Babygroup à la française

Let me just start by saying that until last week, I had always believed that the very idea of a babygroup was anathema to your average French maman. First, by the time your average mom is ready to attend a babygroup, maman is already getting ready to go back to work (and she's looking forward to it). There are very few French stay-at-home moms.

Secondly, I'm trying to remember the last time I heard French mothers talking to each other about their babies, starting solids, or teething. I can't.

I have heard French moms discuss Sleeping Through the Night. It's the first thing they mention when they see your baby: " Est-ce qu'il fait ses nuits?" they ask, their voices carrying undertones of quiet desperation, in case your six-week old is not yet sleeping 12-hours straight.

But apart from the question of Sleeping Through the Night, which is an obsession of all occidental mamas, I don't think that most French moms enjoy discussing babies the way we Anglo-Saxon moms do. They would rather focus on getting their bodies back into shape, getting their perineum ready for sex again (French social security actually pays for the six sessions of ré-éducation at the physiotherapist. Not bad, eh?), getting ready to return to work, etc. Sitting around with other moms to discuss breastfeeding obstacles or which infant formula one's baby is drinking? What's the point?

So imagine my grande surprise when I discovered that here in Tana, there is (gulp)a French babygroup. Actually, it's a playgroup of mixed ages, including babies. Having now attended the French Playgroup, I have taken it upon myself to write up the following list.

You know you are attending a babygroup à la française when:

1. Half the mothers, er, didn't bring their baby. They left the baby at home with the nanny. They just came for the company.

2. You're the only one breastfeeding. If there is by chance another mother who is still breastfeeding her 10-week old, she will probably get up to find a more private place to do so. Heaven forbid that anyone see her breast bared in a non-sexual context!

3. At least one mother is smoking (I am trying really hard to imagine the reaction of my Anglo-Saxon mommy friends to someone lighting up a cigarette at a playgroup but it's hard to imagine it without laughing).

4. The topics of conversation include anything but babies or children. The idea is to have some enlightened discussion about something (anything!) else, such as where you will be going on vacation, where you have been looking for work, the new house, politics. We Anglo-Saxons might be able to learn something from the French about conversations concerning things other than teething, solids and crawling.

5. Should you start to actually talk about the babies, the discussion will be about which infant formula to buy.

6. You show up in a T-shirt and sweats and find the other moms wearing pencil skirts, high heels and blouses.

7. All the mothers are thin and have perfect bodies, even the ones who have just recently given birth. Also, there is a bowl of cookies on the table but no one is eating them except you.

8. None of them have ever heard of, or care about, Dr. Sears, Dr. Brazelton, Dr. Weissbluth, Dr. Ferber, Dr. Grandsenne, Dr. Rufo or any other famous doctor, American, French or other, who has written some treatise on raising a baby. However, their own child's pediatrician is God.

All this to say that parenting is definitely cultural.

Cloth versus disposable around the world

Back in Canada when I was growing up, lots of parents used a cloth diaper service for their baby. Every week, you handed the truck driver your bag of dirty diapers and in exchange, you received a bag full of folded clean ones, all ready for your little one to sully.

When I was pregnant with the Bambina in France five years ago, I said to the Frenchman, "so I guess we'll just sign up for a cloth diaper service, n'est-ce pas?."

When it was clear that he didn't know what on earth I was talking about, I said "you know, the truck comes by every week and you hand over your dirty diapers and you get clean ones."

The Frenchman wondered at this point if I was not from another planet rather than just another country. "Zees does not exeest in France," he said. And he promptly went out to buy a jumbo pack of size 2 Pampers in preparation for the arrival of our daughter.

And at the time, he was right. Diaper delivery services didn't exist in France. So, imagine my surprise when I checked out the May 2009 edition of Parents magazine (purchased in Madagascar in August!) to find .... an article on cloth diapers! Not only do cloth diapers and diaper services now exist in France, they are actually becoming... dare I say it , trendy??

Of course, just as parents in the West are starting to consider cloth diapering as a serious option once again, arguments against using them are rearing their ugly head. In 2005, a study carried out by an advisory board to the UK Environment Agency concluded that cloth diapers had equal the impact of disposable nappies. I still don't believe it. The study assumed that you would be washing your nappies every day in 90 degree celcius water on the mega-long cycle and putting them in the dryer for drying.

