Each country has its own little idiosyncrasies and sometimes it takes time to
get used to them. It took me a long time to adjust my daily rhythms and habits
to the fact that mornings in France are extremely short and that at midday the
country comes to a halt, specially in rural areas. I also undertook too many
trips which were rendered useless because I never remembered that many shops are
closed on Mondays, but the hardest thing to come to terms with was the hateful
French custom of not having school on a Wednesday.
Working mothers’ schedules evolve around this arrangement and wherever you go,
you hear professional mothers telling you they don’t work on Wednesdays. If you
have a proper job, with sick pay and holidays and pensions and all the
hullabaloo, and can arrange to work for 4 days a week, you can use Wednesdays to
take the kids to the dentist or to go shopping. But if you have your own
business or are a freelance, especially if you work at home, then you have a
problem because unless you have childcare available, you will spend the day
trying to fit some work in between constant interruptions, while trying very
hard not to lose your nerves and not to kill your children, because you can be
sure that they will make sure that you don’t get anything done. When they get
older you can take them to do activities in a centre de loisirs but not every
village has one and they only take them from five or six years old. So if you
have little ones, and intend to work too, brace yourself for a few years at
least.
I was one of this unlucky freelance mothers facing the problem of child care on
a Wednesday, and unlike my French friends and neighbours, had no grandmothers,
or aunts, or even an au-pair to leave them with, I had to find a suitable
childminder for Luca, my four-year-old son.
I asked around and found Monique who lived not to far away from my village, and
was a registered childminder. She already had three kids on Wednesdays but one
more was fine, she said. When I went to see her we talked about childcare and we
seemed to agree on the basics of education. She was herself a mother and she
seemed down to earth, calm, affectionate and firm at the same time, and showed
me her various certificates.
“What about safety?” I asked, more on my husband’s behalf than on mine. He is
British and comes from a country where you don’t have wall switches in the
bathrooms to turn the lights on and off but an ugly cord hanging from the
ceiling, just in case you are stupid enough to touch it with your wet hands.
Britain is a country where safety is not only a general duty but a national
neurosis, a country where you can set off fireworks only one day a year, where
no one would dream of eating cheese from non-pasteurised milk, or even less,
lighting a cigarette in a petrol station. Monique saw my vicarious concern and
showed me the fence her husband had built around the terrace, the stair gate,
the child-proof stove, and the approved swings and slide in the garden.
So far so good. I could go back to my helmet-wearing husband and report that
Monique’s house fulfilled all the safety requirements in his rules and
regulations book.
Luca got used to going there each Wednesday afternoon and every thing was fine.
A few months passed and he didn’t bring home a single scratch, bump on his head
or trapped-in-a-door fingers. Good.
And then one day I went to collect him at five thirty as usual. It was an early
autumn evening and as it was still sunny, the four children in Monique’s care
were playing in the garden which was awash with golden light.
As soon as he saw my car, Luca came running to meet me. He looked flushed, very
excited and happy, and had a glow on his cheeks. He started to shout at me from
a distance as if he had something very important to tell me and couldn’t wait:
“Mummy, Mummy, Monique’s dad has put a bomb in the pheasant, Monique’s dad has
put a bomb in the pheasant!”
“What?” I asked.
His friend came over and started telling me too:
“He’s killed him, with a bomb!” he explained while he waved his arms around his
head.
“Boom! Boom!” added Luca.
“What are you two talking about?”
“Boom, boom! Now they have dinner!” my son explained.
But I didn’t understand what they were blabbering away until Monique came to
greet me. She was carrying a baby in one arm, leading a toddler with her other
hand, and she had a huge smile on her face. She looked calm and motherly. And
very pretty in the evening sun.
“What are they saying?” I asked her.
“Oh, nothing; there was this pheasant passing through the garden and my father
shot it. They saw the whole thing and they were very excited about it.” “Your
father shot a pheasant in front of the children?”
“Mais oui.”
“It exploded, mummy!” said Luca, and added another “Boom!” for effect while he
threw his arms in the air as to draw the trajectory of the poor pheasant’s dead
body through the sky.
