—but maybe that’s the whole point. It may kick my ass today, and it may keep on kicking my ass until my kids move out (undoubtedly to go live in the U.S., because karma), but it’s also doing what challenges are supposed to do: improve us. And I am becoming a better person. For one, I’m a lot more compassionate. I laugh at myself more freely. I laugh at a lot of things more freely. My ability to relativize has greatly improved. I may be gaining more gray hair by the day, but each twinkle of silver has significance: a lesson learned, a ray of wisdom received, a jagged edge polished smooth.

The bottom line? My kids are doing great; my business is thriving; my new home is almost fully decorated. In other words, maybe it’ll all be okay after all. 

NO PROMISES THOUGH.

Photo by Jeff Holt

Motherload

I have not written in quite some time about the CHILLUNS, so I am now going to rectify that.

Little g
Little g is several months into French preschool. French preschool begins at age three. It is not obligatory, but something like 99% of French families do it because OMG why wouldn’t you? Little g’s school is nice. It’s public, which is FINE, since public school in France is just great if you live in a decent area, which we do. It’s also free, have I mentioned that? We had a brief flirtation with an organic, touchy-feely, bilingual Montessori option, but it cost upwards of 7,000 euros/year just to say hello, and, um, non. I myself went to a Montessori-esque school, and while it was wonderful and taught me to think outside the box and embrace my creativity and all that, it also sort of did not teach me much about MATH, for example, which my high school algebra teacher noticed right off the bat, and yes I still count on my fingers and oh hell let’s not go there. I’m not forking over 7k so that my 3-year-old can avoid the unpleasantness of homework, thank you very much.

So public school it is. In public school, one’s child is expected to be potty-trained, or as the French say, propre (clean). This is a pain in the ass cultural particularity that takes some getting used to. Little g, despite our best efforts, was not entirely propre when school began in the fall—but we, like many other parents, sent him anyway in the hope that peer pressure would kick him over the pee-pee turnstile. Now, because of increased security measures in France, when one picks one’s child up from school at 3:45 pm, one must wait outside the school gate until the children are released, at which point they come racing out of their respective classrooms and make a bee-line for the gate. They are then handed over to their parents or guardians one by one. So the first week, out comes little g, running along with his classmates and SO FRIGGING CUTE I CRIED LIKE EVERY DAY. Have I said how HARD it is for a mom to send her little one to preschool for the first time? He took it way, way better than I did, but anyway.... So out they come, skipping and smiling and so damn cute. Except what is that garbage bag swinging from little g’s darling orange penguin backpack? Oh, why, it’s full of the clothes I dressed him in this morning—all drenched in stinky pee-pee! Oh, and what are those pants he’s wearing? I’ve never seen them before! Huh. Is this a Scarlet Letter, shame-them-into-conformity thing? If so, it’s whack.

So the whole first week pretty much went that way. Pee-pee, trash bag, someone else’s clothes. Since then, he’s gotten much better (the peer pressure thing works, in other words) and we are mostly past the accident phase, which does not mean I have removed the beach towel from our couch (duh).

Let’s talk about his teacher for a minute, because she’s a piece of work. The woman is in her 60’s, obviously close to retirement, and took a disliking to me from the get-go. Why? Maybe because I’m FOREIGN (actually I’m not, but that’s a post for another day). She likes to balancer (chuck) these semi-sarcastic, WTF-is-that-supposed-to-mean side comments at me, such as, “Your son said a whole sentence in French today” (he’s bilingual, connasse). Or, “You shouldn’t laugh when I reprimand your son” (what?). Or, “You should feed him breakfast because he’s eating his friends” (WHAT?). Anyway, the dislike is mutual, I can assure you. This woman needs to retire and not go anywhere near any little children anymore for the rest of her sad, bitter life. Moving on....

Bonus #1: How to get scratches out of hardwood floors, courtesy of little g and his @&$!! Lightning McQueen race car
Forget the wood paste, olive oil, lemon juice, white vinegar, and whatever other bullshit advice you find online. Grab some professional furniture repair wax in multiple shades of brown, a soft cloth, a plastic scraper (old credit cards work nicely), and a shit ton of patience and go for it. Good luck.