Which brings me to the next point (for which I would like to thank Green Living Tips) - When you use cloth nappies, you can control how much you damage the earth - you can wash them every two or three nights only, you can wash them at 40 degrees celcius (totally sufficient), you can buy your cloth diapers used (why not? They're even more absorbant than the new ones), you can use hemp or bamboo nappies instead of the environmentally less friendly cotton ones, and you can dry them in the sun - the best natural disinfectant going.

You don't have these options when you use disposables.

Here in Madagascar and the rest of the developing world, avoiding disposable nappy use is even more important, for a few reasons:

1) Disposable diapers are expensive here.

2) You can only buy disposable diapers in packages of about 30, making it difficult to stock up. That's not an assuring situation when you consider that stores run out of stock quickly here. If you run out, you won't necessarily find more when you need them (or you might at least have to hit a few shops to find them). Also bear in mind that in the event of another coup d'état, you may not be able to shop at all for a few weeks...

3) Discarded disposible diapers contain human waste. Human waste that sits in landfills (especially landfills in developing countries) can contaminate the local drinking water with harmful bacteria and viruses causing intestinal illnesses, polio and hepatitis.

All that being said, I do put my baby in a disposable diaper whenever we are travelling and as his final diaper before he goes to sleep at night.

Nannies in the Colonial World

The typical expericance with nannies in former colonies can be described as follows:

1. Move into house. Say hello to the cook, the gardiner, the chauffeur and the nanny. They come with the house. You cannot fire them. (Well, you could try, but it would be hard and you would be in the bad books of half the local families, so not worth the risk). Welcome to your household for the next five years.

2. Hand the baby over to the nanny.

3. Kiss your baby good-bye.

4. Expect to see your baby again when he is five years old, unless you ask nanny before then if you might be permitted to, er, maybe hold or even (gasp!) feed the baby.

5. Expect nanny to take offence when you ask her this. After all, who are you to interfere with her job of raising your child. Go and find some other colonial mothers to play cards with!

6. Expect the baby to be speaking nanny's dialect better than your language by the time baby is two years old.

This is the scenario that people had warned me about and sure enough, our nanny, who has just started today (she didn't come with the house) seems kind of surprised that I, er, still expect to be with my 4 month old baby quite a bit and that (gasp!) she can't feed him (he's "still" breastfed, as she noted.)

"And when will he start to drink milk from a bottle?", she asked me.

"Never", I replied.

I think she realised then that I wouldn't be a typical neo-colonial mom.

Preparing Your Child for Life in the Third World

When I told our almost-five year old daughter that we were moving to Madagascar, I thought that I had been pretty thorough. We looked for Madagascar on the map, together. I showed her photos of lemurs. I showed her aerial photos of the capital city, Antananarivo (Tana, for short). I told her that the people there speak Malagasy (or malgache, as it is referred to in French), and that their skin was a different colour from ours (most are of Indonesian/Polynesian descent; some are black African).

What I didn't tell her was the following:

- The city is dirty. The roads are very dusty and there is garbage everywhere.

- The city is very polluted. You can't walk down the street unless you don't mind inhaling car fumes that were banned in the 1970s in Europe.

- Poverty and misery are everywhere, staring at you in the face.

The first day after our arrival in Tana, we drove (or should I say, our chauffeur drove us) down the main avenue of the city.

Bambina: Mommy?

Me: Yes.

Bambina (staring all around her, wide-eyed): I think the people here are very very poor.

Me: yes, they are.

Bambina: Mommy, why are the buildings here all falling apart?

Me: Because people here are very poor, honey. There is no money to fix up and maintain the houses and shops.

Bambina: In Rome, the buildings were beautiful. I want to go back to Rome.

The next day, in the car, after passing the umpteenth child with extended hands at the window of our car, the Bambina blurts out, angrily:

Naughty mommy for not telling me that people in Madagascar are poor. Naughty!

And every day thereafter, moaning and growing that Madagascar (or at least Tana) was not beautiful, that everyone is poor here, that the people here wear dirty clothes and have no shoes, that there was too much dust everywhere, that she missed her old house, her old friends and her old city.

My daughter was suffering from culture shock.

Yep, I should have told her more about the poverty and misery before we arrived. I think she has only just recently forgiven me for this error in judgment. The next move, I'll be sure to prepare her a little better for the shocking reality of the third world (not that I'll need to now that we are here).

What has happened since I last wrote in this blog:

End of March: My darling partner, the Frenchman, is released from house arrest (That's right, house arrest. The caribinieri had arrested him for suspected mafia activity. He was innocent, of course, but the Italian justice system has a nut loose. Poor Frenchman spent two weeks in a prison in Potenza over Christmas and then three months under house arrest in our apartment in Rome. Of course, he wasn't allowed any visitors or telephone calls while under house arrest so all he did all day was work on the computer (which explains why I was rarely able to update this blog...)).

