Summer bliss

It’s that time of the year again, when those of us fortunate enough to live in France get to go on vacation. Now, depending on your definition of “vacation,” this may or may not be a good thing, for there are some who insist that vacation with children is no vacation at all. And for the record, those people are correct. That has never stopped us, though—nor did it this year when it came time to choose where to go. “Croatia!” we decided. “By car!” we decided. Who’s crazy enough to travel from France to Croatia (≈1,000 miles) by car? 

WE ARE.

YAY!

But first, we stopped in Italy—Padua, to be exact. Its Arena Chapel is home to some of Giotto’s most important frescoes, which I had been hankering to visit ever since my blithely innocent days as an art history undergrad back in whenever that was. In any case, the frescoes were awesome. The kids’ behavior, on the other hand, was grotesque. Do you think that stopped us? NOOOO. After over a decade of parenting, potential embarrassment is no longer a deterrent to engaging in full-blown public displays of dysfunction. Did I chase my son around a Renaissance-era marble fountain, threatening to grab the city map that he had turned into a giant paper airplane out of his hands and rip it into 1,000 shreds while fellow tourists looked on, silently thanking God that they had sent their children to stay with grandma and grandpa for the summer? Maybe.

Happy traveller.

Padua on the whole was cool. And by cool I mean hot (mid-90s). But no matter! I stuffed my backpack with water, sunglasses, sun hats, sunscreen, and a USB-rechargeable mini fan, and off we went. We stayed at a really cute boutique hotel, which I heartily recommend to anyone planning to visit Padua anytime soon. Their breakfast in a flowery outdoor courtyard was lovely, plus I have noticed on multiple occasions over the years that Italians are truly tolerant of child antics, which is a BIG BONUS in my book. Actually, can I just say how much I love Italy, full stop? I love it. I love its food (obviously—everyone loves its food). But that’s not all. I love its art and architecture. I love its aesthetics. I love its Aperol spritzes. I love its reasonable prices. I love its language, even if my Italian vocabulary is pretty much limited to menu items and, thanks to a few weeks of Duolingo, observations concerning people’s age groups and genders (as un-woke as such observations may be these days). I love its HISTORY, especially its Roman and early Christian history. That’s my intellectual sweet spot. Oh, and its vegetation. Olive trees, vineyards, umbrella pines! Is there anything better? No—no there is not. I even love that you get to eat cookies for breakfast in Italy. Cookies! For breakfast! France remains my true love, but Italy is a close second. Had I participated in SMU-in-Rome instead of SMU-in-Paris back in 1999, who knows what could have happened?

I mean come on.

After several days of taking photos of bricks, stones, and umbrella pines, we piled back into the car and drove many, many hours through the Fréjus tunnel (50 euros, folks) and on into Slovenia. Do many Americans go to Slovenia? No. Do many Americans know where Slovenia is? No. And I would count myself among them, so no offense. We stopped for lunch in Piran. It was really nice! It had a big beautiful church on a big beautiful hill. Did we march the kids up there? You bet we did.

You’ll thank me one day, kids.

Then, on to our first destination in Croatia—Rovinj. Gorgeous! We swam in the Adriatic; we visited more old churches; we climbed more stone stairs; we drank more spritzes; we continued to engage in the merciless cat-herding that is parenting while on vacation. I found a dress and belt ensemble that makes me look like I just stepped out of a Greek myth—THAT’S A WIN. Also, our digs were awesome. There was an amazing central garden space with turtles just wandering around amid the grass. Yes, turtles.

Gardens: the one thing we can all agree on.

After a week or so, off we went to our second destination in Croatia—Trogir. Again, gorgeous! Swimming in turquoise waters (what’s a sea urchin or two?); visiting ancient Roman cities; drinking more spritzes. Also, dragging our children multiple times out of this insane rubber duck store, which for some reason I cannot fathom is not a local quirk at all but a full-on CHAIN. A chain! Devoted to rubber ducks in costume! And people say we aren’t in the End Times (I’m pretty sure the Book of Revelation includes something about rubber ducks).

Just, why?

