It occurs to me now that sociology might just be a hobby of mine, loosely attended, amidst the hustle and bustle of my life. I like these books...written about the times, about people, about their habits in society. And stated with notes and research to back it up.
Do I want to do that research myself? No way. Is it always right? Probably not. But I like reading about it. Especially when the author is good. Or so unlike me that I can't put the book down.
This book says much more than how you care for a baby. It's from the perspective of a New Yorker, previously jaded by the corporate world, who marries a British man. He is Jewish and looks Mediterranean. He likes Dutch football and feels comfortable being 'other' in a foreign city. Their nannies are Filipino or Moroccan and happen to live nearby in Paris. And they spend half of the book discussing their counterparts in America (very East Coast in their response to anything) and how to serve the French food they acclimate to.
What's more.....the book is how to have a holiday by the sea with toddlers in tow. And what French mothers say at the playground. (Or don't say....I guess they're not as out rightly biographical.) She uses words like svelte and Camembert, and 'autonomie' and 'betise'. She walks her daughter to the French equivalent of preschool 'down a medieval looking street'. She says that some of these things create a 'cadre', or a framework for her view of her world. (Which is what the very thing the other half of the book is about.)
Most of this is so not me, a Midwestern American teacher. No toddlers in tow in my holidays by the sea.
So reading this book was similar to what it felt like to first discover Anne Lamott. She is someone who had dreadlocks and did a lot of drugs in her younger years, who always lived in California and was staunchly liberal in most thoughts about society. She writes from this perspective. I have been to California once, haven't done drugs, don't have dreadlocks (that would be disastrous on many levels) and grew up with a bunch of Republicans. Night and day. But I love Anne Lamott.
There are lots of times in my life when I say something with authority, usually about kids that seems common sensical. I then have the habit of quickly retracting it. I do not want to offend, and I do not want to be arrogant. What's more, I am sleeping through the night. What do I know about tantrums with toddlers at 2 AM?
Close friends tell me that even though I am not some one's mother, I still study people and know the importance of complicity in relationships. And I see a lot of families....some with young kids, like my friends, and then in people I work with every day. When I closed the book just now, I thought about the myriad of stories that I have stored up as well. I can relate because people have been generous to me. They have let me into their lives. So I have seen the things she writes about on the page.
I still argue that you can be philosophical all you want when you're well rested and not the one in charge of a sleep-deprived toddler. So I tread carefully here. But I have been paying attention.
First, I don't think that Americans can only be described in one way, and the French another. And the author doesn't either. But she says that there is a noticeable difference in the way the French view their children at all.
My direct connection was in the chapter that talked about this way of life at home going to school. I had been wondering how valid my thoughts were (retract, retract the arrogance here) and then the author just said it. Teachers see it too. She gave so much credibility to the patterns teachers see in their students, and even referenced the many times she would ask these teachers for advice.
And that's where I come in. Because in 5 short years, I have seen some things, and gotten some advice questions from aggravated parents. And slowly, over time, begun to forge my own views of what is what in teaching children. In spending many hours of my time with them. In talking to their parents. Even greeting them in the grocery store. There is a way to go about these things.
Mostly this book talks about meaning business as a parent, and choosing to live in an equilibrium as a family that doesn't completely exhaust your life. Just because you are a parent.
My first glimpse of this was when I was 20 years old, still in college at Bethel, and the RDs who lived below me became good mentors and good friends. Talk about your pivotal conversations. On Juli's 30th birthday, I sat in her living room with her and talked about her excitement for a new decade. It has banished this idea of living in fear of a number for me ever since.
Still, it's different to actually get to that year in your own life. I say that willingly because I got slightly dramatic inside at 25. And it was twenty-five. (Just for a little while. What is that anyway?)
However, Jon and Juli not only talked with me but showed me how you live so that certain things in your family do not rule you. Including your children. That you pay attention to your marriage in a certain way. That you aren't offended one whit when your brother calls and it's your daughter's birthday and he doesn't even mention it. ('He probabily didn't know. And we want Luci to know that her life alone is not the center of the world.')
It has stuck with me ever since. And every time, I could see 'Juli, the woman and friend' as often as I could see 'Juli, who is a mom'. (Juli had dreadlocks once upon a time too, by the way. To see what it was like, because pregnant women usually don't. I really like her.)
A common fear I hear in women my own age is that they will disappear in motherhood. Whenever it comes to them, even if they hold off and establish some other something in life now, can they handle the change? Does the world really support it? Will their boss make some offhand remark? Will day care ruin their children? Some of my friends are married but not thinking of motherhood at all. Some are right on the cusp of it. Other friends have 2 or 3 children by now. The 20s have varied the life experiences found in each of my friends.
So this disappearing act....mostly when I am with them I try to pay attention to them if not more than their baby. Sometimes I forget...their babies are so new and so cute. They are people I will know for a long time and I want to get to know them. But mothers have told me that when people come up to them, they only look at the stroller. I find that alarming and sad.
Sometimes when I ask them how they are, they need a few minutes to really think about it. So I really admire the way of life that gives children a lot of safety and security, and also keeps your own life from becoming completely unhinged too.
Let's be honest....sometimes that is an ideal. I got to the chapter that discussed the birth of the author's twins, and I myself got a little depressed. Not because they weren't being positive about their lives, but you could feel the intensity of that season in the writing.
My best friend just had twins in May, and I spent considerable time with them this summer. It's awfully inspiring, and awfully intense to take care of two babies at once. The author talked about the kinds of heckled fights that would emerge...'you don't shake up the orange juice before you pour, and I drink a glass of pulp'....and that is the world beginning to unhinge.