Baby c
Baby c is a dream. She’s sweet, cute, sleeps well and smiles a ton. She gives these slobbery baby kisses that just melt your heart. She is also SICK ALL THE TIME, because oh, have I mentioned that preschool is like one giant biology experiment in which 30 little kids cough all over each other/share their teddy bears/swap pacifiers/do God knows what else for 7+ hours a day? Yeah, so lots of sick. Sick begets sick, especially when sick child #1 loves to hug and kiss heretofore healthy child #2, thus ensuring maximal viral transfer. So baby c, despite being only 6 months old, has already come down with multiple colds, a horrid ear infection, two eye infections, and the straight-up flu, thank you very much French public school.

Also, having two kids is insane. No one tells you this beforehand, because if they did, the fertility rate would plummet, but it’s ridiculously hard. Even if they’re sweet and cute and generally amazing, it’s STILL by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and that includes moving to Paris with nothing more than a last-second sublet and a dream (aw). What’s the divorce rate for couples with two or more small children? I shudder to guess. And on that note,

Bonus #2: The Keep It Together cocktail
Ingredients
5 cl Cointreau
4 cl fruit juice (cranberry, orange or apple)
2 cl fresh lemon juice
Ice
Instructions
Pour into shaker. Shake, shake, shake.
Serve in a fancy glass because you deserve it!
ENJOY—feel the bitchiness leaving your body.
Repeat as necessary.

Bonus #3: How to get mashed peas out of a shaggy throw rug
Get down on hands and knees, with a magnifying glass if necessary.
Pick out as many little pieces of pea as possible. Long fingernails help.
Wait overnight, allowing any remaining pea mush to dry up.
Spray carpet with carpet cleaner.
Vacuum.
Vow not to buy another shaggy throw rug until your kids are at least 18.
See Bonus #2.

Get used to this, kiddo.

Deliver me

NB: the following is by far my most TMI post and is intended exclusively for those of my fellow mothers who have been to the childbearing battlefield and made it back again in more or less one piece—and now find sharing their gory, super personal experiences to be strangely cathartic. For everyone else, you’d probably be better off avoiding this one. There, you’ve totally been warned.

OK, so first of all I realize that I promised to write the conclusion to my 3-part series on US presidential elections before going off an any more tangents, but a) all five of my readers will probably forgive me and b) childbirth is way more important than the Electoral College. I mean come on.

Anyway, so, childbirth. I just did that. And it was beautiful and miraculous and also kind of physically awful and emotionally terrifying and if it had gone down like that 100 years ago we’d probably all be dead and so I don’t think I’m going to do it again, like, ever. #ThanksEve

So, as you know if you’re a regular, hubby and I already have one awesome child—little g—but we wanted to go and add a second awesome child, because why stop at one, especially when that one really needs a playmate, seeing as how Mommy can only get down on the floor and build train tracks and stuff for like 15 minutes before she realizes that she has some super urgent thing to do (literally anything else).

Thus, we went and “made” a second awesome child, which is the part of the whole “pregnancy” thing that my body is actually “good” at, and so I passed GO, collected 200 mood swings and entered the first trimester. It was kind of more gnarly than I had remembered it, with many more Ugggggh I’m going to barf/faint/fall asleep standing up moments, in addition to that wretched omnipresent fear of something going wrong, which all we pregnant ladies live with night and day for nine frigging months but try to just suck up and not talk about because really—who’s listening? I also developed a severe aversion to drinking water of all things, I who used to chug two liters religiously every day. But I made up for it with juice and a lot of “fun” newfangled sodas, which in hindsight was pretty dumb of me sugar-wise, but hell, a girl’s gotta stay hydrated.

Now, with the birth of awesome child #1 in 2013, we moved out of Paris and into the western suburbs, thus necessitating a change of maternity clinic for awesome child #2. I researched diligently, found just the right place, and chose a lady doctor with a reputation for being a straight shooter, which is really all anyone should want from an Ob-Gyn. Our first encounter was predictably a little odd; in France, women’s health visits are generally performed entirely in the buff, so the first one with a new doctor is always awkward—at least to my American sensibilities. Like, we just met; do I really have to take everything off and clamber onto this exam table all naked and stuff? Shouldn’t we at least go for coffee or something first? Plus this particular doctor turned out to be pretty damn austere in both word and manner, but surprisingly not in eye makeup—magenta one day, glitter the next—thus adding an extra layer of weird to our budding relationship.

