Oh, Bébé

I'm coming pretty late to the party, but that's how I roll these days.  I would like to blame my baby, one of those didn't-sleep-through-the-night-until-one-year-old types, but that would just be showing the flaws in my American-style parenting.  Does that sound defensive?  Sorry.  I just read Pamela Druckerman's Bringing up Bébé, and I am bursting with thoughts.  And yes, defensiveness.  It's hard not to feel a little cornered when someone starts questioning your national parenting habits (even when they are simultaneously questioning their own).  For those of you not in the mom's group orbit, Druckerman wrote a bestselling book based on her years spent parenting small children in Paris, during which she realized that French children sleep, eat, and generally behave better than their American counterparts.

My basic conclusion is that yes, the French parent differently, but that it would be almost impossible for Americans to replicate their philosophy (which the French don't, tellingly, see as a philosophy), because we ourselves were not raised by French parents.*  Every culture raises children to live in their own time and place, and I think if American parenting is a confusing mishmash of tips and tricks, well, maybe it's because America is a confusing mishmash kind of place (people call it a "melting pot" when they want to be more kind).  Just like we don't have any one food tradition (and we then have to read about French diets, or Mediterranean diets, or Okinawa diets, or, mystifyingly to me, caveman diets), we also don't have one parenting tradition.  And part of America, we have to remember, was actually predicated on the very basis of getting away from stuffy European traditions.  We are free!  And we enjoy this freedom right up to the point when we realize that our freedom to eat what we want and parent how we want has somehow ended in obesity and tyrannical children.

Druckerman kind of acknowledges this conundrum.  She herself says that she doesn't want her kids growing up into "sniffy Parisians," even though she wants to imitate many of their parenting techniques.  But it's hard not to wonder whether only sniffy Parisians can really be successful at implementing the parenting practices she outlines so longingly, or, conversely, whether implementing those practices would in fact, inevitably, create little sniffy Parisians.  Control (the French have strict rules about when and where eating, dressing up, and using playground slang are appropriate) and patience (at just a few weeks old, the French teach their babies that they will not respond to their every cry) and prioritizing aesthetics (French women are expected to "bounce back" faster than a Victoria's Secret model with a big show coming up) are all good things, and they are qualities we admire, but I wouldn't say that those are the things that we Americans have been raised to believe are the core values of our country.  And because we weren't raised to believe that, it makes it very hard to convincingly parent a child under those principles.

As a bit of an aside, though hopefully an illustrative one, I've often thought about the difference between the kids I saw in Lesotho and American kids.  One image that is burned in my mind is of the waiting room of the Mokhotlong hospital filled with babies, toddlers, and small children who would wait with their parents for hours (hours!!).  Not a single toy graced what was really just a long hallway with benches (not even those weird wire and wood bead contraptions that I can only surmise must be sold by pharmaceutical salesmen).  Not only that, but the kids didn't even get down and start trying to wrestle with each other, or build forts out of the chairs.  Nothing.  They just sat there.  This was astounding to me even before I had a baby of my own, but now I am truly awed by what this small sight obviously illustrates about cultural differences.  These kids waited because that's what they had always done.  And, here's the key, the adults did it too.  Not once did I see a magazine or any other form of entertainment in the hands of one of the adults.  They had to wait for their medicine or to see the doctor, so that's what they were doing.  Waiting.  And they knew full well going in that it might take an entire day.  Americans just DO NOT GET THIS.  And I am American to my core in this regard.  Anyway, kind of a long-winded attempt at saying, even though we might think we are closer culturally to Parisians than to small-town Basotho, the principle remains.  It would be very hard for me to teach my daughter to wait patiently in line for eight hours, because it would be nearly impossible for me to do so myself without going out of my mind.  And it would be hard for me to tell her she can never snack, because I would hate to live by that rule.

Still, Druckerman does make a convincing case for being a little more structured and confident as a parent.  I wholeheartedly agree that we want to avoid raising little monsters (or les enfants rois, as they are known in France), and there are some suggestions here that even us hopeless Americans might be able to effectively employ.  Some suggestions are so simple as to be almost condescending, until you realize how hard it really can feel to set basic limits.  She relates advice from a French psychologist who says, "when a child has a caprice [whim]--for instance, his mother is in a shop with him and he suddenly demands a toy--the mother should remain extremely calm and gently explain that buying the toy isn't in the day's plan.  Then she should try to bypass the caprice by redirecting the child's attention, for example by telling a story about her own life."  Simple, yes?  But how many times have you seen American kids throwing fits in toy stores?