April: The Frenchman's employer informs us that we are moving continents.

April 25: I give birth to a darling baby boy, the Bambino, in April, at home. I feel like a carwreck afterwards but am nonetheless thrilled about my little Bambino.

May and June: With the help of movers, I pack all our belongings. The Frenchman has already left to seek out a new home at our next destination.

End June: We leave Rome and spend two weeks in Paris (France, that is, of course).

Finally, in July, we move to.....


MADAGASCAR.

And so, the Globetrotter Parent will continue this weblog from her new island domicile...

(Now I just have to wait for someone to comment "I like to move it, move it. I like to move it, move it...")

The European Birth Experience

My daughter was born in France. It was, I would say, a fairly classic birth scene, from a Western point of view: public hospital, epidural, electronic fetal monitoring, and I pushed the baby out while lying on my back (although they were nice enough to put the bed at a slight angle so that I was not lying completely flat!). I had to specifically tell the midwife that I would not consent to an episiotomy. Otherwise, she would have given me one as a matter of routine.

Oh, and their breastfeeding advice was the standard rubbish - the midwife told me to breastfeed maximum 15 minutes each breast every three hours - sore nipples and all that, you know.

There were some differences between my French birth and a standard North American birth. For one, there was no obstectrician present, just a midwife. I have learned from my experience in France and Italy that, contrary to what many natural birth advocates will tell you, women giving birth in countries who use midwives to manage low-risk births do not necessarily have more "natural" births. Not at all. In fact, what tends to happen is that the midwives are simply trained to be "general practitioner" doctors of childbirth.

Another small progressive aspect of my French experience: upon baby's exit into the world, the midwife immediately placed baby on my chest and left us for a while to bond. Also, the c-section rate in France was not too high at the time - about 20 percent in public hospitals, higher in private clinics. And in the hospital where I gave birth, they encouraged mothers to "room in" with baby - if only because the hospital didn't have the money or space to provide a separate nursery.

I haven't given birth yet in Italy but here is what I have learned so far from my yoga instructor, midwife and the many women whom I have talked to (not very scientific, I know!):

- As in France, Italy uses midwives for most births, but the midwives and doctors almost always work in teams (unlike in France where the doctor only shows up at the birth in an emergency).
- Most hospitals and clinics in Italy will encourage a woman to move around during the first stage of labour. The midwife is there to assist during the first stage.
- Electronic fetal monitoring is rarely used.
- Epidurals are not available at all hospitals and where available, it has to be "reserved" ahead of time.
- Women are encouraged or forced to lie flat on their backs during the second stage of labour, so that the midwife and doctor "can intervene more easily".
- Episiotomies are pretty much routine.
- The c-section rate is about 40 percent for all of Italy, much higher in the south (80 percent in some regions!) and much lower in the North.
- It is apparently difficult (at least in Rome) to find a hospital that will allow "rooming in" with the baby.

Personally, between an episiotomy and a cesarean, I think I might go for the cesarean. I'm hoping for neither one, though, as I have decided to forego the hospital battles and give birth....at home!

Birthing around the world - Le Premier Cri

I finally was able to watch the movie, Le Premier Cri (The First Cry). If you haven't seen and you are interested in birth, this film is for you. This documentary about birth takes you around the world - to the United States, Mexico, Brazil, France, Niger, India, Russia, Japan, Vietnam - to witness all kinds of births - home, hospital, in the desert, in the sea, in a pool, natural, medicalized, cesarian, with a doctor present, completely unassisted, the works. Of course, along with the actual birth, you get to see how culture, wealth, religion and physical environment affect how and where women give birth.


Some reviews gave the director, Gilles de Maistre, slack for allegedly slanting the documentary towards natural birth. But as the vast majority of births in our world are still natural and take place at home, I don't think one can criticize the director for being representative in his choices of what to film. Also, Le Premier Cri does not, by any means, paint a rosy picture of all natural births. One bedouin gave birth in the desert and the baby was stillborn. Another woman had an unassisted birth in the United States and three hours after the birth, the placenta still had not come out. She risked bleeding to death. Fortunately, her friend (who was neither a doctor nor a midwife) managed to reach in and take it out!

Le Premier Cri does not pass judgment on how any of the births take place, natural or medicalized. And if there is one thing that you do learn from the film, it's that childbirth might be universal but just like everything else, how you go about it can sure depend on where you live!