Bringing Up Bebe (4 page)
Authors: Pamela Druckerman
Like me, these women see being pregnant as an excuse to bond, worry, shop, and eat. They fortify each other against the social pressure to lose their baby weight. “At some point I’ll get around to it,” one new mother writes. “I’m not going to waste precious time weighing out lettuce leaves now.”
The most salient dilemma among pregnant Message members and other Anglophones I know is
how
to give birth. I meet an American in Rome who delivered her baby in an Italian wine vat (filled with water, not Pinot Grigio). A friend in Miami read that the pain of childbirth is a cultural construct, so she trained to birth her twins using only yoga breaths. In our Message-sponsored parenting class, one woman planned to fly home to Sydney for an authentic Australian delivery.
Birth, like most everything else, is something we try to customize. My obstetrician says she once received a four-page birth plan from an American patient, instructing her to massage the woman’s clitoris after the delivery. The uterine contractions from the woman’s orgasm were supposed to help expel the placenta. Interestingly, this wo Knglericaman’s birth plan also specified that both of her parents should be allowed in the delivery room. (“I said ‘no way.’ I didn’t want to be arrested,” my doctor recalls.)
In all this talk about giving birth, I never hear anyone mention that the last time the World Health Organization ranked national health-care systems, France’s was first, while America’s was thirty-seventh. Instead, we Anglos focus on how the French system is overmedicalized and hostile to the “natural.” Pregnant Message members fret that French doctors will induce labor, force them to have epidurals, then secretly bottle-feed their newborns so they won’t be able to breast-feed. We’ve all been reading the English-language pregnancy press, which emphasizes the minute risks of epidurals. Those among us who deliver “naturally” strut around like war heroes.
Despite being
the birthplace of Dr. Fernand Lamaze, epidurals are now extremely common in France. In Paris’s top maternity hospitals and clinics, about 87 percent of women have epidurals, on average
2
(not counting C-sections). In some hospitals it’s 98 or 99 percent.
Very few women make a fuss about this. French moms often ask me where I plan to deliver, but never how. They don’t seem to care. In France, the way you give birth doesn’t situate you within a value system or define the sort of parent you’ll be. It is, for the most part, a way of getting your baby safely from your uterus into your arms.
In French, giving birth without an epidural isn’t called “natural” childbirth. It’s called “giving birth without an epidural” (
accouchement sans péridurale).
A few French hospitals and maternity clinics now have birthing pools and giant rubber balls for laboring women to hug. But few Frenchwomen use these. That 1 or 2 percent of nonepidural births in Paris are, I’m told, either crazy Americans like me or Frenchwomen who didn’t get to the hospital in time.
The absolute earthiest Frenchwoman I know is Hélène. She takes her three kids on camping trips and breast-fed them all past age two. Hélène also had an epidural at each delivery. For her, there’s no contradiction. She likes some things
au naturel and some with a giant dose of drugs.
The difference
between France and America crystallizes for me when, through mutual friends, I meet Jennifer and Eric, a couple in their thirties. She’s an American who works for a multinational company in Paris. He’s a Frenchman with a job in advertising. They live just outside Paris with their two daughters. When Jennifer got pregnant for the first time, Eric assumed that they would find a doctor, choose a hospital, and have the baby. But Jennifer brought home a stack of baby books and pressed Eric to study them with her.
Eric still can’t believe how Jennifer wanted to script the delivery. “She wanted to give birth on a balloon, give birth in a bath,” he recalls. He says the doctor told her, “It’s not a zoo here, or a circus. Basically you will give birth like everyone, on your back, legs open. And the reason is that if there is a problem, then I can do something.”
Jennifer also wanted to deliver Kd theiwithout anesthesia, so that she could feel what it was like to give birth. “I’ve never heard of a woman wanting to suffer so much to have a kid,” Eric says.
What stands out for both Eric and Jennifer is what I’ve come to think of as the “Croissant Story.” When Jennifer went into labor, it became clear that all her birthing plans were for naught: she needed a cesarean. The doctor sent Eric into the waiting room. Eventually, Jennifer delivered a healthy baby girl. Afterward, in the recovery room, Eric mentioned to her that he recently ate a croissant.
Three years later, Jennifer’s blood still boils when she thinks about that piece of bread. “Eric wasn’t actually physically present [in the waiting room] during the whole thing. He went out and got a croissant! When they rolled me into the operating room, Eric walks out of the clinic, goes down the street, goes to the bakery, and buys a couple of croissants. He comes back, eats his croissant!”
