blue streak

We live next to a hospital, so the sights and sounds of ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars are a daily part of the background of our lives (may I also point out that the view from my bedroom window frames a lovely copse of trees on the hospital grounds – if it weren’t for the sirens, you could believe you were in the suburbs. Really.). In the same way, living in a house with me provides another auditory backdrop – swearing, particularly if I’m driving, or there’s too much stuff piled at the front of the refrigerator that falls out when you open it, or someone accidentally hits me in the head with a matchbox car turned projectile. I’ve tried, I’ve really tried to hold my tongue since G started not just talking but actively annexing everything he hears into the live Petri dish of his vocabulary – but everyone has to have one vice, don’t they?

Baby B, on his trip to North Carolina a couple of weeks ago, picked up his own first word, “uh-oh,” which he generally uses in its appropriate context, but sometimes just drops into thin air all on its own, like a mild interjection. He’s probably right, given any set of circumstances at any given time around here.

I thought I had escaped with time for good behavior the day that G, playing with a few of his cars in the back of the living room, exclaimed “Oh, CRACK!” loudly but firmly several times when his cars had an unfortunate collision.

But then, last week, we were driving to the babysitter, along a main city artery which had shut down to one very slow-moving lane of downtown traffic because of a giant Lincoln, with its right blinker on, trying to parallel park in a space that was clearly too small for it. Of course this caused the left lane of traffic, annoyed by the stupidity of trying to park in rush hour traffic, and buoyed by the sheer good luck of being in the other lane, to increase its collective speed precipitously, and for each car to pull up just close enough to the car in front to obviate the possibility of letting in any stranded cars in the right lane. In response, the right lane cars also turned on their blinkers and started honking madly, except when the traffic light changed, leaving enough room for one car to accelerate, rev its engine, and zoom out into the flow of traffic. This was almost always the car directly behind the Lincoln trying to park, which then would have – in theory -- left enough space for the car to attempt to pull into the parking place, realize the error of its ways, and drive on. But instead, the next car would pull up immediately into the space vacuum and block the Lincoln, again. It’s like Sisyphus on Georgia Avenue.

We were not running late, so my own annoyance meter was running pretty low – when the fifth or sixth car pulled right up behind the Lincoln, I think I said something like, ‘oh, come on.’

At which point G, from the backseat: “Well, dammit.”

(S pointed out later that, considering my mouth when I’m driving, it could have been a lot worse).

I stifled a giggle, and said, “What do you mean by that word, honey?”

In the new, instructive tone he’s using for everything these days, he said, “That’s the word you use when somebody gets in your way and it’s really annoying.”

It’s hard to fault him for his logic.

“Hmm,” I said. I don’t really like that word. “Do you think we could use another one instead, like kaplooey?”

He thought about it for a second. “No, mommy,” he said. “Dammit’s better.”

Again, logic.

Eventually we settled on a word of G’s own invention that sounds vaguely French, which seemed appropriate. It was really more for the sake of the conversation than anything I’ll bring up again all that often, under the assumption that either the dammits will go their own way, or they won’t, without my highlighting.

Later that day, I noticed a funny thing about our bedroom door. Our house had a marbled history before we bought it, and while the renovations (none of them to our personal credit) are wonderful, bringing the house back to its original modest shine, occasionally a little message from the difficult years will wend its way to the surface. Even under several fresh coats of expertly-applied paint, it turns out that in the late afternoon light you can still see that someone, years ago, carved the words A_ _ and B_ _ _ _ with some kind of sharp object across the front of our bedroom door. It’s a loopy, heavy scrawl, and seems meant rather personally, whether the two words are connected or not. I think it’s weirdly charming – like our own archeological nameplate – if I am the B_ _ _ _, does that make S the A _ _?

But it’s clearly something we’ll have to deal with before G starts to read.

at home

It’s a gorgeous day after several weeks of weather that have really put the “bleak” in midwinter. We took the boys to the park wearing nothing but fleece sweatshirts over their clothes, instead of the heavy, bulky jackets which recently caused G. to wail “It makes my arms too fat and I can’t twirl my hair!” (he has a permanent tangle at the back from this self-soothing activity). It was such a pleasure to watch them run around (or in B’s case, toddle around) unburdened, like little champagne corks followed by endless showers of bubbles.

