Bonjour! Am I French yet?

Brief thoughts on our move to La Grande Nation

In case you missed it, on Monday my family and I got on an airplane with exactly 12 suitcases and moved ourselves and everything we now own from California to the Southwest corner of France, where we will be setting up shop for the foreseeable future.

You may think this sounds very glamorous and exciting. You may be conjuring up mental images of me eating piping hot fresh baguette with creamy French butter while I sip an espresso at a corner cafe, wearing a Hermes scarf and red lipstick, as the Eiffel tower twinkles in the background.

In fact, I am sitting in a very small, very nondescript condo drinking instant coffee amidst a sea of tiny Legos–the entire contents of my son’s suitcase (he would not leave California without them)--and unwashed dishes from last night’s dinner (there’s no dishwasher here). Truly, it’s not very different from what I would have been doing on a Sunday morning in California, except that we are all very jet lagged and whenever I turn on the television they are speaking French.

For the time being, we are “SDF” as the French would say, “sans domicile fixe,” i.e. homeless. We are camped out in an AirBNB for the next two months, hoping to find more permanent housing before our reservation runs out and before the area is crawling with tourists and summer rental prices skyrocket. In theory, this should be fun. In reality, it’s extremely stressful and just as likely to end in a divorce as a successful home acquisition. In the Venn diagram of my husband’s criteria and mine, the overlap is basically “must have a roof and walls.”

But you might be wondering why we sold our perfectly lovely little home in sunny California and moved halfway around the world to a foreign country where they have actual winters and lots and lots of rain. No, it has nothing to do with the current political situation in the US (although it’s certainly not a reason to stay). We have been planning this for at least a year now (long before we knew the outcome of the election).

The primary driver is that we want our kids to speak French. My husband is French. We met in France and I also speak fluent French (though with an identifiable American accent). We thought, like so many other things in our parenting journey, that our kids would just grow up bilingual “naturally”! Afterall, we speak both languages at home. Shouldn’t they just acquire English AND French by osmosis?

As any bilingual families who are reading this newsletter already know, that is NOT how it works. If you don’t have a strategy in place, if you don’t make a concerted effort, then your children will speak whatever language is local to wherever you are living and nothing else. And here’s the thing: the effort required to keep two children under two ALIVE is already more than I could handle, so teaching them French was not exactly at the top of the list of priorities. But now that they are 3 and 5 and utterly incapable of saying so much as “bonjour” we realized the window of opportunity was closing and we’d better up our game or give up the ghost. At first we thought we could just enroll them in a local French school in San Francisco. Then we learned that the price for sending both children was roughly what it cost me to go to Stanford University and, more importantly, about 40X what we were actually willing to pay.

That’s when we had an epiphany: we realized that we could just MOVE to France, where all school is in French (duh), and the kids could go for FREE. And then the more we thought about it, the more we realized that we really LIKED the idea of our kids going to ANY school, French or not French, for free.

You see, in the United States, school starts at age 5 and it goes until 12:30 PM. So at age 3 and 5, we have a half day of free public school for my son and none for my daughter. That means I am left paying $30/hour for a nanny (or about $20/hour for a decent daycare) for my daughter in the morning, and the same for my son AND my daughter in the afternoon if I want to work without children jumping on me. As long as we were living in California, I got VERY good at working from playgrounds, parks, and beaches, or anywhere that my children were entertained enough to leave me alone. But this was not without its limits and frustrations, and on rainy days they got a lot more screen time than I was comfortable with.

In France, school starts at age 3. In fact, school is MANDATORY starting at age 3. And it goes until 4 PM every day except Wednesdays (which are half days). And if you want them to stay until 6 PM every day, you can do that too, and it’s still FREE.

Then we realized that in France you can also have HEALTHCARE without being a slave to the man. I have been a much happier human since I switched to part-time freelance work and my husband has been longing to do the same, but without stable full-time employment in the US, not only could we not afford our mortgage, but we could not afford to go to the doctor.