Our rental in Trogir was a little stone apartment tucked away amid ambling pathways, a pleasant 10-minute stroll from a pristine beach. Very cute. There was just one problem though…

I’d like to congratulate the local city planners for building an international airport three miles outside of town. I mean how hard did they think about this? Regular bombing runs notwithstanding, we had a wonderful stay. And an all-too-short week later, it was time to head home. Naively assuming we could simply drive back into Italy, we tried to do it in one shot. Little did we know that the rest of civilization had chosen that very same day to do that very same thing. Thus, what should have taken us 7 hours in fact took us 11, so by the time we reached our next stop—fair Verona—we were fried. And here I would like to add a slight caveat to my Italian ode above: roads. Roads in Italy need work. More specifically, they seem to have been designed for only the narrowest modes of transportation, e.g. horses. Thin horses. Why are there so many Vespas in Italy? This probably has something to do with it. Getting our car through a mini-tunnel and into its allotted parking space without sacrificing both side mirrors was not really a challenge we were thrilled to face upon pulling up to our rental at 10:00 p.m., but such is life. What’s a battle scar or two (or way more than two)?

Totally worth it.

As for the city of Verona, ahhhhh—positively enchanting. Italy in all its glory (and by that I mean ancient ruins, umbrella pines, and spritzes, in that order). Plus, after over two weeks on the road, our kids were finally starting to behave. Alas, it was soon time to leave. But nary you fret, Italy. 

Torneremo presto!

A Roman road! Even my feet are smiling.

Ah, les vacances

French people get way too much vacation.

You who are reading this, and who may not have taken more than 2.5 days of sick leave in the past 18 months, may think that I’m crazy to say such a thing, so perhaps I should be more specific:

French children get way too much vacation.

Why might I say that? Read on.

Just another World Heritage site (we’re over it, Mom, seriously). 

My parents had the dubious honor of flying out from California to visit us for a romp through southern France this summer, even though it was technically our turn to go to them. But seeing as how I’m still recovering from our Christmas trip, plus the fact that my brother is tying the knot in Florida this coming March, we figured this was a good compromise.

Where to begin? Let’s start with transportation:

First of all, there are six of us when my parents are here and our car only seats five. But my father-in-law has an old Peugeot equipped with a sixth seat and a rooftop storage unit, so hey.

Of course, that sixth seat feels a lot like the proverbial back of the bus, i.e. hot and bumpy with zero leg room, but WHO’S COMPLAINING?

Afoot and lighthearted we take to the open road.

I’ll tell you who: my kids. Both of them. Screaming. Wailing. Temper tantruming. Rolling on the ground. The only way to get either of them to accept sitting “in the trunk” was to offer them my portable fan and my Snapchat account.

Here is but a small taste of what that led to:

Thespian #1

Thespian #2

Group travel is an interesting sociological experiment, and ours is always a particularly dysfunctional unique brand of that. Take two American grandparents who are used to having calm and quiet, add two Franco-American children who are the exact opposite of calm and quiet, one Frenchman who feels neither heat nor cold nor pain nor fatigue, and myself, who wants nothing more than two months of absolute solitude in a mountain monastery, and cram them all into a 20-year-old car with sketchy air conditioning for a three-week, 1,000-mile trek through southwest France in 90° heat … and what do you get?

A lot of drinking (obviously).

Negotiating everyone’s various and often conflicting needs was interesting, between my dad’s swollen ankles and my husband’s view that any day registering under 20,000 steps is a day wasted; between my mom’s natural amiability and my natural irritability; and between my daughter’s aversion to car rides/heat/walking/eating/sleeping and my son’s equal aversion to all of those things, it’s a wonder that none of us throttled the others with our bare hands (the temptation was real). 

Look at the camera, folks.

But for all our differences, we managed to visit quite an astounding number of places, and to have rather a good time of it to boot. Sprawling cities and perched villages, medieval castles and neolithic caves, craggy mountains and lush valleys, meandering rivers and tranquil lakes, and “oh Mom, not another church.” You name it, we did it. My dad’s ankles survived, my husband’s inner athlete was appeased, and the kids will (maybe) thank us one day for offering them so much culture.

Is it September yet?