Now everyone is sleeping, and I am alone in the sunshine, in my living room, looking out across the bare trees and the hospital grounds and the patches of melting snow. And today, for the first time since we got back, I feel deeply, exactly at home. Somehow the passing-through-ness has lifted with the weather (hopefully less briefly, since we’re getting more snow this week). I can imagine remembering this afternoon years from now, in some other place, and being glad. It’s been a long time coming.

Last night we were looking at our two boys, the almost-toilet-trained and the almost-ambulatory, and trying to remember what it was like when G was at B’s stage. We don’t really believe that he ever was, G having skipped entirely the solemn, wry and contemplative baby stage and emerging fully formed, like Athena, except naked and rolling in a barrel. With sparklers attached. I am constantly resisting what feels like an unfair urge to cast B as the yin to G’s yang, the calm beside the storm. He has every opportunity to prove us wrong. But we do start to wonder if we’ve been exaggerating, a bit, just how lively things have been since G joined the party.

So I went upstairs and unearthed a CD with some old videos of G from the first winter we lived in Paris. We slid it into the laptop and clicked on the first video we saw – G in his first pair of rubber-soled shoes, walking across the dining room floor in our apartment. There it was, the 1000-watt smile, barely containing the canary. And underneath our encouraging voices, a strange, persistent noise. After a second, it came to me. It was the thumping of G’s shoes, like timpani, as, at fourteen months, he made his way across the floor. It’s G’s world, and we really do just live in it.

B, on the other hand, is silent as a sylph. He has shown no interest in walking more than a few steps, but he can get to the top of the stairs without making a sound. If he wants attention, he raises one finger in the air, as if he is politely making a point at a meeting. He bursts into absolute highbeams every time G enters the room, and his second favorite game is throwing cereal to Lucy.

In a couple of weeks our babysitter is moving both boys to a bigger site that, thankfully, also exists in her kingdom (more, someday, about working, commuting, the morning oatmeal ritual, and the pleasures of sitting by myself at a desk). I worried, with that peculiar combination of protectiveness and embarrassment, if there were discipline problems around the edges that we weren’t hearing about. “Oh, no,” said M, when I ventured a question on the phone. “I was just watching him all day the other day, and how frustrated he gets that he can’t just move through the other children. He can’t help running into them – he just wants to get across the room, and they happen to be in the way. It just doesn’t seem fair for him to spend the day in time-out just for being a three-year-old boy.” I was flooded with relief. Having always been the child who sat in the corner with a book, being the mother of the one ricocheting around the room is strange and uncharted territory. It requires adjustment, like finding out you are related to Herbert Hoover.

But we let G stay up late to watch Springsteen perform at the Super Bowl, and he curled up next to me on the sofa, leaning into the crook of my arm. After a few minutes of football, to which neither his father nor I could give too much illumination, he said, “Too much pushing in football. It makes me nervous.”

I said, “Me, too.”

repatriation

Eight weeks, three relocations, several home improvements, one storage delivery of more crap than I thought it was humanly possible for us to own and leave lying dormant for two years, and a stealth gastrointestinal virus later, I’m back. To anyone who still checks in here occasionally, thanks, and I’m sorry.

I can report that the disorientation has receded, but not completely. I’m still startled by the voices of strangers talking to me, though as a consequence I’ve rediscovered the pleasure of unplanned and unrehearsed chatting. Even more fun has been watching G adjust to this very un-French volubility. It tracks well with his natural gregariousness, but he can’t quite handle it being the norm rather than the exception. It’s like being forced to eat ice cream every day. The pinnacle was when a strange woman stopped him mid-tantrum in line at Costco and said “That’s not the way you treat your mama, honey. Here’s the way you treat your mama.” And then she gave me a big hug. He was speechless.

Cars and roads are big. Even our urban grocery store is the size of a city block, with the dairy and the deli at opposite mileposts, and I often find myself exhausted in the middle, trying to remember where the peanut butter is (at the dairy end, next to the yogurt, go figure), and wondering if I should just give up and go home. I haven’t yet, even though we’re at that stage of larder-stocking where every trip to the store involves locating the invisible but essential staple item without which you cannot make X for dinner -- only to come home and find that you don’t have a big enough pot. Even with the load of storage items delivered, there are still big gaps in what we need for everyday use, and I find it increasingly hard to remember where anything is. The response to approximately 78.5% of G’s questions is “It’s on the boat, honey” (the response to the other 11.5% is, “No, you might kill yourself.” Welcome to the world of the almost three-year-old boy. There are many wonders here.).