I think it's realistic to say that's how some things feel. But there is a long-term goal in the book, and I read that it's accessible to Americans, despite the 'neuroses' found in the 'pregnant woman reading section' at Barnes and Nobles everywhere. (I hear there aren't as many of those in France.)
The chapters that resonate most with me can even be understood in a selection of the chapter titles. Read on...
'doing her nights'
'wait!'
'tiny little humans'
'day care?'
'bebe au lait'
'the perfect mother doesn't exist'
'caca boudin' (this literally means 'sausage poop' and was comprised of the book's best stories)
'i adore this baguette'
'you just have to taste it'
'it's me who decides'
and...
'let him live his life'
That last one could be the battle cry of the common middle schooler, but I do agree that the frontal lobe is also at war with some of those long-term decisions. Ebb and flow. I'd say the previous chapter,"It is me who decides", would also be an appropriate response from the 40 something parent who is responding to their angsty puberty-stricken child.
My respect for the parents of teenagers lives on.
Amazon.com got me hooked when it let me read the first two chapters of the book before I bought it. Here's what I leave with you. It's mid stride in the chapter called 'caca boudin' and it offered a closer explanation of what I have recently begun to enact at school as well.
SAYING HELLO.
"While the maternelle brings us all more into French life, it also makes us realize that French families observe social codes that we don't. After a dinner at the home of my friend Esther and her husband, who have a daughter Bean's age, Esther becomes agitated because the little girl won't come out of her room to say good-bye to us. Esther finally marches into the girl's room and drags her out.
'Au revoir,' the four-year old says meekly. Esther is soothed."
.....
"For some French parents, a simple bonjour is isn't enough. 'They should say it with confidence, it's the first part of a relationship,' another mother tells me."
.....
"Adults are supposed to say bonjour to each other too, of course. I think tourists are often treated gruffly in Parisian cafes and shops partly because they don't begin interactions with bonjour, even if they switch to English afterward. It's crucial to say bonjour upon climbing into a taxi, when a waitress first approaches your table in a restaurant, or before asking a salesperson if the pants come in your size. Saying bonjour acknowledges the other person's humanity. It signals that you view her as a person, not just as someone who is supposed to serve you. I'm amazed that people seem visibly put at ease after I say a nice solid bonjour. It signals that - although I have a strange accent - we're going to have a civilized encounter.
In the United States, a four-year old American kid isn't obligated to greet me when he walks into my house. He gets to skulk in under the umbrella of his parents' greeting. And in an American context, that's supposed to be fine with me. I don't need the child's acknowledgement because I don't quite count him as a full person; he's in a separate kids' realm. I might hear all about how gifted he is, but he never actually speaks to me."
.....
"Part of what the French obsession with bonjour reveals is that, in France, kids don't get to have this shadowy presence. The child greets, therefore he is. Just as any adult who walks into my house has to acknowledge me, any child who walks in must acknowledge me, too. "
.....
"Parents acknowledge that greeting someone is in some ways an adult act. 'I don't think it's easy to say hello,' says Denise, a medical ethicist with two girls, ages seven and nine. But Denise says it fortifies kids to know that their greeting matters to the adult."
Tres interresant, n'est-ce pas?
At the beginning of the year, my students laughed when I impersonated the glazed look I see in response to my greeting at the beginning of class. I tell them it is awkward for me to see this, and that saying hello is important to me. It sets a tone. And now this is our normal. Last year, in the spring, I took some time to think about why it's so important that people greet their teacher. Not because it's a throwback to the stereotypical rigidity of the 1950s teacher/student way of life. But because saying hello does matter in any time and place.
We practiced. If they responded in a way that was over the top or to seek attention, we did it again, despite the awkwardness that momentarily ensued. (I do not shout at them. They will not shout at me.) Earlier in teaching, things like this made me feel like a complete battle axe. But now I know that it matters. Lots of school is teaching people manners too. If they interrupt me, I tell them I am talking with another adult. They will wait. If they do it again, I ignore them until they get it. Sometimes, this is what must happen. They don't see it at first, but they quickly learn. And so, I brought this element to the beginning of class.
Furthermore, I now say that having manners in classrooms is so important. For both the teacher and the student. In student teaching, I literally witnessed shouting matches between teachers and students. It was ugly, and made the world feel off kilter. ('Didn't she know that power struggles don't work with 14 year olds? Didn't I want to punch the teacher who told me I needed 'more street cred to get to these kids'? Why yes, yes, I did. 'Street cred' did not find its way into the class he taught, let me tell you.)
In those first years in other classrooms, I saw a lot of real incredulous anger from kids directed at their teachers.
It is why I have loved the quote from Dickens that reminds the teacher to respect the pupil. They respond very well when manners are shared, and an icy glare for moments otherwise, and a few rules that are a framework. It lets a lot of life in. There is that 'autonomie' the French speak of. You aren't that stressed. And you can breathe.
A lot of this 'way of teaching' that I have in my mind has come from experiences in class with all of my very best teachers. But I see now, in reading Bringing Up Bebe, that it can come in the framework of more than just school. I do not mean to be patronizing when I say this, but saying 'No' firmly to a 14 year old and standing by it, has had the same outcomes as saying 'No', firmly, to someone who is 2. The boundary is a relief. For everyone.
'No', said rightly, is a powerful thing. And....life lesson 4,235 for Miss Christians in teaching.
All in all, this book is great. And I say it is meant for more than just the mothers and the teachers of this world.
No comments:
Post a Comment