French Children Don't Throw Food Read Online Free Page B

training as a midwife.
    Actual sex is the final, symbolic domino to fall. Although it’s technically permitted, books like
What to Expect
presume that sex during pregnancy is inherently fraught. ‘What got you into this situation in the first place may now have become one of your biggest problems,’ the authors warn. They go on to describe eighteen factors that may inhibit your sex life, including ‘fear that the introduction of the penis into the vagina will cause infection’. If a woman does find herself having sex, they recommend a new low in multitasking: using the moment to do pelvic-floor exercises, which tone your birth canal in preparation for childbirth.
    I’m not sure that anyone follows all this advice. Like me, they probably just absorb a certain worried tone and state of mind. Even from abroad, it’s contagious. Given how susceptible I am, it’s probably better that I’m far from the source. Maybe the distance will give me some perspective on parenting.
    I’m already starting to suspect that raising a child will be quite different in France. When I sit in cafés in Paris, with my belly pushing up against the table, no one jumps in to warn me about the hazards of caffeine. On the contrary, they light cigarettes right next to me. The only question strangers ask, when they notice my belly, is
Vous attendez un enfant?
– are you waiting for a child? It takes me a while to realize that they don’t think I have a lunch date with a truant six-year-old. It’s French for ‘Are you pregnant?’
    I am waiting for a baby. It’s probably the most important thing I’ve ever done. Despite my qualms about Paris, there’s something nice about doing this waiting in a place where I’m practically immune to other people’s judgements. Though Paris is one of the most cosmopolitan cities on earth, I feel like I’m off the grid. In French I don’t understand name-dropping, school histories and other little hints that, to a French person, signal someone’s social rank and importance. And since I’m a foreigner, they don’t know my status either.
    When I packed up and moved to Paris, I never imagined that the move would be permanent. Now I’m starting to worry that Simon likes being a foreigner a bit too much. After living in all those countries while he was growing up, it’s his natural state. He confesses that he feels connected to lots of people and cities, and doesn’t need any one place to be his official home. He calls this style ‘semi-detached’, like a house in a London suburb.
    Already, several of our Anglophone friends have left France, usually when their jobs changed. But our jobs don’t require us to be here. The cheese plate aside, we’re really here for no reason. And ‘no reason’ – plus a baby – is starting to look like the strongest reason of all.

2
    Paris Is Burping
    OUR NEW APARTMENT isn’t in the paris of postcards. It’s off a narrow street in a Chinese garment district, where we’re constantly jostled by men hauling rubbish bags full of clothes. There’s no sign that we’re in the same city as the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame or the elegantly winding river Seine.
    Yet somehow this new neighbourhood works for us. Simon and I stake out our respective cafés nearby, and retreat each morning for some convivial solitude. Here, too, socializing follows unfamiliar rules. It’s OK to banter with the staff, but generally not with the other patrons (unless they’re at the bar, and talking to the barman too). Though I’m off the grid, I do need human contact. One morning I try to strike up a conversation with another regular – a man I’ve seen every day for months. I tell him, honestly, that he looks like an American I know.
    ‘Who, George Clooney?’ he asks snidely. We never speak again.
    I make more headway with our new neighbours. The crowded street outside our house opens on to a quiet cobblestone courtyard, where low-slung houses and apartments face each other. The residents