My European critics like to remind me that school and healthcare are not “free” in Europe: you pay through the nose in taxes. To this I say: you pay through the nose in taxes in California too. Our monthly property taxes in California cost us more than it is costing us to rent a condo 5-minutes walk from the beach in the Southwest of France. And what did we get for that? Public school for children 5+ that ends at noon every day (where they serve corn dogs for lunch), a public library that was open for about 4 hours per week, public transport that could get you from A to B slower than you could walk the same distance, zero healthcare, and a volunteer fire service. The net average tax rate for a middle-class American is about 25%, and for a middle class French citizen it is about 27%. The difference is more about how we USE our tax money in America. France spends about $60 billion annually on the military (which is about 2% of its GDP) whereas the US spends about $900 billion (about 3.5% of its GDP) and far more than any other country. We are too busy policing the world to give our citizens the basic necessities required to live happy, healthy lives.

That said, I am truly sad to leave California behind. Every morning I wake up and have some newfound grief that I need to deal with. Yesterday morning it was the whales. Pacifica, where we lived, was a humpback whale migration hotspot, and last year was an exceptional year. For most of August and September, they were breaching and tail-waving and fin-slapping and putting on a general show just ten yards off-shore from our favorite local beach. So I just sat there and sipped my coffee and thought oh my GOD, I am going to miss those whales.

Then this morning it was the Redwoods. I’m all torn up about how small the trees are here in France. How can a person live without Redwoods? Those ancient giants that remind us of our impermanence on earth, the brevity of the human experience and the resilience of nature? Will my children miss running buck-naked through the woods by the creek near our old home? Can they do that here? For now, it appears that most French children wear clothes at all times. Where are the feral children? Certainly not in Biarritz.

But in order to compensate for the lack of whales and Redwoods, France has food. The little town where we are staying is not exactly a culinary paradise (by French standards anyway). There is no open-air market. There are no Michelin restaurants. There isn’t even a decent boulangerie. But there is a supermarket. A giant, strip-mall supermarket with an ugly, crowded parking lot out front. It’s nothing special to look at, but inside there are 500 varieties of the most delicious yogurt you have ever tasted, grass-fed butter galore, cheeses from every region, perfectly-seasoned rotisserie chickens, mustard that will make your eyes water, earthy red wines full of tannins that Americans can’t tolerate but in my opinion make red wine worth drinking, and oranges so sweet they literally taste like candy. If you don’t feel like cooking (which I rarely do) you can buy a box of prepared soup that has only three ingredients in it, all of which you can recognize as actual edible foods (what? No red dye or formaldehyde?), and a loaf of fresh bread and cheese. Two bags of groceries will cost you a fraction of what it costs in an American supermarket (especially in California) because the French are socialists who aren’t afraid to regulate shit when it’s in the interest of its farmers and people. Actually, America is not afraid to regulate shit either, but somehow instead of reasonably-priced eggs we ended up with high-fructose corn syrup and ethanol. Oops.

I don’t want to paint a picture of France as a political paradise. One of the reasons I left Paris in 2018 and moved back to California is that the labor market is an absolute mess here, which mostly hurts young people looking for work. The French are so overly-protected in their jobs that there’s not enough new job creation, and young people trying to break into professional services industries (the only way to really afford an apartment in Paris) are overworked and underpaid. I also have my reservations about the higher education system, which is free, but pushes specialization at a young age. We’ll see about that when we get there.

But on the whole I think the US could learn a lot from France, politically-speaking. So many of the things that Americans claim “could never work” are a reality here already. And they make a real difference in the quality of life for everyone. Will they last? It’s hard to say. For one thing, as the demographics change, the social security system will have to evolve, but the French population refuses to accept even a change of a few years to the age of retirement. And there’s a lot of anger here over immigration, just as there is in the US, which is pushing far-right parties into positions of power. We’ve only been here 5 days and I’ve already encountered my fair share of low-key xenophobia. Then again, I did not expect the Basque people to welcome with open arms a Franco-American family with remote jobs and US dollars looking to buy a house in their precious homeland.

Anyway, I promise that I am not going to turn this newsletter into a French-American political comparison. I am still here to write primarily about motherhood in hunter-gatherer societies, evolutionary mismatch, and the science of womanhood. But I am, first and foremost, an anthropologist at heart, and I can’t help making cross-cultural observations. So expect some new content on French attitudes towards motherhood, children, and parenting as well as the occasional political piece.

That’s all I’ve got for now folks. Let me know in the comments if you have specific questions. The newsletters might be a bit shorter and sparser until we officially get settled in, but hang in there, there’s so much more to come.

A bientôt.