No ordinary island

Pandemic be damned, it’s summer. And summer means vacation. Because this is France, and liberté-égalité-congés payés is what. As for myself, I may never truly be on vacation again because I am self-employed, but Covid-19 has suddenly placed new emphasis on the free aspect of freelance, so sure, bailing for several weeks is fine.

Normally, my parents were due for a visit this summer and we were all going to Ireland, but the whole 2020 pangolins-bats-yada yada-cough cough-touch nothing-go nowhere-viral armageddon kind of threw a wrench into that. Plus President Macron told us to behave and stay (relatively) close to home.

Us: Corsica is technically in France. Let’s go to Corsica!

When in Corsica, one definitely needs a car. So we decided to cross nearly the full length of the mainland and take a ferry docked in Nice, thus keeping our car and avoiding the airport. The very thought of the airport sends my cortisol levels through the roof. Maybe because of multiple experiences such as this one.

Sure looks good from here.

Parking on the ferry was interesting. Its staff for some reason was made up of 100% irate Italians, barking barely recognizable orders as we maneuvered our way onto one of the lower decks. I don’t know what madman came up with the parking plan on this thing, but the cars were crammed in so closely together that we couldn’t so much as open either of the doors on the right-hand side. Weird. Somewhat barbaric. Borderline panic-inducing. Oh well!

The crossing took six hours, which maybe would have been OK with the kids if the on-board activities and attractions had been open, but thanks to our pal Coronavirus, everything was closed. The whining commenced almost immediately.

Dear son: Mom this boat sucks so muuuuuuch! There’s nothing to doooooooo!

Me: Do you know what you sound like right now? Like an overprivileged white kid with first world problems. You are lucky and I mean really lucky to be voyaging across the Mediterranean with your sister and two parents who love you while other kids out there are hungry or homeless or caught in the midst of war—do you hear me?—WAR!  

Dear son: *stares blankly at me*

Me: Oh never mind. Here’s half a Twix.

Dear son: *smiles*

Exiting the boat was hellish. Actually, scrap the -ish. It was straight-up hell. Dark, hot, crowded, airless, and definitely not compliant with social distancing measures. It was bad. They really need to rethink that whole park-on-top-of-your-neighbor concept. But we lived. Next.

The first week, we stayed in Lumio, a charming hillside town overlooking the sparkling Bay of Calvi, and also the home of supermodel Laetitia Casta (who knew?). The rental was fab:

Each day, we explored northern Corsica to the best of our abilities. We took twisty windy hold-onto-your-faith-with-both-hands cliffside roads with breathtaking (and potentially life-taking) views. We discovered the UNESCO world heritage site of Scandola, with its turquoise coves and rainbow rock formations:

The kids dug it:

We ventured onto secret beaches and swam in natural pools. We enjoyed picnic lunches and al fresco dinners. We caught some lizards and a few sea critters. We scraped the finish off the side of our car on a giant yucca. We ate some exceedingly pungent cheese. We visited perched villages in the 90° heat.

The kids dug it:

Northern Corsica is rugged and wonderful, surrounded by turquoise water and vegetation that looks surprisingly similar to that of San Diego (represent!). It also has simply incredible rock. Quartz, limestone, rare pink granite, basalt. Gorgeous. Every river, every beach, every natural pool is a treasure trove of multi-colored boulders and pebbles:

I’m hooked on macro photography, for better or worse.

Only downside: the heat. I don’t do heat (I don’t really do cold, either, but that’s a topic for another day). In fact, the older I get, the less I do heat. At least when it’s cold, you can put on an extra sweater. But when it’s hot, all you can do is stand in front of the A/C or go swimming. So we stood in front of the A/C and went swimming. A lot. I actually ended up with a tan, which totally flies in the face of the whole Scandinavian vibe I usually have going.

At sunset, we would climb up to our rooftop terrace with a view of the bay for apéro, every surface still radiating the day’s warmth, crickets chirping, the lights of Lumio twinkling on the hill behind us and the stars sparkling above. It was otherworldly.

Then suddenly, a whole week was over and it was time to head south. Despite its modest size, Corsica has a remarkably rich and varied landscape; we traded the golden cliffs and Californian vegetation of the north for the sandier, balmier, more Côte d’Azur feel of the south (which is somewhat bizarre considering we were farther than ever from the actual Côte d’Azur, but OK).

