There Are No Grown-ups Page 4

  To turn things around, I decide to celebrate my fortieth birthday with a party. However, I don’t invite any of the middle-class professionals and stay-at-home moms I’ve been socializing with. Instead, I invite the people I’d like to befriend, and who I suspect are part of my real tribe: a handful of writers and intellectuals whom I know a little bit. My carefully curated guest list has a half-dozen people and their partners, including an Ivy League professor, a documentary filmmaker, a celebrated South African journalist and a woman whose boyfriend writes for the New Yorker. Some of them I’ve only met once.

  Since my birthday falls on a Sunday, I decide to hold an afternoon “open house” in my apartment between four and six. It’s a small commitment, and there isn’t much else happening on a wintry Sunday afternoon, so everyone accepts.

  I spend the day arranging flowers, Italian cheeses and hors d’oeuvres on my kitchen counter, and setting out a dozen glass flutes for champagne. I dress my kids in their most adorably Parisian outfits, and warn them not to touch the food. Minutes before four o’clock, I put on some calm-but-complicated jazz: the sound track for my new life.

  Then I wait for my forties to begin. For the first hour of the party, no one comes. My children sit quietly at first, then beg to be allowed to eat something or to go outside. Soon they’re watching me with what seems like pity: Why doesn’t Mommy have any friends at her birthday party? My amused husband reads a book on the couch.

  At five o’clock, the filmmaker texts to say that he and his wife can’t make it after all. I put away two empty flutes. At five fifteen, the South African journalist arrives with his boyfriend. They chat politely with me and Simon, while glancing around at our near-empty apartment. They barely know me; are they meant to be the only guests?

  Around five thirty, four or five others show up and situate themselves in small clusters around my kitchen island. I flit anxiously between them, trying to conjure a salonlike atmosphere. But it is not a dazzling Parisian salon. It’s a sparse, awkward, excessively catered gathering of people who aren’t sure why they’ve come. They all leave by six fifteen, having failed to finish even the first bottle of champagne. No one except my children eats anything.

  My failed fortieth makes a few things very clear: I am too old to have an aspirational birthday party. And though it’s been less than a day, I’m already doing the forties all wrong.

  You know you’re in your forties when . . .

  There is no longer any trace of you in your childhood bedroom.

  You have full-on adult memories of things that happened a long time ago.

  You see a sepia photograph of a weathered Native American woman sitting beside a wooden loom, and you realize that she’s probably your age.

  You leave the house without makeup, and people keep asking whether you’re tired.

  You’re not considering Botox, but you are considering bangs.

  4

  how to raise children

  I COMPENSATE FOR MY OWN family’s smoke screen of good news by talking to my kids about practically everything. We dissect the characters of everyone we know, including all their friends.

  I may have overdone it. When I’m walking my daughter (we call her “Bean” because a nurse put a beanie on her head when she was born) to school one morning, I mention that when I was growing up, we almost never analyzed other people. She finds this inconceivable.

  “That’s been my entire childhood,” she says.

  Looking back now, it seems like raising very young kids was largely a test of physical endurance. (I wrote a book about how to make this test somewhat easier to endure.) As they get older, it becomes a test of judgment, and a measure of your own grown-up-ness. I often feel like the ruler of a tiny country who’s constantly called upon to make laws and adjudicate disputes. You have to be wise—or at least fair—to have any credibility with your subjects.

  That’s especially true with twins. When my older son has a nightmare and cries out at three a.m., I rush into his room. Was he dreaming of monsters? Terrorists?

  Nope. In the dream “You gave Leo Smarties, but you didn’t give any to me,” he says. (I’ve realized that, though the boys were born minutes apart, they still think of themselves as the middle and youngest children, so I think of them that way, too.)

  During waking hours, I’m often torn between playing the reassuring authority figure who can handle anything and taking a more naturalistic we’re-all-exploring-life-together approach. Should I act “parental” or act like myself? If I seem too flawed, will my kids feel safe?

  Organizationally, I’m practically infallible. Studies show that people in their forties are at a lifetime peak in “conscientiousness.” Parenting sometimes seems to require little else, as I label their windbreakers, sign their permission slips and enforce their tooth-brushing regimens. I’m an organizational Olympian.

  My kids are not. It’s as if the physical world is outside their control. During preschool, my younger son once came home with a purple stain on the rear of his pants. He said it was pie. (Technically, he said it was tarte.)

  “How did you get pie on your tush?” I asked, genuinely baffled.

  “It wasn’t my fault. It fell on the chair and then I sat on the chair,” he explained.

  “Do you go to the Three Stooges school?” I asked.

  It’s been years since I lost anything. But even now that my kids are older, they can’t keep track of a sweatshirt. My older son often dashes around our apartment saying, “I’ve lost my marbles!” (He means this literally; marbles are all the rage at his school.) I supply each child with a laundry bag when we travel, but they repack their smelly clothes mixed up with their clean ones.

  I’m less competent when they pepper me with factual, moral and quasi-philosophical questions: Guess who’s my third-favorite soccer player? Why didn’t we give that homeless person money? How many countries have I vomited in? Why did Hitler dislike Jews?