Anyway, I made it through the loooooong, woozy first trimester and joyfully leapt into the second, which as we all know is the “good one.” And indeed it was good. And it went by all too quickly. And I really have nothing more to say about it other than that my belly got way big way fast, but I felt pretty bitchin’ anyway, and have I mentioned that awesome child #2 turned out to be a GIRL and how extra awesome that is? I love me some pink!

Then along came Mr. Mean and Nasty Third Trimester, who was already NOT my friend back in 2013, as the nearer I came to my due date, the more crazy shit my body started to do, some of which was NOT FUNNY at all. First, my feet went: I came down with Plantar Fasciitis, which is an inflammation of the soles of the feet causing intense pain and making moving about even less pleasant than it already is with a big ol’ pregnant body. Then I started blowing up like a balloon, or rather a water balloon, and got bitched out by my then-doctor for gaining too much weight when really—it’s water, dear doctor. Look up “edema,” which is pretty common and you should really know that ‘cuz it’s um your job—but worst of all, around week 36 I developed this in-SANE itch. It began on the soles of my feet and spread to my palms, belly, face, and pretty much everywhere else and it ROYALLY sucked. It sucked so much that I mentioned it to my doc, and bless her heart, she recognized it as being all kinds of NOT FUNNY and sent me for immediate blood work and fetal monitoring. I didn’t quite get what was up, but with the lab results and the help of good ol’ Professor Google, I soon realized that I had a hideous liver disorder called Intrahepatic Cholestasis of Pregnancy (ICP), which basically means that one’s liver cannot deal with the hormonal deluge any longer and decides to just stop working. Aside from being royally unpleasant for the mother, ICP can straight up lead to stillbirth—right at the end, too, just when you thought you were ready to cross the finish line. The only cure for this MoFo of a disease is to deliver, and thankfully, awesome child #1 seemed to sense that and decided to exit my toxic body of his own free will some 10 days later. Phew. Of course, I then went and got saddled with a host of crazy postpartum crap, such as D-MER and Diastasis Recti, but oh hell, who’s keeping track at this point? So my abs split in half and I felt like throwing myself off the balcony every time my milk let down—so what? In exchange, I somehow came away with a pair of lovely skinny legs, zero stretch marks, and a child for Pete’s sake, so let’s try to keep a little perspective.

THIS time around, the Plantar Fasciitis gave me a break, and the edema was slightly better (yet I still managed to get bitched out because apparently the entire medical profession thinks that edema is a joke and really it’s just too many cakes we fat pregnant chicks are wolfing down, in addition to all that juice and soda, which furthermore makes BIG babies and by the way your baby is “too big” which means STOP THE FUCKING SUGARY DRINKS RIGHT THIS RED HOT MINUTE OR IT’S STRAIGHT TO C-SECTION LAND). But worst of all, I once more came down with FML, er, ICP, and naturally, several weeks earlier than in 2013, leaving me with much more time to totally freak the hell out. Wassup, liver? Why you hatin’? Okay, so there were a few years in my wayward youth running around in Paris when I may have gone slightly overboard in the alcohol department, but c’mon. Liver disorder? From that? Well, no—rather, it seems to be a hereditary thing, meaning that my Scandinavian blood is to blame. My mom didn’t have it, but apparently it can skip a generation. Great. Anyway, if you want to know all about ICP, and just how much it sucks, here is a blog by a fellow sufferer and here is a support group and here is a Wikipedia article and if after reading all that you still don’t appreciate how terrifying it is to be diagnosed with this satanic POS of a disease, then you have no empathy and are probably a sociopath.