“Your father shot a pheasant here, in the garden? With a rifle?”
“Mais oui, he is a hunter.”
“In front of the children?”
“Oui, Oui.”
I didn’t know what to say. I hate guns, weapons and war toys but I am a meat
eater after all and think that the hunted pheasant had probably had a better
life in the woods than the chicken I buy in the supermarket, but what was my
husband going to say when he’d learnt about this? He goes out of his way not to
kill a fly if he can avoid it (mosquitoes he makes an exception for) and if I
scream at the site of a huge evening spider crawling up a wall in the house, he
goes and gets a glass jar and a postcard, puts the beast inside and takes it to
the garden, oblivious to my hysteric demands of “kill the bloody thing”. And he
loves birds too. Not to the point of spending hours in a lookout, but he does
carry his binoculars around like a real English countryman.
Several times I had seen father and son watching Bill Oddie’s nature programmes
on Cbeebies together and I wondered whether the father was going to feel
betrayed by the killing enthusiasm of the son.
“And now they have their dinner for tonight!” Luca interrupted my train of
thought with a much more pragmatic argument. He was jumping up and down with
excitement, as if he had just been given an open ticket to a fairground.
“Ils ont tout compris,” said a very satisfied Monique matter-of-factly, as if
she were a teacher who had had to explain her class a very difficult lesson.
I stood there, open-mouthed, torn between the need to say something and the
awareness that I had no right to be critical about their way of life. But I had
lots of objections inside my head. Not only the guns business, or the cruelty to
animals, but most importantly, what about traumatising the children?
“Hmm, il va être bon ce faisant,” Monique added while she lifted the baby up
and down in the air and made her chuckle with laughter. There was a festive air
around the five of them. As if they had been to a party to which I hadn’t been
invited. And I felt a bit left out, a bit jealous even, of not having been there
an hour earlier to witness the tragic death of the poor bird.
“My father is a real hunter, you see, he likes fresh meat, and you can’t get
fresher than that, can you?”
“No, I don’t think so. You’re probably right.”
But what about traumatising the children, and more importantly, what about
safety? I didn’t know Monique’s father. I didn’t know how old was he, or how
good his eyesight was, or worse his aiming. What if one of the kids might have
been accidentally hurt? And was she right to let the kids witness a hunting
episode while so young and vulnerable, and specially, while being so close?
But when I saw how calm and confident Monique was and how happy the kids seemed
I realised that she wouldn’t have put them in danger, that wherever the hunting
had taken place, the children were, no doubt, at a safe distance.
As for the kid’s traumatic experience, I saw no evidence. Au contraire.
“Come on Mummy, let’s go. I want to tell Daddy about the bomb! I want to tell
Daddy about the bomb!” Luca was shouting. For all my not buying him guns and war
toys, I had to admit something terrible about the nature of my sweet little boy:
he was a totally-normal-testosterone-driven-mini-male, and the pheasant’s tragic
death had made his day.
I was worried driving back home from Monique’s. I knew that Luca wouldn’t keep
his mouth shot and that my husband would explode with anger when hearing about
the pheasant episode. I was sure that he was going to forbid me to take the kid
back to Monique again. That was goodbye to my Wednesdays, for sure.
Luca got out of the car screaming about bombs and exploding pheasants and I
pretended not to hear. I just wanted to avoid the subject altogether. But it
didn’t work. The kid’s enthusiasm was contagious and soon his father wanted to
know exactly what he was talking about. He started to show a certain amount of
concern on hearing the words bomb and exploding, not to say the onomatopoeic
noises and graphic description Luca was doing with his little arms. I explained
everything, trying to water down the child’s fervour in order to protect the
safety-conscious father from making a scene and from running to Monique’s house
to give her a piece of his anglo-saxon mind. But I was wrong. When he finally
understood the story, his reaction wasn’t at all what I had expected: he started
to laugh. I sat on the garden and sighed with relief, watching the sky turn pink
as the sun hid behind the mountains. I knew this could mean only one thing, a
good thing, that my husband was loosing his Britshisness and finally going
native.
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