Our next rental was also nice, although less “authentic” than our first. It had a little cubby hole kids’ room accessible via a really dangerous-looking ladder, a classic example of what the French would call a fausse bonne idée (an idea that seems good at first but is actually a curse in disguise). The A/C was right on the money, though, so we just upped our level of vigilance by about 200%:

What lawsuit?

Our “mini villa” (*grabs dictionary, looks up oxymoron*) was also in close proximity to some of the world’s most beautiful white sand beaches, so we hit the beach and I mean HIT IT. Lots of sand and sun and more sand and more sun! I got even tanner! My pale-faced ancestors were surely spinning pirouettes in their graves!

We also visited the southernmost tip of the island, a splendid city called Bonifacio. Magnificent scenery. I took roughly 200 photos because how could you not? Many of them were macro shots of flowers and the famous Corsican maquis, but I will spare you!

One of the “musts” in Bonifacio is a staircase carved into the side of a cliff known as the Staircase of the King of Aragon, which is a secret passage to a natural spring with fabulous views of the sea. According to legend, it was built by said king’s troops during a siege one night in 1420, although the truth is that it was probably built by monks (which is just the absolute opposite of the legend, but whatever!). In any case, after donning protective gear and completing the visit, I came away feeling highly dubious that any king, legendary or otherwise, ever huffed it up and down this killer staircase. Pity his servants and water-bearers, although I’m sure their rear ends were as finely chiseled as those 187 steps.

The kids dug it, bien sûr:

And lest I forget a personal highlight, mountain child that I am: Corsica is also blessed with absolutely glorious mountains. In fact, so mountainous is the island that it is often referred to as une montagne dans la mer (a mountain in the sea). So many ridges and peaks to choose from! We explored just a smidgeon, but I’d gladly have lingered far longer. I mean look at this:

An extraordinarily magical, mystical land altogether. Being a fervent admirer of all things Tolkienian, and in the midst of reading The Silmarillion with the utmost relish, Eru Ilúvatar, Varda, Ulmo et al. were on my mind quite a bit throughout our travels.

Corsica or Middle Earth?

In conclusion, and if I may wax profound for just a minute here—Corsica took my breath away. I have been travelling around France for nearly 20 years now, and have discovered countless things to love, but this island had an entirely different, deliciously unique feel to it. In Corsica, the imprint of French Civilization is far less overwhelming than it is on the mainland, where art and architecture speak passionately and eloquently of human history, of human achievement. In Corsica, the roles are reversed: structures, however handsome, are ultimately mere props; Nature is the true star of the show. Polychrome rock. Spirited wind. Fiery sun. Crystalline water. They spoke deeply and powerfully to me on this trip, cutting through the layers of suppressed anxiety and accumulated mental clutter. 

In these strange and often surreal times, the “new normal” for many of us is one of uncertainty, of disorientation, and a gnawing fear that the Covid-19 crisis is but a warning shot. Yet these timeless elements of earth and air, fire and water, which existed long before we arrived and will endure long after we have departed, are a reminder that perhaps our view of our own lives has itself become too “macro.” Perhaps we need to zoom out, shift our focus off of our little selves, forget our all-important problems for a while, and remember that we are part of a much larger picture. We and All That Is are made of the same stuff—are works by the same Artist. Checking in with the heart, reconnecting with the present is simple: hear the rustle of wind in the trees. Slip one foot, and then another into a cool brook. Close your eyes and feel the sunshine on your face. Ultimately, what makes me feel safer, healthier, more in touch with life itself: checking my Twitter feed for the umpteenth time, or lying in silence on a warm boulder, listening to the sound of water flowing over pebbles? Maybe the key to soothing a weary soul really is as easy as that. Contentment doesn’t have to be fleeting. 

Someone should tell my kids.

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.

We don’t need no education

Ah, September. Its sweet blend of nostalgia and anxiety, guilt and deliverance, foreboding and euphoria … no other time of the year can quite compare.