And, of course, as we try to configure our lives into something more stable and predictable, the boys are changing every day. B is crawling and pulling himself up to standing; any minute we’ll have to install a gate on the stairs. He has a two-toothed smile to rule the world. G speaks more and more in complete paragraphs, and has mastered an elocutionary hand-gesture (we’ve been watching the debates) that he uses for emphasis to define his place in the world (“I have a problem, mommy,” he says, making the gesture Obama uses to mark a place in the air for middle-class misfortunes. “I can’t eat the big oatmeal because my mouth is too small.”).

The thing that’s happening fastest is that G is losing his Frenchness, a thing so elusive I didn’t realize he had it until we returned to the states. The first weeks of our return, he was dismayed every time we went to a park that didn’t have a fountain; he was also fascinated by garden squirrels, which in France are exotic woodland creatures and do not inhabit city parks. These things made me realize that G’s first conscious impressions of the world, his mind’s eye Rolodex for the important nouns of childhood, are completely different from my own, sounded out with a distinct image and accent. He’s already adapted to the new realities of Washington with the cheerful pragmatism of a toddler – he never feels at sea in the supermarket – but I hope that, little as he is, somewhere those images will hold, a dissonant echo to remind him, and me, where we’ve been.

by the sea, by the beautiful sea

Here we are at the North Carolina coast, with the ocean literally on our doorstep. We’ve gotten to watch the sunrise every day since we got here, a glorious consolation prize for the jet lag that still has both boys waking up well before God herself does. Yesterday G sat on my lap as the pinky blaze crept up over the horizon, backlighting the clouds à la Cecil B. DeMille. His mouth dropped open (letting loose a few chunks of Raisin Bran) and he gasped, “Someone painted the sky.”

It’s lovely to be home, lovely that G’s grandmother was sitting next to him to hear him say something so rare and wonderful instead of only reading or hearing about it much later, when some of the magic had worn off in the retelling. It’s also lovely that two weeks from now we won’t be boarding another international flight. On our flight over, I only had to lock myself in the bathroom once with the baby, crying (me, not the baby – the comma is important), but it’s still not an experience I’m eager to repeat. And yet I can’t believe that means we’ve really left Paris for good.

On our long walks down the beach – some of which G is joining us in this year, matching our slower pace with a stride that advertises the two inches his legs have grown past the bottom of all his pants – I pause every time someone waves at us or stops to say hello (which is exactly every time we pass another human on the beach). I’ve been away a long time, I think. Do I know you? I wave back uncertainly, and smile.

And then I remember we are here, in the southern United States, not Paris, where a greeting is a sign of intimacy born only of many years of cautious interaction, a place we were just approaching as we left. I had forgotten what it’s like.

The weather here is as warm as the greetings, and it’s helping to thaw me out, keeping me relaxed even as I avoid facing up to all these sea changes in our lives. I’m normally the first one to get excited about a big change, but the sadness of leaving Paris plus the disorientation of packing up all our belongings and the children has me off my paces, a bit.

Beach houses in North Carolina all seem to be decorated out of the same central warehouse, stocked with pastel and sunset-hued furniture and an endless supply of decorator prints and beach-themed tchotchkes (plastic dolphins, surfboard-shaped doormats). This year’s house has a number of painted wooden signs, made to look slightly weatherbeaten, each with a different exhortation in a different font – “Relax! It Doesn’t Get Better Than This!” “Run your toes through the sand!” They have the effect of making me slightly anxious. Suppose I don’t toe the line?

And tonight, a hurricane is rolling in, a storm small enough not to require evacuation but large enough to bring in some pretty spectacular weather. We’ve laid aside flashlights, diapers, and bottled water, and all up and down the beach there’s a sense of waiting, like a slightly held breath. I’m looking forward, a little, to the storm, and the rain, and the calm after.

goodbye stranger

We leave Paris in a week, and it’s making me emotional about the strangest things. I’m not a saver, and yet I fetched out the cancelled bus tickets from the bottom of my purse for the two lines we take most often and stowed them in the pocket of B’s baby book. It was an awful, rainy day on Friday, but it was the last of S’ vacation, and so we went to the Louvre and had lunch among the horrible humid crowds in what is basically an underground mall food court and I still misted up as we walked back to the bus in the driving rain.