From my first mention of itchiness (“It could just be my hay fever, right?”), I found out precisely why this particular doctor has a reputation for no-nonsense; she may wear funny eye shadow, but she does not fuck around when a pregnancy starts to head south. She immediately put me on the drugs Ursodiol and Atarax and prescribed a strict regimen of weekly blood work and ultrasounds, bi-weekly fetal heart monitoring and all kinds of other reasons to hone my driving skills driving back and forth from home to clinic to home to clinic—but no complaints here because holy shit, I’ve never been so scared in my life. There is a famous quote by Audrey Hepburn about how the toughest part of motherhood is the inner worrying that cannot, must not be shown, and that is SO TRUE, especially with an ICP pregnancy. I mean there you are, after gutting it out for 8 months and OH SO READY to finally meet your little one, only to come down with this rare, wretched disease that turns your heretofore safe, cozy uterus into a toxic prison. And no one knows what you’re going through, and you can do nothing about it, aside from following your doctor’s orders and praying night and day that everything will work out. In other words, it is out of your hands—way, way out.

With the help of the Ursodiol, whose role is pretty much to do the job that one’s loser liver has decided it no longer wants to do, my blood work showed marked improvement. This allowed me to, you know, sleep at night and not totally lose my mind. Until it stopped working, that is—obviously while my doctor was on holiday. She had been planning to induce me at around week 38, as most ICP patients are, but in light of my spiking bile salt levels, the head midwife at the clinic decided to go ahead and induce me at week 37—which was absolutely fine because every second my baby spent inside me constituted a risk of the absolute worst nature. So the day after my 37th birthday (let’s all appreciate the parallel), I headed for the clinic with chéri in tow, there to spend much time ushering awesome child #2 out of me and into the world, which despite Islamic terrorism, Zika and Donald Trump, is still a hell of a lot safer than my frigging body.

Now, a fun fact about induction is that it hurts. It hurts A LOT. It hurts more than normal labor, which as everyone knows really, really hurts. But at first it didn’t; at first it just felt like particularly nasty cramps, leaving me with the silly idea that I could handle the pain for a few hours before summoning the anesthesiologist. But then I realized that no, in fact, I really couldn’t handle the pain, so they put in an epidural, plugged in an oxytocin drip to speed things up and ... GAHHHHHHHH!!! The contractions suddenly got 10 times worse. I was like, “Why can I feel this despite the BIG ASS needle sticking out of my spine?” And Science was like, “I’ll tell you why. Because contrary to popular belief, epidurals are not fail-proof; they fail quite a lot, actually.” This one had the particularity of failing only on my right side while functioning perfectly on my left, but pain management during childbirth does not lend itself to philosophical discussions about having a half-empty or a half-full perspective; it’s really an all or nothing affair, and if you opt for all then you should get all and not fucking half is the point I’m trying to make here. But such is life.

Ultimately the midwife, who must have gotten mighty tired of listening to my groans and whines and whimpers echoing down the hallway, told me that if I wanted the pain to end then now would be a good time to start pushing. “Seriously? But there’s no doctor here,” I said, but apparently that was no biggie. The baby was high, the pain was unbearable, and we had time to kill. So push. Well alrighty then—I pushed. A bit too enthusiastically it seems, because suddenly the midwife was shouting “STOP STOP STOP!” and there was still no doctor in sight because the guy on call obviously had a very screwy notion of what being “on call” actually means and was thus tied up in a fucking appointment at his fucking office and OMG there’s no MD here and my body really hurts and this is not how it’s supposed to work—I want my mooooooooom! But then, the midwives had been taking care of everything since I had shown up that morning, so why the hell would we suddenly need a doctor anyway? In the end they drafted some random one from another delivery next door and together they all shouted encouragement and then suddenly, out pops this little head and then out comes an entire 8-pound baby and holy crap I am such a STAR at pushing I had no idea! To be fair, I think I can definitely credit awesome child #1 for blazing the trail down there with his own, much more difficult passage three years ago. *Shudder*

OK, so they take this wailing baby, who I am SO ELATED to see, into another room to be checked and weighed and all that, and only THEN does the actual on-call doctor decide to actually show the fuck up. Nice. Did I still pay him? Yes. Why? Because he turned out to be quite an excellent conversationalist once he decided to finally, you know, sit the hell down and get to work—coaxing scary things out of scary places that you honestly don’t want to know about and stitching up other things that had paid the price for my drinking all that soda, the whole gory operation perfectly reflected in his glasses as he explained to me how much he appreciates the States and how great it is that we Americans always seem to keep our sense of humor. “Do you want to see the placenta?” he said. I laughed.

