Bringing Up Bebe Read Online Free PDF Page B

flaunting the fact that they haven’t renounced pleasure.
    A photo spread in
Neuf Mois
(Nine Months) magazine shows a heavily pregnant brunette in lacy ensembles, biting into pastries and licking jam off her finger. “During pregnancy, it’s important to pamper your inner woman,” another article says. “Above all, resist the urge to borrow your partner’s shirts.” A list of aphrodisiacs for moms-to-be includes chocolate, ginger, cinnamon, and—this being France—mustard.
    I realize that ordinary Frenchwomen take these calls to arms seriously when Samia, a mother who lives in my neighborhood, offers me a tour of her apartment. She’s the daughter of Algerian immigrants and grew up in Chartres. I’m admiring her soaring ceilings and chandeliers, when she picks up a stack of photographs from the mantel.
    “In this one I was pregnant, and here I was pregnant.
Et voilà
, the big belly!” she says, handing me several pictures. It’s true, she’s extremely pregnant in the photographs. She’s also extremely topless.
    I’m shocked, first of all because we’ve been using the formal
vous
with each other, and now she’s casually handed me naked pictures of herself. But I’m also surprised that the pictures are so glamorous. Samia looks like one of those lingerie models from the magazines,
sans
most of the lingerie.
    Granted, Samia is always a bit dramatic. Most days she drops off her two-year-old at day care looking like she just stepped out of a film noir: a beige trench coat cinched tightly at the waist, black eyeliner, and a fresh coat of shiny red lipstick. She’s the only French person I know who actually wears a beret.
    Nevertheless, Samia has merely embraced the conventional French wisdom that the forty-week metamorphosis into mother shouldn’t make you any less of a woman. French pregnancy magazines don’t just say that pregnant women can have sex; they explain exactly how to do it.
Neuf Mois
maps out ten different sexual positions, including “horseback rider,” “reverse horseback rider,” “the greyhound” (which it calls “
un grand classique
”), and “the chair.” “The oarsman” has six steps, concluding with, “In rocking her torso back and forth, Madame provokes delicious frictions . . .”
    Neuf Mois
also weighs in on the merits of various sex toys for pregnant women (yes to “geisha balls,” no to vibrators and anything electric). “Don’t hesitate! Everyone wins, even the baby. During an orgasm, he feels the ‘Jacuzzi effect’ as if he were massaged in the water,” the text explains. A father in Paris warns my husband not to stand at the “business end” during the birth, to preserve my feminine mystique.
    French parents-to-be aren’t just calmer about sex. They’re also calmer about food. Samia makes a conversation with her obstetrician sound like a Vaudeville routine:
< K="0foop height="0" width="2em"> “I said, ‘Doctor, I’m pregnant, but I adore oysters. What do I do?’
    “He said, ‘Eat oysters!’” she recalls. “He explained to me, ‘You seem like a fairly reasonable person. Wash things well. If you eat sushi, eat it in a good place.’”
    The stereotype that Frenchwomen smoke and drink through their pregnancies is very outdated. Most women I meet say that they had either the occasional glass of champagne or no alcohol at all. I see a pregnant woman smoking exactly once, on the street. It could have been her once-a-month cigarette.
    The point in France isn’t that anything goes. It’s that women should be calm and sensible. Unlike me, the French mothers I meet distinguish between the things that are almost definitely damaging and those that are dangerous only if they’re contaminated. Another woman I meet in the neighborhood is Caroline, a physical therapist who’s seven months pregnant. She says her doctor never mentioned any food restrictions, and she never asked. “It’s better not to know!” she says. She tells me that she eats steak