  Spiritual conversations are especially daunting.

  “If there was a God, he would make it sunny every day. It’s not sunny today, so there is no God,” my older son explains during an overcast picnic.

  “That’s what’s known as ‘the weather proof,’” I reply.

  I can fake my way through some questions, but as a foreigner, I don’t always have the option of coming across as a capable adult. Even after a dozen years in France, daily life can be baffling. My kids—who were born here and attend French schools—quickly realize that I don’t know third-grade French grammar, and that I can’t do long division the “French” way. They insist on spell-checking every note I send to their teachers or to parents of their friends. When I get creative in the wording of the boys’ birthday party invitation, my younger son draws the line diplomatically: “Mommy, I promise you, nobody says that.”

  My children do see advantages in having foreign parents. When they use bad words in French, I usually don’t even notice. I only figured out one word was unacceptable when a French boy slept over and exclaimed, “Your mother lets you say that?”

  I try to coax the kids into my American realm, where I have impeccable spelling and grammar. Simon and I only speak to them in English, and we seed their bookshelves with English-language stories. But this doesn’t transform them into cultural Americans. They speak in French-influenced syntax (“Is it wet, the grass?”) and there are words they’ve only seen in books and don’t know how to pronounce. On Armistice Day, Bean tells me that her class saw a World War I “plake” (she means a plaque). Once when she’s upset, she says that she’s “de-VAST-ed.”

  “You’re DEV-astated,” I clarify.

  I’m constantly translating from their English into mine.

  “What’s a ‘pee-oh-ner’?” Bean asks me while I’m cooking dinner one night.

  “A what?”

  “A ‘pee-oh-ner.’ Like in Laura I
ngalls Wilder times.”

  “Spell it?”

  “P-I-O-N-E-E-R.”

  I do manage to transmit American humor, or at least the vaudeville variety. My kids like the joke about how many Jewish mothers it takes to change a lightbulb. (“None, I’m fine, I’ll just sit here in the dark.”) They also enjoy the one about the son who comes downstairs wearing one of the two sweaters his mother has just given him. My younger son delivers the punch line in a Franco-Yiddish accent: “Vat, you didn’t like the other one?”

  To my delight, they pick up some American expressions, but I have no control over which ones. Being French, my sons are delighted by “Who cut the cheese?” Bean, who watches lots of American television, is especially fond of “Shut up!” when it means, “Keep giving me those compliments!”

  “My blood is boiling,” I tell her once when I’m angry.

  “I hope that’s an expression,” she replies.

  Unlike me, they only use Celsius. When I accidentally tell them the temperature in Fahrenheit on a warm day, they’re terrified. “We can’t go outside, we’ll burn!” one of the boys exclaims.

  The holy grail of my Americanization project is sending them to sleepaway camp in the United States. After three weeks in cabins with kids from the Boston suburbs, the acculturation will be done for me. They’ll form an emotional bond with my country and learn American slang.

  I send away for catalogs and show the kids a promotional film in which children their age sing songs around campfires and wax about all their new friends. I get goose bumps watching campers splash around in tree-lined lakes, just as I used to do, while uplifting background music plays.

  But my children are horrified. Having been raised in France, they don’t believe that anyone would be that cheerful voluntarily. Bean thinks it looks like a hostage video.

  “They definitely made those children say that. Can’t you tell?” she asks.

  It’s not just the “camp spirit” that bothers her. It’s getting up to a bugle and being forced to sing in unison. “Mommy, I’m not going to have your American childhood,” she says. “I don’t want to wake up at seven a.m. and make bracelets. I just don’t. Accept it.”

  You know you’re a fortysomething parent when . . .

  You’ve decided that swimming counts as a shower.

  You find it tedious to tell your third child how babies are made.

  You struggle to explain what life was like before YouTube and cell phones.

  You carefully restrict your children’s screen time, but check your phone every fifteen minutes.

  You can’t believe it takes so many years of school to learn everything.

  You are sometimes tempted to let your kids skip class so you can stay in bed.

  5

  how to hear

  WHEN WE VISIT SIMON’S FAMILY in London over the Christmas holidays, I keep asking people to repeat themselves. This happens most often when I’m speaking to Simon. The last few words of his sentences sometimes seem to disintegrate.

  I blame Simon for this on two counts: he has a British accent, and he mumbles. Both intensify when he’s with his family. I’ve zoned out anyway, since we spend most of Christmas playing a British edition of Trivial Pursuit that requires an encyclopedic knowledge of Welsh road signs and 1970s English soccer.

  Of course, I also have a catastrophic second suspicion about why I can’t hear: I’m going deaf. I don’t mention anything to Simon, but as soon as we’re back in Paris I arrange to visit an ear doctor who works out of a local hospital. (Contrary to American beliefs about “socialized medicine,” most doctors here are in private practice and I can see whichever one I want.)