And that is my, or rather, our birth story. Did it go according to plan? Sort of—my plan essentially being to give birth to a healthy baby and live to tell about it. And here, two weeks later, our beautiful, perfect little girl is asleep on my lap as naturally and innocently as can be, and 90% of my own pregnancy-related difficulties have evaporated. And if that isn’t sweet Deliverance, I don’t know what is.

Road rage II

As some of you may recall, I swore up and down that I would avoid getting behind the wheel in France, both for my safety as well as everyone else’s. But that was before I had a baby, who is growing at lightning speed and will be in driving school himself before I know it, which would be super embarrassing. Actually, the truth is that he goes to day care twice a week now, and the place is almost 20 minutes away by foot. This isn’t a problem when the sun is out; it’s a lovely walk, and hey—I’m sporty. But when the nice weather heads south and we’re stuck with the nasty, those 20 minutes feel a lot like 40 (you try pushing a stroller while holding an umbrella). So enough of that. Plus, we’re suburbanites now. I have clients to meet. Babykins has little friends to visit. The car was bound to become an issue sooner or later.

So I bit the proverbial bullet and signed up for driver’s ed—for the second time in my life. The first time, I was 15 years old and I think it cost my parents something like $300. This time, I’m much, much older and it cost—I kid you not—six times more (and my parents aren’t paying). I think this kind of blatant extortion heavy-handed pricing would spark a revolution in the US, but as I don’t live there anymore, and my Californian license is worth exactly rien to the French, my options were either to go (back) to driving school or find alternative means of mother-and-baby locomotion. There are a few, but they all seem inordinately cumbersome and/or life-threatening:

The bike: dangerous

The caboose: stupid-looking and dangerous

The rickshaw: unwieldy, stupid-looking, and dangerous

None of these being an acceptable alternative to the car (bonus: we already have one), I accepted the price tag, expensed it (obviously), and moved on to worrying about what I had just committed myself to. Because even after years of experiencing the French highway as a terrified passenger, it still strikes me as complex, overly aggressive and fraught with seemingly arbitrary, totally un-American rules like sidewalk parking and la priorité à droite. Perhaps worst of all (for me), automatic shift is as rare in France as it is ubiquitous in the US. But what do you do, go buy a fake permit online? Hey wait—

In France, as in the US, one can obtain a driver’s license (legally) only after passing a written test, followed by a practical test. But here, the written test is electronic. It’s based on a series of screen shots intended to simulate various situations one might encounter while driving, each accompanied by a multiple choice question. Preparation for the written test consists in taking practice test after practice test after practice test until one has pretty much memorized every possible question that could ever come up on the real test. For example:

How many points is this guy worth?

I can hardly wait for the practical part.

Comfort me with apples

Teething sucks. I can’t remember my own, but so far as I can tell from my 15-month-old son, it ranks right up there with stomach flu in the “fun” department. Poor baby; he first began sleeping soundly through the night at 6 weeks, and I distinctly recall our naive hope that we could all just take up residence in the Land of Uninterrupted Dreams. Little did we suspect that the teething demons would swoop down and steal our collective slumber away for weeks—nay, months!—on end. In fact, I would venture to say that it has been one year since our teething troubles began. A full year! And do you know how many teeth Babykins has to show for it? Four and two halves, minus a chip. Sigh.

Gnarly teeth run in my family. After five years of braces, a pretty unpleasant headgear episode, and numerous visits to the oral surgeon, I have exactly 24 of them left in my mouth, as opposed to the standard 32. My husband, on the other hand, has these tiny little naturally straight teeth, so I was kinda hoping our son would inherit his chompers from THAT end of the gene pool. Alas, reality seems to have chosen otherwise.

Yours truly at age 13.* Note large teeth and nascent patriotism.

I had no idea that teething would take so damn long. If it were up to me, they’d all just come in at once and we could move on to losing sleep over something else. But it’s one of the universal “joys” of babyhood, so we may as well accept it. Yet judging from certain third party reactions, one might think that teething is some rare disease. We’ve been told on multiple occasions by well-meaning folks with the utmost gravity in their voices, “Votre fils a très mal aux dents” (your son’s teeth really hurt). To which I always reply with an “indeed” and one of those nervous half-laughs I do when I’m totally uncomfortable. What am I supposed to say? “REALLY? Is that what those white things in his mouth are?” “Should we have him hospitalized?” “Do they make children’s morphine in France?”