This is not what Jennifer had envisioned. “My husband needs to be sitting there biting his nails, thinking, ‘Oh, will it be a boy or a girl?’” she says. She mentions that there was a vending machine near the waiting room. He could have bought a bag of peanuts.
When Eric tells his own version of the Croissant Story, he gets mad, too. Yes, there was a vending machine. But “it was very stressful; I needed some sugar,” he says. “I was sure there was a bakery just at the corner, and the bakery ended up being a bit far away. But they took her at seven. I knew that they had one hour of preparation and things like that, and I think she came back at eleven. So in all this time, yes, I spent at least fifteen minutes going to get some food.”
At first, I see the Croissant Story as a classic men-are-from-Mars tale. But I eventually realize that it’s a Franco-American parable. For Jennifer, Eric’s selfish pursuit of the croissant signaled that he wouldn’t sacrifice his own comfort for the sake of his family and the new baby. She worried that he wasn’t sufficiently invested in the project of parenting.
For Eric, it signaled no such thing. He felt thoroughly invested in the birth and is an extremely involved father. But at that moment, he was also calm, detached, and self-interested enough to walk down the street. He wanted to be a dad, but he also wanted a croissant. “In the U.S. sometimes I have the feeling that if it’s not difficult for you, you have to feel bad about that,” he says.
I’d like to think
I’m the sort of wife who wouldn’t be bothered by the croissant, or at least that Simon is the sort of husband who would hide the crumbs. I do submit a PG-rated birth plan, stating that under no circumstances should Simon be permitted to cut the umbilical cord. But since I tend to scream when I get my legs waxed, I don’t think I’m a great candidate for natural childbirth. I suspect I’ll have trouble viewing the pain as a cultural construct.
I’m more concerned about getting to the hospital in time. Following a friend’s advice, I’ve registered to give birth at a hospital all the way across town. If the baby makes a break for it during rush hour, there could be trouble.
What to Expect.
My contractions begin around eight o’clock at night. That means I can’t eat the steaming Thai food we’ve just picked up. (I will fantasize about pad thai from my hospital bed.) But at least the streets are clear. Simon calls a taxi, and I’m quiet while getting in. Let the driver—a mustachioed man in his fifties—try to pry me out.
I needn’t have worried. As soon as we’re on the road and he hears my yelps from the backseat, the driver becomes ecstatic. He says he’s been waiting his whole career as a chauffeur
for this cinematic event.
As we cross Paris in the dark, I open my seatbelt and slide to the floor of the taxi, moaning from the mounting pain. This is no leg wax. I ditch my faux fantasies of a natural childbirth. Simon opens the windows, either to give me some air or to cover the sounds I’m making.
Meanwhile, the driver speeds up. I can see the street lamps zipping past overhead. He begins loudly reciting the story of his own son’s birth twenty-five years earlier. “Slower, please!” I plead from the floor, between contractions. Simon is silent and pale, staring straight ahead.
“What are you thinking about?” I ask him.
“Dutch football,” he says.
When we arrive at the hospital, the driver pulls up at the emergency entrance, jumps out of the car, and sprints inside. It seems he’s expecting to join us for the birth. Moments later he’s back, sweaty and panting. “They’re expecting you!” he shouts.
I lurch into the building, leaving Simon to pay the fare and persuade the driver to leave. The moment I see a midwife, I declare in my clearest French: “
Je voudrais une péridurale!
” (I would like an epidural). If I’d had a wad of cash I would have waved it at her.
It turns out that despite the French passion for epidurals, they don’t just perform them on demand. The midwife takes me into an examining room to check my cervix, then looks up at me with a bemused smile. I’m barely three centimeters dilated, out of a possible ten. Women don’t usually ask for epidurals this early on, she says. She won’t summon the anesthetist from
his
pad thai for this.
She does put on the most soothing music I’ve ever heard—a sort of Tibetan lullaby—and rigs me up to a drip that softens the pain. Eventually, exhausted, I fall asleep.
I’ll spare you the details of my very medicated, very pleasant birth. Thanks to the epidural, pushing the baby out h Khe td"as the precision and intensity of a yoga move, without the discomfort. I’m so focused that I don’t even mind when my obstetrician’s teenage daughter, who lives around the corner, pops in after the delivery to ask her mom for some cash.
As it happens, the anesthesiologist, midwife, and doctor are all women. (Simon, stationed far from the business end, is there too.) The baby comes out as the sun is rising.