“Boy, you really do love Paris, if you love it today,” S said, and he meant it as a compliment. But I think it is the complement of the sublime and the ridiculous that truly gets me about our life here, the constant refraction of my daily life with small children against such an eternally beautiful backdrop, the crowds and the rain notwithstanding. It’s as if the cliché of Paris (which is true) is a defense against the mundane repetitiveness of raising a toddler and a baby – my nostalgia for their babyhood will be shot through with Parisian light (and a healthy helping of soaking rain).

For example: the week before the Louvre, we were out and about on a very specific errand, which was to find and buy a plastic toilet-seat insert that will allow a thinking-seriously-about-potty-training G to sit on the grown-up toilet without falling in. The errand was designed partly to encourage G in his endeavors, partly to distract him from his obsession with putting various objects – coins, small toys – down the corrugated hose that vents our air conditioner to the outside. You can imagine that my house is divided as to whether introducing a new level of chaos is such a good thing, especially just days before we pack up all our worldly possessions and change continents (S’s attitude: continents, continence, what’s the big deal?). Anyhow, it turns out that the toilet-seat insert -- which, after visiting the supermarket baby section and the droguerie (home of all orphaned home supplies, from mop buckets to small appliances), we finally found at the pharmacy -- is called, in French, a “siège reducteur.” Now I, for one, would be delighted to own a device that would reduce the size of my rear merely by sitting on it. And I am also certain that such a device exists in France, and can also be bought at the pharmacy, but it likely is not made of blue plastic and shaped like a hippo (instead, it vibrates and you have to rub a special cream on your fesses before using it). But for G, onward and upward.

As we left the pharmacy, seat in hand, a bunch of dudes who looked like they were in no particular hurry to get anywhere were drinking beer and passing around a small radio that was blaring, improbably, Supertramp. G smiled and waved, they smiled and waved, and we went on home to put the seat in the potty. I meditated a little on the idea that there is a time and a place for everything, and how that is underlined by the formalities of French culture and the beauties of Paris – that it opens up to make a place for us, and the tour buses, and the bums listening to Supertramp, is nothing short of a miracle. And for a moment I began to trust Paris to show me the way to an elegant leave-taking that will maybe impart a little borrowed grace to me as I go.

Then G came running in from the bedroom saying, Mommy, come look where I peed. Sadly, the siège reducteur was dry as a bone. It turns out the air conditioner hose has uses beyond toys and small change. Elegance, not so much, but I’m grateful all the same. Paris, thanks. We’ll miss you more than you know.

old stones

France is as full of monasteries as it is of other old things – some working, some crumbling, and even some belonging to the Carthusian order, the unusual monks about whom I wrote my graduate thesis, in a land long ago and far away. (The Carthusians were also recently brought into the international spotlight through the documentary film “Into Great Silence,” which I haven’t seen yet but opened to long lines in New York and Boston, making me feel retroactively hip). On two previous occasions I’ve been within spitting distance of one of these monasteries but was unable to visit, due to complications of itinerary or under two-year-old. But last week in Loches, where we spent a marvelous holiday imposing on the hospitality of G and M, we discovered quite by accident that there were ruins of a Carthusian monastery only about 25 km away – in fact, our hosts had been to see a set of one-act plays presented there. We had no special plans for the week and decided on a day trip.

The Chartreuse, or Charterhouse, of Liget was founded by Henry Plantagenet as one of the many penances strewn across the UK and France as acts of contrition for the murder of Thomas à Becket (nothing says “I’m sorry” like a nice bouquet of monastery). At its height there were 20 learned, probably aristocratic monks – including Richelieu’s brother – leading a contemplative life in a rather lovely setting deep in the Loire valley. The monastery was almost completely destroyed at the time of the Revolution, and the monks had to escape for their lives through an underground passageway in their sous-sol that went over half a mile through the limestone (and served originally as a connection between the monastery and the servant brothers housed down the road at the Corroirie). After the Revolution, the land – including all the old stones – was bought back from the republic by an aristocratic family that had survived the Terror, who built a manor house on the property and have more or less lived their ever since.

How do I know this? I got it straight from the mouth of the great-great-grand nephew (or something like that) of the land’s most recent purchaser.