But tonight, while we were celebrating Monday with our traditional apéritif du lundi, I stumbled haphazardly upon a surprising source of comfort. Baby was in his high chair, an array of strategically-chosen toys at his disposal, yet still doing that glass-shattering wail he does when we aren’t personally entertaining him—adult conversations at our home these days are a creative mix of shouting and lip-reading—when I had a revelation: give him an apple. And you know what? It worked like a mute button! He didn’t utter a peep for the next hour. Perfectly content, he gnawed that thing into oblivion, barely allowing me a chance to remove the stem and seeds before it all went down the hatch. And then he went and fell fast asleep without a fuss, and is still dozing peacefully—truly a rare, write-this-down phenomenon!

Perhaps as a nod to his mother’s country roots, that apple may have been just what his poor, sore little gums needed. And here I was loading him up on teething rings, tamarind gum paste, homeopathic moon drops and the like. How’s that parental learning curve going...?

*Photo by Bill Benson

Yes we can

For those of you who don’t believe in miracles, check this out: my son is now 14 months old, meaning that despite my incapacity to sustain most forms of plant and animal life, child rearing is surprisingly doable.

I can’t say it’s been easy learning to parent while working from home, keeping said home passably tidy and maintaining at least a solid B in personal hygiene, but I’ve never been one to shrink from a challenge, especially in the face of naysayers. Our pediatrician comes to mind: “You’ll never get anything done” was her retort when I informed her of my intention to forgo childcare until our son had turned one. Well, she was wrong; I get stuff done. It just takes me 10 times longer than it used to.

Something I discovered in my first year as a mother is that no-you-can’t-ers abound; our pediatrician is but one example. And it’s not just that. Too many sources of parenting information, be they first or second-hand, are either needlessly negative or straight up alarmist—the apparent goal being to keep parents in a perpetual state of borderline panic. From SIDS risk to vaccination hype to choking hazards, the underlying message is that at any given moment, we are but one accident away from infanticide. Why, it seems every baby product out there bears a warning label tantamount to If you don’t use this product exactly as intended, your child may very well die (and it will be all your fault, you poor incapable fool). And here I thought pregnancy was stressful.

OK, some specifications are warranted.

That may be why I’m so delighted to have passed the 1-year mark unscathed. I’m also delighted to have discovered just how wrong so many people are about raising babies. Even before ours was born, we began receiving all manner of seriously jaded, totally unsolicited advice, often from perfect strangers. For example, “Enjoy your pregnancy; it’s the last time you’ll be able to do what you want for a long time.” (How is one to respond? Thank you?) Since our son’s birth, we’ve been advised to avoid restaurants, museums, and weddings; to protect him from honey, public changing tables, and the sun; to have him fed, bathed, and lying in an empty crib—on his back only—by 8:00 pm; and for heaven’s sake, to never leave those little feet bare. But my favorite piece of advice, and one that apparently has no expiration date, is to “cherish this age while it lasts” (insinuation: because man, are you gonna hate the next one).

Coming soon.

Incidentally, this is all garbage. We may be the only ones around doing it, but we take our son absolutely everywhere. He’s traveled with us by plane, train and automobile. He’s visited five countries, including both coasts of the United States, and dipped his adorable baby toes into the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, and the North Sea. We’ve taken him to museums, cathedrals, art gallery openings and classy restaurants (and a wedding). He doesn’t have a fixed bedtime and no, he doesn’t like socks—so just STOP already with the tisk-tisking! Yes, there have been some extreme situations (a diaper change at 1,500 meters atop Puy de Dôme, for example), but so far, so good. Babies need stimulation, which we’re happy to provide. And you know what? He’s doing beautifully.

Maybe that’s why I’m such a die-hard Obama fan. However history ultimately remembers him, he had me at Yes We Can. As a new mom, I cannot fathom why, amid the cascades of parenting advice out there, none is anywhere as encouraging as that simple notion: yes you can. Of course it’s hard; everything worthwhile is. But a whole lot of people, many far less apt than we, have managed it. So as we ease into our second year as parents, we do so with renewed confidence in our own instincts—which have turned out to be of far greater worth than all that other advice combined.

