Bringing Up Bebe Read Online Free PDF

done. Despite my qualms about Paris, there’s something nice about being pregnant in a place where I’m practically immune to other people’s judgments. 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 growing up, it’s his natural state. He confesses that he feels connected to lots of people and cities and doesn’t need one place to be his official home. He calls this style “semidetached,” like a London town house.
    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.

Chapter 2
    paris is burping
     
    O ur new apartment isn’t in the Paris of postcards. It’s off a narrow sidewalk in a Chinese garment district, where we’re constantly jostled by men hauling trash 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 neighborhood works for us. Simon and I each stake out our respective cafés nearby and retreat each morning for some convivial solitude. Here, too, socializing follows unfamiliar rules. It’s okay to banter with the servers, but generally not with the other patrons (unless they’re at the bar and talking to the server, 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 neighbors. The crowded sidewalk outside our house opens onto a cobblestone courtyard, where low-slung houses and apartments face each other. The residents are a mix of artists, young professionals, mysteriously underemployed people, and elderly women who hobble precariously on the uneven stones. We all live so close together that they have to acknowledge our presence, though a few still manage not to.
    It helps that my next-door neighbor, an architect named Anne, is due a few months before me. Though I’m caught up in my Anglophone whirlwind of eating and worrying, I can’t help but notice that Anne and the other pregnant Frenchwomen I come to know handle their pregnancies very differently.
    For starters, they don’t treat pregnancy like an independent research project. There are plenty of French parenting books, magazines, and Web sites. But these aren’t required reading, and nobody seems to consume them in bulk. Certainly no one I meet is comparison shopping for a parenting philosophy or can refer to different techniques by name. There’s no new, must-read book, nor do the experts have quite the same hold on parents.
    “These books can be useful to people who lack confidence, but I don’t think you can raise a child while reading a book. You have to go with your
feeling
,” one Parisian mother says.
    The Frenchwomen I meet aren’t at all blasé about motherhood, or about their babies’ well-being. They’re awed, concerned, and aware of the immense life transformati Fy Oket mon that they’re about to undergo. But they signal this differently. American women typically demonstrate our commitment by worrying and by showing how much we’re willing to sacrifice, even while pregnant; whereas Frenchwomen signal their commitment by projecting calm and