What really makes me a little jealous, though, is the sense of confidence that Druckerman's French friends and neighbors seem to have about their parenting.  They advocate following your intuition (as do I), but it is certainly easier to act on your intuition if everyone around you seems to think along roughly the same lines.  I have had many conversations with moms who are tormented because their doctor or mother-in-law or some other person with possible child-rearing authority has told them that they HAVE to do something that feels completely against their instincts.  And often they end up doing it, because being a new mother (or father) is disconcerting and it doesn't matter how good you have been at every other thing in your life, this is something you have to figure out as you go along.  So we want advice, and we want a set of defined answers.  But in America they don't seem to come as easy.  Druckerman tells a great anecdote about how she and her husband were stymied by a question the daycare (crèche) lady asks about their daughter's feeding schedule.  They couldn't answer the question, and she was completely baffled by this ignorance.  How can you not know when your own baby eats?  Druckerman finds an answer to this cultural stand-off when she notices that the American website BabyCenter gives eight different sample schedules for five- to six-month olds, "including one in which the baby eats ten times a day."  A French parenting magazine, in contrast, offers one schedule. Babies eat at eight A.M., twelve P.M, four P.M., and eight P.M.  But then you just end up back at my previous point--she notes that this makes sense because it is the schedule almost all French adults follow as well (minus the snack, of course).  How many Americans do you know who are this scheduled?  Or, much better question, do you know any two American adults who follow the exact same eating schedule?  If not, how do we then implement it with our babies?

Druckerman raises some very interesting questions about American parenting, and I'm sure I will continue to think about them as I muddle my own way through raising a child.  I do want my daughter to learn to wait for gratification, and to respect adults, and to (while we're thinking big) start taking longer naps.  But these are only a few among many positive qualities we want to instill in our children.  It is good to be intentional about fostering whatever qualities you yourself think are essential to leading a good, fulfilling life.  So I'm glad I read this now, because as E enters the toddler years I do think it is important to start really thinking about what "family" values you want to emphasize.  And I think this will also make me pause to evaluate my own habits, because how can you teach qualities that you aren't modeling yourself?

Whether or not you buy the parenting principles (and I'll wager you'll be tempted to, because Druckerman makes French kids sound so....obedient), it's an interesting read for the anthropological perspective.  I would actually love to read a book that just compared cultural parenting styles--kind of like the movie Babies, but with words.  Just putting it out there.



* At the same time, while our current parenting culture might look very different than France's, my husband made the good point that a lot of French parenting practices sound like American parenting from 50 years ago.  I can't imagine my grandmothers or their cohorts climbing around on jungle gyms after their kids, waving baggies of Cheerios and narrating their every move.  

Cutting for Stone: Brief Review

The recently-read books are piling up and inducing guilt, so I'm just going to post a quick couple of thoughts about Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.  We read this for our book club, suggested by one of our members whose family is peppered with medical professionals.  Verghese is himself a doctor, and shares a similar background as his main character, Marion Stone, a child of Indian and British descent who is born and raised in Ethiopia and immigrates to the United States to complete his medical training.  The other details of Marion's life are, one hopes, a little more fantastical than Verghese's.

Marion and his twin brother, Shiva, are born to an Indian nun at Missing Hospital, where she and their supposed father, the surgeon Thomas Stone, both worked.  The twins are connected at the head, and their traumatic labor causes the death of their mother.  Stone, unable to cope, flees Ethiopia.  And yes, I just spent a whole post complaining about bildungsromane, but this book is going to have to make me hedge a little.  While a large portion of the novel is concerned with Marion's coming-of-age,  Marion always seems to be looking back on his childhood in a believable way, and Verghese does not particularly attempt to make Marion's voice the voice of a child.  Additionally, Verghese establishes the other, adult, characters in such a compelling and warm way that Marion's voice never really grates.  Hema, the twin's adoptive mother, and Ghosh, their stand-in father, carry a large portion of the first half of the book with their combination of strength and limitations.  Hema and Ghosh are both also doctors, and somewhat reluctant surgeons, so the whole book is infused with the air of the hospital.

We discussed in our book club the many "coincidences" and fantastic plot twists, but decided that in some way the book makes you buy into the possibility of such happenings.  Perhaps the emphasis on science and medicine actually helps this buyability--Marion is not an irrational man, so his retelling of the story, filled though it might be with improbabilities, seems trustworthy and reasonable. 

Though I had a hard time getting away from the prejudice that Verghese writes well "for a doctor," I think it would be more just to say that Verghese writes well, period.  His descriptions of Ethiopia and the life of the hospitals both at Missing and in New York are revealing and often beautiful, and most of his characters are finely drawn.  The exception to this, I would say, is the character of Genet, Marion's love obsession throughout the book.  Verghese never really seems to fully access insight into her motivations or Marion's attraction to her.

These thoughts are getting longer than originally intended, but, hey, this is a long book.  More reviews to come soon!

God on the Rocks: Review

Hmmm...so writing reviews of books that you didn't really enjoy reading turns out to be not as much fun.  Actually, it's overstating things to say that I didn't enjoy God on the Rocks at all.  It's just that I've enjoyed Jane Gardam's other books so much that this one felt like a let-down.  In the interest of making prejudices clear, I really have something against books about children.  I mean, I like children.  I'm sure they would have interesting things to say, if they ever wrote novels themselves.  But I kind of hate reading adults' interpretations of a child's world.  In most bildungsroman, I really only like it once the narrator has reached, say, fifteen.