Champignons de Paris

Those of you who have been following me have probably figured out by now that I most emphatically do not have a green thumb (but even if I did, it would still have no prints). That used to be a source of deep personal anxiety, as I had once heard somewhere that if you can keep from killing your houseplants, then you can move on to domestic animals; if you can keep from killing them, then you can go ahead and procreate. Well, in the big Pass/Fail that is gardening, I have so far scored a big fat F. I’ve owned all manner of plants, and have managed to over or under water/heat/love virtually all of them into oblivion, but that certainly did not stop me from having a baby and HE is perfect, thank you very much (crazy parents notwithstanding).

So about those plants. After the death of our cactus, we decided to replace it with a Pachira Aquatica, which Wikipedia says is a “tropical wetland tree native to Central and South America, where it grows in swamps.” What it was doing at our local Ikea is beyond me, but we bought it—primarily because it’s fun-looking, which is as good a reason as any.

See? Fun.

I somehow managed to knock a good third of its foliage off between the store and the car, but we got it home in one piece (sort of) and it seemed to be happy enough in our living room for a few weeks. But then it started to look a bit sad, so I gave it extra water and put it out on the balcony to get some sunlight (just like a South American swamp! Right? Right?). However, that turned out to be too much for it, so I took it back inside and figured to hell with the sunlight—I’d just stick to watering. Then, the other day, I was bending over to pick something off the floor next to the tree, when I noticed that an entire colony of mushrooms had spontaneously sprouted out of its pot. Beyond what that says about my ability to care for plant life, it begs the question: why do mushrooms seem to follow me from one apartment to the next?

Like this, only way less cute.

Because they do follow me, you know. My first Paris apartment, which was a 1-bedroom dive (albeit a “big” 1-bedroom dive) in the northern 18ème arrondissement, had this funky bathroom that I painted yellow. And repainted yellow. And repainted yellow again—all in a vain attempt to cover up the scary black mold spots that kept materializing on the walls every few months. One day I went into the yellow bathroom to take a shower and found a full-sized mushroom growing straight out of the caulking around the shower door. I took a photo and sent it to my parents—you know, to reassure them about my life abroad. Then there were our infamous ceiling fungus issues in the 15ème arrondissement, which I shant get into here, namely because I’ve moved on with my life, but in case you’re interested, I wrote all about it here and here.

And now this family of ‘shrooms in an otherwise hot, dry environment. Maybe they’re a desert subspecies. Interestingly, they are different from my old shower mushrooms, which indicates that interior fungi are surprisingly diverse here! But in all seriousness, what’s the deal with the mushrooms in Paris, or rather, in my Paris? Is this a karmic thing? Is it metaphorical? And if so, what does it mean that I have champignons growing in what is otherwise known as a “Money Tree”? Maybe it’s the universe telling me to leave gardening to the bees and embrace the wide world of fake plants (thereby saving mucho Euro-dollars by not having to replace them all every six months).

Come to think of it, why stop at fake plants?

The timing is actually pretty good, as this weekend I was intending to go buy a bunch of spring flowers for the balcony. Do you suppose fake geraniums exist? Actually, about the only plant of ours that seems to be thriving IS a geranium—a real one—that was lobbed at our balcony in the middle of the night about a month after we moved in (no doubt a token of friendship from our new neighbors). In an illustration of the well-known adage, “When life chucks a geranium at you, plant it,” we did, and now it’s blooming away. Maybe there’s hope for me yet.

Almond joy

I’ve never been a huge fan of lunch. Breakfast, yes; dinner, definitely; but lunch ... meh. Uninspiring. I’d even dare say depressing. Just something we do in the middle of the day because our bodies demand nourishment. I realize this anti-lunch attitude is very un-French of me, but considering that I will never actually be French, I’m OK with that. So is my distaste for the midday meal an American thing? The running perception on this side of the world is, after all, that we Americans don’t eat lunch, or at least don’t eat anything worthy of being called “lunch.” We’re supposedly more of a sandwich-at-the-keyboard kind of culture. I’d try to argue otherwise, but since I obviously cannot cite myself as a counterexample, what’s the point?

Actually, that looks pretty good!