I’ve read that babies look like their fathers when they’re born, to assure the dads of their paternity and motivate them to go out hunting (or investment banking) for the family. My first thought when our daughter comes out is that she doesn’t merely resemble Simon; she has his face.
We cuddle with her for a while. Then they dress her in a chicly understated French outfit supplied by the hospital, complete with an ecru-colored beanie on her head. We do give her a proper name. But thanks to the hat, we mostly just call her Bean.
I stay in the hospital for six days, which is standard French practice. I see no reason to leave. There is fresh-baked bread with every meal (no need to leave for a croissant) and a sun-dappled garden where I steal away for walks. The extensive in-room wine list includes champagne. On day three, I can’t stop saying to Bean, “You weren’t born yesterday!” Simon doesn’t even pretend this is funny.
As if to emphasize that there are universal parenting principles in France, babies born here come with instructions. Each newborn is issued a white softcover book called a
carnet de santé
, which follows the child until age eighteen. Doctors record every checkup and vaccination in this book, and plot the child’s height, weight, and head size. It also has commonsense basics on what to feed babies, how to bathe them, when to go for checkups, and how to spot medical problems.
The book doesn’t prepare me for Bean’s transformation. For the first month or so, she continues to look just like Simon, with dark brown eyes and hair. She even has his dimples. If anything’s in doubt, it’s her maternity. My fair-haired, fair-eyed genes seem to have lost to his swarthy Mediterranean ones in a first-round knockout.
But at about two months old, Bean has a metamorphosis. Her hair turns blond, and her brown eyes morph improbably into blue. Our little Mediterranean baby suddenly looks like a Swede.
Technically, Bean is American. (She can request French citizenship when she’s older.) But I suspect that her French will surpass m
ine within a few months. I’m not sure whether we’re going to raise a little American girl or a little French one. We might not have a choice.
Chapter 3
doing her nights
A
few weeks after we bring Bean home, neighbors on our little courtyard Nhe tdh="0 begin asking, “Is she doing her nights?” (
Elle fait ses nuits
?)
This is the first time I hear the French formulation of “Is she sleeping through the night?” At first I find it comforting. If they’re
her
nights, then she’ll inevitably claim them. Whereas if they’re just
the
nights, she might not.
But I soon find the question irritating. Of course she’s not “doing her nights.” She’s two months old (and then three months, and then four). Everyone knows that tiny babies sleep badly. I know a few Americans who—by sheer luck—have babies that age who go down at nine
P.M.
and wake up at seven. But most parents I know don’t get an uninterrupted night’s sleep until their kids are around a year old. Heck, I know four-year-olds who still wander into their parents’ rooms at night.
My Anglophone friends and family appreciate this. They tend to ask the more open-ended question, “How is she sleeping?” And even that isn’t really a request for information; it’s a chance for the exhausted parents to vent.
For us, babies are automatically associated with sleep deprivation. A headline in the British
Daily Mail
declares: “Parents of Newborns Miss Out on SIX MONTHS Worth of Sleep in Their Child’s First Two Years,” citing a study commissioned by a bed company. The article seems credible to readers. “Sadly this is true,” one comments. “Our one year old daughter hasn’t slept a single night in twelve months, and if we have four hours sleep it’s a good night.” A poll by the National Sleep Foundation in the United States found that 46 percent of toddlers
wake up during the night, but just 11 percent of parents believed that their child had a sleep problem. A toddler’s T-shirt I see in Ft. Lauderdale says simply, “Party tonight at my crib 3
A.M
.”
My English-speaking friends tend to view their kids as having unique sleep needs, which they just have to accommodate. I’m walking around Paris with a British friend of mine one day when her toddler son climbs into her arms, reaches under her shirt to clutch her breast, then falls asleep. My friend is clearly embarrassed that I’ve witnessed this ritual, but she whispers that it’s the only way he can nap. She carries him around in this position for the next forty-five minutes.
Simon and I had of course chosen a sleep strategy. Ours was premised on the idea that it’s critical to keep a baby awake after she feeds. Once Bean is born, we go to enormous effort to do this. As far as I can tell, it has no effect.
Eventually, we ditch this theory and try other ones. We keep Bean in the daylight all day and in the dark at night. We bathe her at the same time each evening and try to stretch out the time between her feeds. For a few days I eat almost nothing but crackers and Brie, after someone tells me that fatty food will thicken my breast milk. A New Yorker who stops by says she read that we should make loud whooshing sounds to mimic the sounds in the womb. We whoosh obediently for hours.