Personally, I love September. Not only is it the one month of the entire year in which I am neither too hot nor too cold, but it carries with it a sense of infinite possibility akin to that of the New Year, only without the bleakness, darkness, and freezing rain of January. Also, Paris in the autumn is one of my great joys, perhaps because it was autumn when I first arrived here many moons ago.

As a mother, my fondness for September has been exponentially amplified, for it also heralds the end of summer’s reign of terror and the restoration of civilized routine. In France, this time of the year is known as la rentrée, when the vacationing season winds down and French adults return to their jobs, tanned and rejuvenated, while French children return to school, where they resume being psychologically pummeled into obedience by the national education system.

Mandatory schooling in this well-educated country begins at age three with maternelle, which is roughly the equivalent of the preschool, pre-K, and kindergarten years. Maternelle takes place on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm. That’s a long day (says my mom), yet somehow not long enough (says every parent I know).

When our son began maternelle, I was an emotional wreck. On his first day, we trotted him off to class wearing his little orange penguin backpack, and I proceeded to spend the entire week crying harder than our two-month-old daughter. However, by the time it was said daughter’s turn to enter school three years later, believe you me I did not spend more than 10 minutes wiping my eyes—a substantial improvement. I have come to embrace, nay, ADORE French school.

 

I mean look, over the course of maternelle alone, our son has learned more than I think I knew when I was twice his age: The kid can count past 100 in two languages, write the alphabet in print and in cursive, read short words, and do basic mathematics. He knows about the solar system, the life cycle of trees, the music of Mozart, and the art of M.C. Escher. He’s been on field trips to several châteaux, the zoo, and multiple artsy movies. He’s even learned how to swim. At school. Oh, and table manners! He’s learned how to hold his silverware, how to eat multi-course meals properly, and how to get along with his peers—sort of.

School is fabulous.

Now, it’s not all a bed of roses. Certain teachers can be quite strict with the rules, which does not necessarily mesh well with the whole positive parenting philosophy. However, for children who tend to be among the more obedience-challenged (eh-hem), it’s a damn panacea. In fact, the school system is one of the keys to that oft-noted good behavior demonstrated by French kids that Americans find so fascinating: Right about the time when a child is reaching his maximum exasperation-inducing capacity, i.e., age three, in swoops public school to iron that right out. It has been relatively successful in our home; I figure his American heredity is what’s keeping our son a tad naughty, but then maybe that’s part of his charm? I guess?

Also, potty training—yikes. If your child is not propre (literally “clean”) then he is not allowed at school. The end. This is a major stress factor for parents desperately awaiting their child’s turn to be tamed educated. Try as we might, our little guy was not quite ready on time; when we picked him up at the end of that first day, he had a tell-tale plastic bag tied to his backpack. Its contents were wet clothing that reeked to high heaven: “WTF IS THIS?” I believe were my exact words. I suspect the unspoken goal of the exercise is to shame the child into obedience, or rather, shame the child’s parents into stepping up their potty training game. In any case, it may be cruel and unusual, but it worked—he was 95% potty trained by the end of the week, as were his other reluctant classmates.

This year, we are discovering the next step in the French educational adventure, which is to say first grade. In first grade, they mean business. This was immediately evident to us on our son’s last day of kindergarten, when we received a page-long list of supplies to be provided on Day One of the following year, along with a note specifying that every last item, right down to each individual crayon, would need to be labelled. It took me roughly three hours to create, print, cut out, and label everything—and an additional hour to Scotch tape it all when my lovingly-made labels began to peel off. 

Then there’s the backpack. For years, I had noticed French children dragging theirs along the ground on little wheels, suitcase-style, and kicking up an insane amount of dust in the process. What is the point of that? I often wondered. Now I know. Normal-sized children’s backpacks simply cannot contain all the crap that French schoolchildren are expected to haul around with them. So we had to go out and buy our son a backpack twice his size, just like everybody else. At least he can wear the thing—I draw the line at wheels. I mean come on, the kid is in FIRST GRADE. What happens when he reaches middle school? I see trunkfuls of office supplies in our future, along with a full range of personalized luggage in which to carry it all.