My parents aren’t big lunch people, either, which is probably where my lack of enthusiasm began. Lunch at their house is, for want of a better word, “nonexistent.” If one happens to be hungry in the middle of the day, one opens the refrigerator and forages. Possible finds include salad greens in various stages of decay, giant Costco cheese blocks, ancient tortillas that no one will ever eat, and an astounding—no, a stupefying—array of condiments. In the freezer are raw cranberries and a year’s supply of nuts. But again, since no one in my family eats lunch, the lack of actual food in the kitchen is worrisome only to my husband, who, being French and all, has no desire to subsist entirely on inferior cheese and frozen almonds until dinnertime (which is also pretty sparse). I say, where’s his sense of intercultural appreciation? At least there’s no need to worry about any holiday weight gain!

We are what we eat.

I will acknowledge that living in France has helped me to take lunch more seriously, even if I still don’t necessarily enjoy it. When I was a regular employee, I appreciated the midday breather that la pause déjeuner represented, as well as the proximity and variety of solutions to those pesky hunger pangs. But now that I’m my own boss, I’ve kind of returned to my ambivalent roots. Lunchtime rolls around, I’m hungry, and I have neither inspiration nor patience. Happily, there is an obvious choice: I really like cheese, which, France being the alpha and the omega of dairy products, we have aplenty. I also really like this pre-sliced packaged bread called Harry’s “American Sandwich” (which is actually quite popular among the French, who are more open-minded about bread than one might imagine).

Maybe it’s the American spin that my subconscious finds comforting, or maybe I’m just lazy, but I can’t get enough of the stuff! It probably accounts for about a third of my daily caloric intake. I do opt for the “whole wheat” variety, so I figure it’s not so bad. I mean, yeah, I’m eating straight up industrial bread in France, but hey—it’s from a French supermarket.

Plus you can’t do that with a baguette.

To make a long story short, I eat a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches: way more than I ever ate while living in the US, actually. I use coconut oil instead of butter (virtuous), real cheddar cheese (semi-virtuous), and Harry’s bread (it’s whole wheat!). I know I should eat some veggies with that, but when it’s already 3:00 pm and Babykins could go into meltdown mode at any minute, I don’t have the presence of mind to go concocting some amazing salad of organic produce, which I would have carefully selected that morning from a quaint farmers’ market while humming “Little Town” from Beauty and the Beast. So instead I eat a tomato. Whole. Like an apple (less cutlery to wash). Ironically, I often do this while watching reruns of Masterchef or Top Chef or some other cooking-related show, whose participants would probably be horrified by my dietary deconstructionism. But I figure watching real food being prepared counterbalances what’s actually on my plate and besides, it beats frozen almonds.

I'm back

Well, it’s been nearly a year since my last post, which is admittedly pathetic, but as I nonchalantly mentioned a while back, a little bundle of joy has come our way, in addition to a new company (my own!) and a new town. In other words, the theme of 2013 around here has been BIG, BIG CHANGE. And as it turns out, these particular big, big changes, while fantastic, are really quite time consuming.

Where to pick up? I won’t bore you with the details of my pregnancy, because really, you probably don’t care. Plus I had it fairly easy until the last two months, when I magically transformed into a living water balloon. That might have been worth relating at the time, but at five months post partum I’m happy to say I pretty much recognize myself again, and with baby sleeping through the night I no longer have to face blunt observations from absolutely everybody about how tired I look. Not that I expect it to last, mind you, but I’ll take what I can get.

It’s really quite astounding how much my life has changed in so little time. A year ago I was living in the heart of Paris with a “9-5” (really 9:30-7:30 but who’s counting?) agency job, a killer commute and no sweet little dependent creature to take care of (my husband notwithstanding. Har-har). And now, a mere 12 months later, I’m a MOM, an entrepreneur, and a suburbanite! Two of those things I’d sworn never to become. Granted, I did said swearing when I was 12 and 24 respectively, neither of which is the most lucid of ages. Had I been wiser, I’d have kept the oath swearing to a minimum, because the truth is that I feel like I’ve walked smack into that last scene from Field of Dreams: “Hey, is this heaven?” “Maybe it is.” Awwwww.

OK, I’ll get back to my regular sarcastic observations next time around (which I promise will be soon). For now, it’s Christmas. Let’s just enjoy it.