When we arrived at the monastery – which, like many French monuments, is private property open to the public at the discretion and generosity of the owner – there were signs indicating that we should park at the road and then pay a call at the “lower house” to be admitted. Unfortunately, there were a number of lower houses, one of which seemed to be occupied by a party of German painters having lunch, and no clear place to make ourselves known. Just as I started to talk to a couple of curious Germans, two boys about twelve or thirteen years old came up the hill toward us and our stroller and gave us a cheerful wave. They were both wearing tee shirts, shorts and wellies (the latter item of clothing leading me to believe that the level of their enthusiasm in greeting us had much to do with avoiding some kind of chore). "Vous voudriez voire la monastère?” the taller one asked politely. “There are some leaflets at the bottom of the hill,” he continued, “but I can give you a guided tour if you want.” We did, of course, want, and so the six of us set out across the forecourt of the manor towards the ruins of the church and the old monastery walls.

The tour was excellent – heavy on the blood and destruction, but also very correct about the lives and habits of the brothers. I found myself distracted as we walked around, though, not just by the second language and my two-year-old, but also by my growing infatuation with our junior tour guide. Like many other French boys his age that we’ve met, he was incredibly gentle with B and made much of G, in what seemed like a natural inclination. I don’t know if it’s just manners bred in the bone, or the fact that generations of government encouragement of familles nombreuses virtually ensures younger siblings and cousins for just about every French child, but it’s a patience I’ve come to appreciate. I was also impressed by his attention to small details, like the giant chestnut that stood in the place of the original monastery well, or the legend of the naughty monk, who, when caught out skipping vespers in order to drink the last of the monastery wine, crawled inside the oak barrel and was turned to stone (this stone barrel now sits on top of a trickling fountain next to a sign that reads “Eau non potable.” Tant pis.). And he didn’t rush through the details as if they were memorized from index cards – he had a sense of the story, and at the appropriate moments even paused for effect. Most of all, though, I was entranced by the sound of his French, which rolled out in fluid prose that seemed to have bypassed entirely the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and come directly from the court of Louis XVI. There were none of the French equivalents of um, or you know and he didn’t use any slang, which not only made it easier for me to understand but also made me feel like I was in the middle of a movie whose main plot device was to have the adolescent hero possessed by the ghost of his great-great grandfather. It would have to be called something like “Jean-Louis and the Revolution,” or “My Dinner With King Louis.” It was all quite wonderful.

At one point during the tour, G did something especially hair-raising, I forget what, and I scolded him by calling out his full name in three long, drawn-out syllables, in the French pronunciation.

“I’m sorry, what did you say his name was?” our tour guide asked. I told him.

An amazed smile bloomed across his face and he said, “That’s my name, too!”

I said something like, well, I hope he can live up to the honor – and then I took his picture. I plan to use it for future reference as Exhibit A in child-rearing. Even if there was more than a little noblesse oblige involved there, it was still an impressive display – only made more charming by the fact that, as we walked back up the hill to our car, both boys were being screamed at by their older sister (cousin?) for spraying water out of the barrel-fountain.

It was only a minor slippage, considering. Because most twelve year old boys I know, if they’re talking about old stones, they usually mean Keith Richards.


*The photo is of a small window featured in the lower story of each monk’s cell. Their food was passed in through this window every day, so as not to interrupt their study and prayer. Sometimes I would like to have the same thing for G.

bad mommy

It was a fine morning yesterday, and with B ensconced happily making eyes at the babysitter, G and I had a date. I’m trying to make sure that he and I get some individual time together so that our relationship doesn’t devolve into the litany of Don’t (hit your brother, scream so loudly, open the refrigerator door, cause me to be institutionalized before I turn forty). Plus he’s a pretty amusing small person, all told, and it makes me feel like I’m being a better mother.

When I asked him what he wanted to do with our special time together, he said, “I want to go to the coffee shop.” The current object of his toddler obsession with achieving adulthood is the hot beverage – “want warm coffee/hot tea in my special own cup” is a pretty common refrain chez nous, especially if I happen to be drinking one or the other. (Lest the caffeine police break down my door in the next instant, both “coffee” and “tea” for G are a cup of microwave-warmed milk. For the “tea” I have to dunk my tea bag in the cup for half a second to achieve verisimilitude; it is not necessary to add anything to the “coffee,” for reasons mysterious to me. The “special own cup” is a tiny coffee mug some blessed soul gave us when G was born – it looks like a cross between a diner mug and Oliver Twist’s tin cup. So you get the picture). Since we were going out anyway, it seemed like a good time to up the ante.