While nearly all child narrators are somehow precocious (otherwise they wouldn't know all of the big words that their adult puppetmasters force upon their lips), they do provide a tempting canvas on which to paint a distorted picture of the adult world.  Children are credited with understanding the world in a unique and prescient way; because they don't always understand what is going on around them, they can give us fresh interpretations.  But again, I usually come back to the cynical position that we are not actually seeing things through the child's lens of confusion and wonder, but rather from the artificial construct of that lens by the author.  I don't know, maybe that doesn't bother other people.  Maybe I need to get over it.

Anyway, rant against pseudo-childlike insight aside, I just didn't think that this was Gardam's best work.  Margaret Marsh, the young girl protagonist, reminded me a little bit of surly Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden, but without the eventual sunny breakthrough.  Her mother has just had a baby, and Margaret is disgusted both by the infant and her mother's obvious infatuation with him.  Because of the baby, though, Mrs. Marsh decides that Margaret deserves a special treat each week, as a solace for the reduction in motherly attention.  The treat takes the form of trips to the seaside with the Marsh's servant-girl, Lydia.  While the Marshes are strict and upright Christians, particularly fanatical Mr. Marsh, Lydia plays up her sensuality with tight satin dresses and speaks coarse Cockney English.  Margaret begins a period of growth and change on these day-trips, first in the exposure to some kind of sexual relationship between Lydia and a gardener on an old estate, and then through her experience at the estate itself.  Unsupervised while Lydia conducts her love affair, Margaret wanders onto the private property and its strange denizens.  At this point in the story, perspectives begin to open up and we learn that the estate begins to Rosalie Frayling, now a mummified old woman, who has opened up the house and grounds to mental patients.  Unbeknownst to either Margaret or Rosalie, Mrs. Marsh was once engaged to be married to Rosalie's son, but the affair was quashed by Rosalie's outrage at the idea of her son abasing himself to marry the daughter of the postman.  Meanwhile, Mrs. Marsh decides to reconnect with this son, who has moved back into the village.  How these pieces all come together in a fairly natural way demonstrates Gardam's sure hand with plot.

Gardam is also a beautiful writer, and she does justice to the setting as well as the complex emotional lives of her characters.  In the end though, I wasn't fully moved by the characters.  Blame my irrational hatred of child protagonists, if you want.  But I'd pick up Old Filth or Man in the Wooden Hat first.

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer: Review

I admit that I picked this book up because it was sitting on the "Free Book" table outside of my office and was persuaded to read it because it was a Booker finalist in 2009 (and thus a candidate for Complete Booker inclusion!). It is another of the seemingly endless stream of books written about World War II and its lead-up and aftermath. Admittedly, this is a time period with amazing narrative potential; nearly every major country in the world has its own story to tell.

This particular book centers around the story of a Czech couple who begin their life together in the late 1920s. I am personally fascinated with this period and the literature produced both within and about it--there is a certain pleasurable omniscient doom that comes with reading about that period before the Second World War went and made a mockery of the First World War's claims to be "Great." Liesel and Viktor Landauer are confident in their future and the improvements that are sure to come, and they make this hope manifest in the designing and building of their dream home. They hire a visionary architect, von Abt, to design a space free of all ornamentation, a house that will liberate them from all of the hindrances of the past. In an early conversation, Viktor and von Abt discuss the value of modern over neo-Gothic architecture. Von Abt says the true ideal is the Japanese house of paper, which does not injure its inhabitants if it happens to fall down. But here is the novel's central problem: how do you move from houses of stone to houses of paper, from the old to the new, without people getting crushed in the process?

Viktor and Liesel see their home as its own revolution. They "watched their future world growing around them and they thought that it was a kind of perfection, the finest instrument for living." But quickly the reader understands that the glass walls of the house give only a false sense of transparency.

They crowd into the space of the Glass Room like passengers on the observation deck of a luxury liner. Some of them maybe peering out through the windows onto the pitching surface of the city, but, in their muddle of Czech and German, almost all of ignorant of the cold outside and the gathering storm clouds, the first sigh of the tempest that is coming.

This counterfeit safety is revealed first in Viktor and Liesel's relationship and then slowly through their entire world. Viktor is Jewish and Liesel Christian, and though Viktor begins to understand their vulnerability as the Nazis cut a wider and wider swath, Liesel maintains her belief in invisible lines. "The story is there, not here" she says, "It is over the border in another country, another world, another universe." Of course, those borders reveal themselves to be as fragile as glass.

Mawer's book convincingly explores these large ideas, though at times his personification of the Glass Room begins to grate. Ultimately, it is the inhumanity of the house that seems significant. Viktor believes that the value of the house lies in the fact that "there are no disturbing curves to upset the rectilinear austerity of the space. There is nothing convolute, involute, awkward, or complex." In other words, there is no life. The house is just an object, a modern statement that becomes a relic by the book's close. The people, the living, continue to struggle on.


*If anyone is interested in seeing the real "Landauer House", actually the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic, click here.