Nothing seems to make a difference. At three months old, Bean still wakes up several times a night. We have a long ritua S a ">Nl in which I nurse her back to sleep, then hold her for fifteen more minutes so that she doesn’t wake up again when I put her in her bassinet. Simon’s forward-looking view of the world suddenly seems like a curse: he’s thrown into a nightly depression, convinced that this is going to last forever. Whereas my myopia suddenly looks like a stroke of evolutionary brilliance. I don’t think about whether this will last six more months (though it will); I just live night to night.
What’s also consoling is that this is all to be expected. Parents of infants aren’t supposed to get any sleep. Almost all the American and British parents I know say that their kids began sleeping through the night at eight or nine months, or much later. “It was really early,” a friend of Simon’s from Vermont says, consulting with his wife about when their son’s three
A.M.
wake-ups stopped. “What was it, at one year old?” Kristin, a British lawyer in Paris, tells me that her sixteen-month-old sleeps through the night, then adds: “Well, when I say ‘sleeps through the night,’ she gets up twice. But each time, only for five minutes.”
I take comfort in hearing about parents who have it worse than we do. They’re easy to find. My cousin, who co-sleeps with her ten-month-old, hasn’t gone back to her teaching job, in part because she’s up feeding the baby much of the night. I frequently phone up to ask, “How’s he sleeping?”
The worst story I hear comes from Alison, a friend of a friend in Washington, D.C., whose son is seven months old. Alison tells me that for the first six months of her son’s life, she nursed him every two hours
around the clock
. At seven months old, he began sleeping four-hour stretches. Alison—a marketing expert with an Ivy League degree—shrugs off her exhaustion and the fact that her career is on pause. She feels that she has no choice but to cater to her baby’s punishing, peculiar sleep schedule.
The alternative to all this night waking is supposedly “sleep training,” in which parents leave their babies alone to “cry it out.” I read up on this, too. It seems to be for babies who are at least six or seven months old. Alison tells me that she tried this one night, but gave up because it felt cruel. Online discussions about sleep training quickly devolve into brawls, in which opponents claim the practice is at best selfish and at worst abusive. “Sleep training disgusts me,” one mother posts on babble.com. Another writes: “If you want to sleep through the night—don’t have babies. Adopt a three-year-old or something.”
Although sleep training sounds awful, Simon and I are theoretically in favor of it. But we’re under the impression that Bean is too young for something so militaristic. Like our Anglophone friends and family, we think Bean wakes up at night because she’s hungry or because she needs something from us or just because that’s what babies do. She’s very small. So we give in to her.
I talk to French
parents about sleep, too. They’re neighbors, work acquaintances, and friends of friends. They all claim that their own kids began sleeping through the night much earlier. Samia says her daughter, who’s now two, started “doing her nights” at six weeks old; she wrote down the exact date. Stephanie, a skinny tax inspector who lives on our courtyard, looks ashamed when I ask when her s Ssk oteon, Nino, began “doing his nights.”
“Very late, very late!” Stephanie says. “He started doing his nights in November, so it was . . . four months old! For me it was very late.”
Some French sleep stories sound too good to be true. Alexandra, who works in a French day-care center and lives in a suburb of Paris, says that both of her daughters began sleeping through the night almost from birth. “Already in the maternity ward, they woke up for their bottles around six
A.M.
,” she says.
Many of these French babies are bottle-fed, or they drink a combination of breast milk and formula. But that doesn’t seem to make a crucial difference. The French breast-fed babies I meet do their nights early on, too. Some French moms tell me they quit breast-feeding when they went back to work, at about three months. But by that time their babies were already doing their nights.
At first I figure that I’m just meeting a few lucky French parents. But soon the evidence becomes overwhelming: having a baby who sleeps through the night early on seems to be the norm in France. Just as stories of terrible sleepers are easy to find among Americans, stories of spectacular sleepers are easy to find among the French. My neighbors suddenly seem less obnoxious. They weren’t baiting me; they actually believed that a two-month-old might already be “doing her nights.”
French parents don’t expect their babies to sleep well right after they’re born. But by the time these broken nights start to seem unbearable—usually after two or three months—they usually end. Parents talk about night wake-ups as a short-term problem, not a chronic one. Everyone I speak to takes for granted that babies can and probably will do their nights by about six months, and often much sooner. “Certain babies do their night at six weeks, others need four months to find their rhythm,” an article in
Maman!
magazine says.