This is not to say that there is no room for fun in the French curriculum. Anyone who lives in proximity to a schoolyard will tell you that the kids have ample time to (loudly) ram around outdoors, play sports, and blow off steam. Honestly, French public school is the gift that just keeps on giving. My kids are receiving a high-quality education for free, and are bringing home the artwork, reading, writing, and arithmetic to prove it. Most importantly, they seem to honestly be enjoying themselves; they’re happy when I drop them off in the morning and happy when I pick them up in the afternoon.

Which means I have 8 hours per day sans kids, and that, my friends, is the true beauty of French schooling.

Let us cultivate our garden

Today a tree was delivered to my front door. I bought it online for 24 euros and had it shipped to me from across France for an additional 27 euros. You might be thinking, “Wait, you paid more in shipping than you did for the tree? Are you some kind of moron?” To which I would reply, “Perhaps I’m a moron, but I’m a moron with a pretty bitchin’ tree.”

Let me back up about 40 years. I was raised in a house with a garden. I fully expected to one day have a house with a garden of my own. But then I moved to Paris, and began a long period of renting decidedly garden-less apartments. I thus contented myself with decorating the balconies of my various abodes with potted plants, realizing along the way that I’m pretty bad at keeping green things alive. Huh.

Many years later, when I had acquired a husband and birthed a couple of tiny people, the day came when we decided to empty our bank accounts into a place of our very own—obviously an apartment, because this is the Paris region and we are not Bill Gates. But apartment or not, I wanted a real garden. First, a garden means that one is on the ground floor, and that means no balconies or windows to worry about one’s children falling off/out/through. Second, a garden means outdoor space for one’s children to ram around in without the risk of getting lost/kidnapped/run over. (I’m not unnecessarily anxious; YOU’RE unnecessarily anxious.)

A garden is also an end in itself—a garden! Yay! At last a chance to plant more exciting things than doomed-to-die-in-August €3.99 specials! I made lists of plants, did sketches (indeed), and read up on local species. We hired a gardener, for Pete’s sake. He came this close to covering half the surface area in gravel, but we don’t talk about that.

With time, effort, and many trips to nurseries across the northwest Ile-de-France, we now have quite a cute little garden. I have managed to cram every kind of pretty flowering plant I can think of into it somewhere, while leaving enough grass for our kids and the occasional hedgehog to scamper about in.

Also, and this is very exciting: I haven’t really killed anything so far. I was semi-convinced after years of desiccating/drowning vast quantities of potted plants that I was hopeless as a gardener. I remember saying as much to a few people I’d just met at an expat gathering a few years back. I believe my exact words were, “I don’t have a green thumb; I have a black thumb!” One of the folks I was talking to happened to be African American. She gave me an odd look; I turned beet red. And that is another reason to have a garden, i.e. a hiding place for the socially inept.

It being March now, our garden is beginning to awaken. This makes me happy. I spent all last Tuesday yanking out weeds, snipping dead branches, planting seeds, and lobbing snail shells as far as I could get them. You might say, “That’s cruel!” To which I would reply, “No; eating my plants is cruel.” I’m a pacifist, except when it comes to nasty little creatures nibbling on my plants or on my children—then I am merciless. Show me a slug sliming its way toward my tender green shoots and I will show you a kitchen knife that has no moral compass.

My new tree is a Coralcole dwarf ornamental crab apple. You heard me. Finding it was a pain in the ass, which is why I ultimately shrugged at that hefty delivery fee. I mean, I could have DRIVEN for several hours to the like one place in France that seems to stock these things, but would that have been time, energy, or cost-efficient? Clearly not. Anyway, it is now here, and I will plant it this weekend, and my husband will eye me warily and wonder why I’m so hell bent on filling up the garden with such highly specific plant life.

WHY? Because God is in the details, damn it, which is about as close to my entire life philosophy as one pithy saying can get.

Watercolor by yours truly.

Visions of sugarplums

I’m not really a dessert person. Oh, I love tarte Tatin (it’s like an upside-down apple pie and I’m from the apple pie capital of America, so no surprise there). And macarons. And I can be coaxed into the occasional moelleux au chocolat. But I cannot *make* any of these things. I can make pumpkin pie. And banana bread. That’s about it. Everything else turns out either too thin, too flat, too dry, too crumbly, too dark, or some unfortunate combination thereof.

