I Foolishly Moved My Whole Family to France. Then the Real Fun Started.
The most telling day of my life as a father (as opposed to the most frightening, which was when I learned that my wife, Jessica Green, was pregnant not with one creature but with two, or the most moving, which was when the two creatures, George and Frederick, were born) was Friday, December 12, 2008.
That was the day we left our home in New York City and moved to Lyon, France. My wife, a fluent French speaker, was already there. She had secured an apartment and furnished it with a truckload of IKEA furniture.
She had even found an English-speaking sitter so that she and I might slip out on our own in our new city.
Lyon is in the east of the country and about halfway between Paris and the Mediterranean (i.e., near nothing that any of us knew), and we were moving there so that I could learn about French cooking for a book project.
I would like to say that we were also there for Jessica, a wine scholar and a teacher, but that’s not true. I would like to say that we were also there for the boys, so that they might learn French. But that’s not true either.
We were there for me, and we all hoped that it wouldn’t be such a bad thing for everyone else.
I don’t want to labor my indifference. I adored my sons. But I was also a New York dad, busy guy in a busy city, and I was determined, dammit, to master French cuisine in France.
Then on that telling day, the boys carsick from a panicky dash to the airport, we missed our flight. There wasn’t another one for three days.
Even I, never known for my punctuality, was aware that you don’t miss the flight to the country you’re moving to with your children, and where your wife, after much work on your behalf, is waiting.
It seemed symptomatic (and, well, it was). There were more mishaps, and we eventually wound up alone in a new city, closed down for Christmas, without knowing if the boys could be enrolled in school.
Young Frederick, surveying the empty streets outside our very cold dwelling, asked innocently, “Where are the friends?” I felt, not for the first time, the unexpected burden of being a father: that I was too irresponsibly selfish to raise miniature human beings.
The city’s attitude toward toddlers surprised us. On the second day, Frederick was smacked by a taxi driver for putting his feet on a car seat. Children were spanked in public—angrily, on the subway, at a birthday party, at church.
When we finally got the boys into a school, the attitude wasn’t so different.
A fellow student was lifted out of his seat by his throat. George was slapped in the face because he couldn’t stand in a straight line. Their peers, too, could be a little aggressive.
One day, several of them—outsiders, much picked on, and therefore too ready to fight—pinned a boy to the ground, told him not to squirm or he would be sorry, and cut off his eyelashes with a pair of scissors.
Changes came slowly and—surprisingly even if appositely enough—were expressed through eating. “I had the most amazing lunch today,” George said. “There was une salade with the most delicious sauce.”
Frederick’s new favorite was beets. The school canteen—three courses, no second course until the first one was finished, every item in the French repertoire, with a sauce, and no repeats (a proposition so radical that I am compelled to repeat it: no repeats!)—had already accomplished more in teaching our children how to eat than we could ever imagine doing.
On the boys’ fourth birthday, and over my ferocious objections, Jessica, inspired by where we found ourselves, instituted a practice of family dinners together: abysmal, messy fart-fêtes to start but soon intimate and looked-forward-to daily events. They continue to this day (the boys are almost 15), a refuge from adversity and a confirmation of our intimacy.
Bonding—that’s the word I find myself wanting to use. We broke routines, we became foreigners, and the effect brought us closer. Fashioned in our adversity, our family became bonded, including (some of the time) the oblivious, selfish father.
You Might Also Like