Le Sommeil, le rêve et l’enfant
(
Sleep, Dreams and the Child
), a top-selling sleep guide, says that between three and six months, “He’s going to sleep complete nights, of eight or nine hours at a minimum. The parents will finally rediscover the pleasure of long uninterrupted nights.”
There are exceptions, of course. That’s why France has baby sleep books and pediatric sleep specialists. Some babies who do their nights at two months start waking again a few months later. I do hear about French kids who take a year to start doing their nights. But the truth is, over many years in France, I don’t meet them. Marion, the mother of a little girl who becomes one of Bean’s close friends, says her baby boy did his nights at six months. That’s the longest among any of my Parisian friends and acquaintances. Most of them are like Paul, another architect, who says that his three-and-a-half-month-old son sleeps a full twelve hours, from eight
P.M.
to eight
A.M.
What’s maddening is that while French parents can tell you
exactly when their kids began sleeping through the night, they can’t explain how this came about. They don’t mention sleep training, “Ferberizing”—a sleep technique developed by Dr. Richard Ferber—or any other branded method. A Sdedionnd they claim that they never let their babies cry for long periods. In fact, most French parents look a little queasy when I mention this practice.
Speaking to older parents isn’t much help either. A French publicist in her fifties—who goes to work in pencil skirts and stilettos—is shocked to learn that I have any baby sleep issues. “Can’t you give her something to sleep? You know, some medicine or something like that?” she asks. At the very least, she says, I should leave the baby with someone and recover at a spa for a week or two.
None of the younger French parents I meet either drug their kids to sleep or hide in a sauna. Most insist that their babies learned to sleep long stretches all by themselves. Stephanie, the tax inspector, claims she didn’t have much to do with it. “I think it’s the child, he’s the one who decides,” she said.
I hear this same idea from Fanny, thirty-three, the publisher of a group of financial magazines. Fanny says that at around three months old, her son Antoine spontaneously dropped his three
A.M.
feedings and slept through the night.
“He decided to sleep,” Fanny explains. “I never forced anything. You give him food when he needs food. He just regulated it all by himself.”
Fanny’s husband, Vincent, who’s listening to our conversation, points out that three months is exactly when Fanny went back to work. Like other French parents I speak to, he says this timing isn’t a coincidence. He says Antoine understood that his mother needed to wake up early to go to the office. Vincent compares this understanding to the way ants communicate through chemical waves that pass between their antennae.
“We believe a lot in
le
feeling,” Vincent says, using the English word. “We guess that children understand things.”
French parents do offer a few sleep tips. They almost all say that in the early months, they kept their babies with them in the light during the day, even for naps, and put them to bed in the dark at night. And almost all say that, from birth, they carefully “observed” their babies, and then followed the babies’ own “rhythms.” French parents talk so much about rhythm, you’d think they were starting rock bands, not raising kids.
“From zero to six months, the best is to respect the rhythms of their sleep,” explains Alexandra, the mother whose babies slept through the night practically from birth.
I observe Bean, too, often at three
A.M.
So why is there no rhythm in our house? If sleeping through the night “just happens,” why hasn’t it just happened to us?
When I pour out my frustration to Gabrielle, one of my new French acquaintances, she recommends that I look at a book called
L’enfant et son sommeil
(
The Child and His Sleep
). She says the author, Hélène De Leersnyder, is a well-known pediatrician in Paris who specializes in sleep.
now="-1" face="Goudy Old Style MT Std">The book is baffling. I’m used to the straightforward, self-help style of American baby books. De Leersnyder’s book opens with a quotation from Marcel Proust, then launches into an ode to slumber.
“Sleep reveals the child and the life of the family,” De Leersnyder writes. “To go to bed and fall asleep, to separate himself from his parents for a few hours, the child must trust his body to keep him alive, even when he’s not in control of it. And he must be serene enough to approach the strangeness of
pensée de la nuit
(thoughts that come in the night).”
Sleep, Dreams and the Child
also says that a baby can only sleep well once he accepts his own separateness. “The discovery of peaceful, long and serene nights, and an acceptance of solitude, is that not a sign that the child has recovered his inner peace, that he has moved beyond sorrow?”
Even the scientific sections of these books sound existential. What we call “rapid-eye-movement sleep” the French call
sommeil paradoxal
(paradoxical sleep) because the body is still but the mind is extremely active. “To learn to sleep, to learn to live, are these not synonyms?” De Leersnyder asks.