Lacking any kind of talent in this area never particularly bothered me until I became a mom. Living in France and all, where children’s 4 p.m. snack-time is straight up sacrosanct, I kind of feel obligated to provide mine with a warm home that smells of sugar and spice—which is why I buy scented candles.

But this is Christmas. Christmas is different. Christmas means turning on the oven and baking sweet things. More specifically, my American psyche says that Christmas means baking COOKIES. I suck at baking cookies. However, this year I felt like family cookie time would be a nice festive bonding opportunity that we could all share, while listening to carols and smiling. I have these moments of suspended sanity sometimes, where I forget all past experience or indeed common sense and just dive, head-long, into guaranteed failure. This would be one such moment.

It doesn’t help matters that my Christmas cookie culture is more inferential than empirical; my mom being an enthusiastic devotee of the full organic SoCal lifestyle, my brother and I did not grow up eating chocolate chip cookies; we grew up gnawing on whole wheat-sesame-raisin-honey-nut thingies with an involuntarily blackened underside (I’ve inherited this trait, so no criticism here). Actual Christmas cookies—the kind made out of white flour and white sugar—were something the neighbors gave us once a year, probably out of pity.

I obviously don’t own any cookie recipes—because why would I?—but that is why we have the internet. So I hunted down some Better Homes-worthy candidates, printed them out, made a shopping list, and figured I was off to a good start. What I neglected to factor into the equation was that THIS IS FRANCE. One would think that after 20+ years of living here, I’d stop assuming anything, especially when it comes to Christmas (there are no candy canes! NO. CANDY. CANES.), but alas.

Now, in my defense, we do our shopping at what the French call an hypermarché, which supposedly translates as a “big box store,” although I’ve never used this particular term in my entire life, and I get the feeling that if I went and tried to sneak it into an English conversation, people would imagine I was talking about a cardboard specialty shop. In any case, “big box store” is a moronic translation for the hypermarché, which is where you go when you want to buy large quantities of multiple types of stuff, all in one place. Oodles of groceries, tons of toys, mountains of clothing, piles of housewares, etc. etc. etc. It’s like Walmart but way better (duh, it’s French). Ours is a Carrefour Planet, which I call “the Vortex,” because time seems to mysteriously speed up as soon as we’re inside; instead of taking 1-2 hours, the average visit takes us 5. So I figured, foolishly, that the Vortex would cover all of my cookie-baking needs.

Ah, but this is France, mes chéris. And France does things its own way.

Let’s start with molasses. Seems simple enough. The word exists in French—mélasse—and is a known ingredient (at least in the French West Indies); therefore, it should be a supermarket item like any other, according to me. Except that no, it isn’t. I scoured the (very large) baking aisle, the jams and jellies aisle, the organic aisle, and even the imports aisle (lost time: 30 minutes). Nothing. As my dad pointed out, France’s colonial past would indeed lead one to believe molasses to be a readily available commodity. Plus, France has quite a few overseas territories that grow what? SUGAR CANE. Rum, for instance, is not lacking here; the Vortex has all the rum anyone could need. No molasses, though. The same can be said of whole turkeys, but don’t get me started on that.

Fine. I scratched molasses off my list and figured I’d find a workaround. All the basics were there aplenty: butter, sugar, eggs, flour. No ready-made frosting, but who cares? I’d rather make my own (you heard me). However, things got tricky again when I reached the “decorations” part of my list: red and green sugar, holiday M&Ms, and Hershey’s Kisses. Oh yeah, and cookie cutters.

Red and green sugar: did the Vortex have it? No. In fact, the entire baking aisle looked much like it does the rest of the year, i.e., nothing particularly Christmassy about it. Thus, the only decorations available were the usual confetti sprinkles, chopped nuts, chocolate chips, vanilla extract, almond powder, etc. I looked, believe me. Up the aisle and down again. Crouched. Stood on my toes. NOTHING. Oh, there was colored sugar all right: gold sugar, pink sugar, pearled sugar. I even found candied fruit, but only YELLOW candied fruit. They must be doing this on purpose.