  The ear doctor is an amiable Frenchman in his sixties who listens attentively while I describe my husband’s problem. (I’ve looked up the French verb “to mumble”; it’s marmonner.) He hears me out, then puts me in a booth with headphones on. Whenever I hear a beep, I raise my hand in the manner of French schoolchildren, with one finger pointing toward the sky. Then I repeat a series of faintly uttered French words: jardin, esprit, fréquence.

  When I emerge from the booth, the doctor is grinning at me.

  “How old are your ears?” he asks.

  We go over to his desk, and he takes out a chart showing the normal progression of hearing over a lifetime. The line slopes gently downward. At twenty years old, “your hearing is perfect,” he says. By my age, the lowest and highest tones are harder to hear. “You can’t blame your husband for this,” he says. I’m within the normal range.

  I’m relieved, but surprised. I’d always assumed that a person’s hearing is more or less the same until he enters his seventies or eighties, at which point everyone starts shouting at him through an ear trumpet. I had been somewhat prepared to cope with an aging face and mind in my forties. I hadn’t counted on my ears entering midlife, too.

  Nor does this bode well for my marriage. The tones I’ve lost seem to be precisely the ones that my husband speaks in. And apparently, the physical declines of midlife are just beginning. Anthropologist Richard Shweder writes that when he injured his lower back playing squash, and couldn’t stand up straight, his squash partner declared, “Welcome to middle age!”

  A girlfriend who just turned forty tells me over lunch that she has developed a “ptosis,” a slight droop in one of her eyelids. Her doctor said the precise cause is “age.”

  A man in his midforties who never had any trouble sleeping says that he now wakes up several times each night to urinate. His doctor explained that his newly enlarged prostate is pressing on his bladder, and suggested that he exercise, drink tomato juice and try several different pills. When none of these help, the doctor says he’ll just have to live with the wake-ups. (In the modern forties, just as our children start sleeping through the night, we stop.)

  Most people in their forties are healthy, of course. Plenty of us run marathons, play tennis and shoot hoops. The odd fortysomethings still play professional hockey or golf, pitch baseballs, swim competitively and dance in ballet companies. But we’ve gotten at least slightly worse at practically every sport, thanks to longer reaction times, lower lung capacity and less muscle mass. Doctors have started mentioning words like “arthritis.” If we could ever run like a gazelle, that ability evaporates by our forties. “Now it’s impossible to go that fast, no matter how hard I try,” says a fit forty-two-year-old who’s been a recreational runner for decades.

  At least there’s good news about fertility. Doctors used to cite sobering statistics, including one claiming that women who don’t have children by their late thirties have a 30 percent chance of remaining childless forever. It turns out that those figures were based in part on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French birth records, and other historical data, that predate antibiotics, ultrasound and modern statistical methods.

  Since 1990, the rate of babies born to American women ages forty to forty-four has nearly doubled. This is partly thanks to technology. A forty-nine-year-old I know just gave birth to a baby girl who came from a donated sperm and egg. A woman I met on a playground had twins from her husband’s defrosted sperm after he’d been dead for several years.

  Of course, child-rearing can be more exhausting in the forties, and it brings other challenges. A forty-two-year-old new mother tells me that she needs reading glasses to clip her baby’s fingernails. By the time your child learns to walk, it can feel as if, in a blink, you’ve gone from fecund young mother to madame.

  And small bodily changes are starting to accumulate. My yellowing front tooth resists all dental interventions. I used to only wear glasses outdoors; now I need them to navigate my apartment. I panic when a BB-sized bump appears on the floor of my mouth. After sending me for a scan, a doctor says it’s a harmless bone growth that’s not uncommon in “people my age.”

  “When will it go away?” I ask.
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  “It won’t,” he says. “And you’ll probably get one on the other side, too.”

  Once again, my mind hasn’t caught up with my chronological age. When the ear doctor shows me the hearing-loss chart, I tell him that I had planned to skip all these little breakdowns that come as you get older. I wanted to be the exception.

  “I know, in your head you’re still twenty years old.”

  “No, in my head I’m about thirty-seven,” I say.

  “I’m sixty-nine. But in my head I’m twenty,” he says, smiling again.

  “Twenty? I wouldn’t want to be twenty,” I say, suddenly wondering how many wives he’s had.

  “You’re right, thirty. But in fact, I’m sixty-nine. And this doesn’t end well.”

  “It’s hard to believe that two-hundred-fifty-year-old people aren’t discovered every now and then,” I tell him.

  “I will be one of them!” he replies, then he adds: “L’amour n’existe pas”—love doesn’t exist.

  “L’amour?” I ask, confused.

  “La mort!”—death!—he clarifies. I’d misheard him. “Of course love exists. Death doesn’t exist. Or at least our own death doesn’t. We have proof of other people’s death, but not of our own.”

  When I get home, I don’t mention any of this to Simon—not my ears, not love, not death. It’s odd to age alongside your partner, and sometimes it’s best to pretend that you’re not. There are probably things he’s not telling me, either. I keep after him to enunciate, though I think he knows that our misunderstandings aren’t entirely his fault. We’ve struck an unspoken agreement: He’ll pretend I still have the same ears as when he married me. And I’ll pretend that I’ve heard every word.