Our home being Paris, the city of a thousand charming cafes, and we being ourselves, the ugly Americans in residence, we went to Starbucks. The awful truth is that the four cafes nearest our square are in a race to outbid each other for supercilious snottiness, and while I might enjoy a whiff of that when I’m out on my own in the afternoon, it’s not the best environment for a date with G. And the French people making American-style Italian coffee drinks v-e-r-y slowly in our local Starbucks are unfailingly kind to G and me. Exhibit A: le chocolat chaud.

G and I had made our way to the coffee shop by the usual toddler tacking – like navigating a very small sailboat through an extremely choppy sea. Once we’d made it safely into port (i.e. inside the doors of the shop), I settled G on a green velvet armchair by the window and told him sternly to stay there while I ordered our drink. Naturally he popped up next to me five seconds later, nose barely clearing the service counter. I was in the middle of ordering a moyen chocolat chaud, and the young woman at the register grinned – yes, grinned – past me at the mop of blond hair and said, “C’est pour le petit?” I nodded yes, and immediately she pulled up two paper cups, smaller and smallest, like two-thirds of the three bears, and said, “I can make it in the little one so it’s easier for him to drink.” Before I could even thank her, she said, “And I’ll make sure they don’t get the milk too hot.” Merci beaucoup.

G was practically levitating with joy by the time the drink arrived, waving the green straw (une paille, one of those startling words that is exactly the same descriptive metaphor in both French and English) I had unwrapped and given him, like a tiny epée. The hot chocolate itself was an exquisite example of the genre, topped with an escargot-like ribbon of whipped cream and drizzled with chocolate (I also love the phrase for whipped cream, crème fouetté, which sounds like cream made crazy. But I digress). The pleasure of watching G inhale the hot chocolate through the straw was as intense as it was brief. He sucked it down in two long, professional pulls, leaving a halo of chocolate and milky froth around his mouth. We sat for a few more blissful minutes, enjoying the hit, and then took a little tour of the coffee shop, testing out various tables and chairs for comfort and commenting on the artwork.

And then it was time to go home.

My elder son, as you may have noticed, likes a little drama. When he’s happy, the angels are singing; when he’s sad, the world is black, black, black. (Here is where my own mother can insert something about “chickens,” “home,” and “roost.”). When I said the words, “It’s time to go home,” he emitted a long, low moan, like the creaking of a bellows, and then began to keen “NO H-O-O-M-E! NO H-O-O-O-O-O-O-M-E!” at the top of his lungs, and steadily, as we exited the coffee shop and began to make our way down the street. People actually stopped to watch us – I know that French two year olds have tantrums (sometimes), but apparently they do not involve flinging oneself on the filthiest part of the sidewalk and rolling in discontent. I believe this is called restraint. Flinging and rolling for G, on the other hand, are tantrum standbys, and are one of the many aspects of his behavior/ my parenting that have been cause for observation and commentary by our Parisian neighbors. (Once, walking home from the garderie, a woman of a certain age in spotless white woolen pants watched G thoughtfully for a while as he rolled in mid-rage on an oil slick at the entrance to a parking garage. “You know he’s going to get dirty that way,” is what she told me.) Other popular subjects include the state and appropriate seasonality of my children’s clothing, the safety of my double stroller, and G’s gender. I like to think that we provide some entertainment value.

Anyway, as we neared the end of our long march and approached the doorway to our building, I noticed the homeless woman who lives in our neighborhood coming up behind, and eventually past, us. She’s probably about seventy and clearly not all there – she swathes her whole body, including her head, in rags of various colors and provenance, and she talks to herself in a constant stream. I appreciate that even in our snooty neighborhood, people are generally kind to her. We’ve never had much meaningful interaction, as she is terrified of both the dog and the stroller, but I try at least to be respectful about giving her space. Well, yesterday I had neither dog nor stroller, only a vociferously unhappy toddler – which must have been inexplicably less terrifying, because as I began to haul G unceremoniously over our doorframe, she turned around and began making her back toward us in a way that was clearly purposeful. She did not stop until she got about a foot away from me, and she looked down first at G before fixing me with a baleful glare. And then she said, in very clear French, “Vous n’etes pas une bonne maman.” “You are not a good mother.” And flashed a grin at G and went on her way.