On to M&Ms. Do you think that the French stock holiday M&M’s (considering they do stock brownie M&Ms, mini M&Ms, and caramel M&Ms)? No, I’m sure you would never think anything so patently absurd. Anyway, they don’t. So I bought a normal bag and figured I’d PICK OUT the red and green ones. Hershey’s Kisses I pretty much expected not to find; they may stock miniature candy bars like Snickers, Mars, Milky Way, etc., but the so-called City of Love does not carry Hershey’s Kisses.

By this point my bitch-o-meter was at about a 6 out of 10, so it was time to move along. Cookie cutters—dammit. I had to backtrack to the “house and kitchen” section of the Vortex. And what did I find there? NO GINGERBREAD MEN is what. Not one. I found tree shapes (yay!) and lots of festive cake molds, but no good old-fashioned gingerbread man cookie cutters. WHY THE HELL NOT? French Christmas decorations often feature gingerbread men! So where do they keep the corresponding cookie cutters? My bitch-o-meter inched up to a 7. I needed a drink. Spiked eggnog would have been nice, except eggnog is ANOTHER CHRISTMAS THING YOU CAN’T GET IN FRANCE.

In the end, I had to go to an arts and crafts store on the other side of town the next day for my gingerbread man. Obviously, the cutters weren’t sold separately; I had to buy a pack of three in various sizes. Oh well. I ALSO found green and red colored sugar! Granted, the red was definitely fuchsia, but it was labelled rouge, so I took it. Total cost for sugar and cookie cutters: 19 euros. Yeah.

When cookie baking day rolled around, I pulled out my recipes, organized my ingredients, summoned my children, and got to work.

It took six hours. SIX HOURS.

First of all, we only have one cookie tray (technically two if you count the pizza tray, but it’s “not optimal” and I mean that in the Benghazi sense). Second, our oven can only handle two racks. Also, whatever one is supposed to use as a surface for rolling out and cutting up cookie dough, we clearly don’t have that. Doing it directly on the countertop seemed weird, so I used a cutting board. The cutting board is not big. Anyway, our limited production capacity meant that our productivity level was destined to be mediocre from the get-go. That did not stop us. We rolled out portions of dough, the kids obviously fought over who got to do the cutting, I managed to get the cookies off the cutting board and onto the various trays without completely destroying their shapes, and into the oven they went.

Decorating the cookies was another romp through the fields of wholesome-family-moments-gone-terribly-awry. Have you ever made icing? I hadn’t. The recipe called for powdered sugar and water. Do you know what happens when you mix powdered sugar and water using an electrical hand mixer? Clouds of powdered sugar rising into your face is what happens. My kids thought this was hilarious. Spooning said icing onto the cookies was rather messier than I’d imagined as well, but we got through it. The kids THOROUGHLY enjoyed decorating the iced cookies, and for a few moments there I really did catch a glimpse of the “holiday moment” I’d been aiming for all along.

Alas, it was short-lived. The decorating committee soon began to squabble over supplies, which rapidly degenerated into mutual accusations of ineptitude, followed by insults and verbal attacks, physical aggression, and ultimately eviction of the committee from the premises. The committee was reconvened after a 10-minute break and told in no uncertain terms that such behavior was not reflective of the Christmas spirit and would not be tolerated.

Did that help? Not really, but we (I) gritted our (my) teeth and got through it. In the end, the house smelled Christmassy and the cookies were actually pretty tasty. The kitchen, however, took about an hour to put back into order, and seeing as how I’d had quite enough “help” from my children for one day, I thought it wiser to limit the clean-up committee to those above the age of 10. This obviously gave me ample time to mutter under my breath about holding Hallmark and its holiday propaganda (in particular that ca. 1990s Oh Holy Night commercial) FULLY RESPONSIBLE for guilt-tripping me into believing that family Christmas baking is a thing, when in truth I’m pretty sure that all those beautiful sugary cookies our neighbors used to give us when I was a kid were MADE BY ADULTS, WHILE LISTENING TO NAT KING COLE AND SIPPING BRANDY.

Oh well, there’s always next year. 

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