Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman Read Free Book Online Page A

ecstatic. He says he’s been waiting his whole career as a chauffeur
for this cinematic event.
    As we cross Paris in the dark, I open my seatbelt and slide to the floor of the taxi, moaning from the mounting pain. This is no leg wax. I ditch my faux fantasies of a natural childbirth. Simon opens the windows, either to give me some air or to cover the sounds I’m making.
    Meanwhile, the driver speeds up. I can see the street lamps zipping past overhead. He begins loudly reciting the story of his own son’s birth twenty-five years earlier. “Slower, please!” I plead from the floor, between contractions. Simon is silent and pale, staring straight ahead.
    “What are you thinking about?” I ask him.
    “Dutch football,” he says.
    When we arrive at the hospital, the driver pulls up at the emergency entrance, jumps out of the car, and sprints inside. It seems he’s expecting to join us for the birth. Moments later he’s back, sweaty and panting. “They’re expecting you!” he shouts.
    I lurch into the building, leaving Simon to pay the fare and persuade the driver to leave. The moment I see a midwife, I declare in my clearest French: “
Je voudrais une péridurale!
” (I would like an epidural). If I’d had a wad of cash I would have waved it at her.
    It turns out that despite the French passion for epidurals, they don’t just perform them on demand. The midwife takes me into an examining room to check my cervix, then looks up at me with a bemused smile. I’m barely three centimeters dilated, out of a possible ten. Women don’t usually ask for epidurals this early on, she says. She won’t summon the anesthetist from
his
pad thai for this.
    She does put on the most soothing music I’ve ever heard—a sort of Tibetan lullaby—and rigs me up to a drip that softens the pain. Eventually, exhausted, I fall asleep.
    I’ll spare you the details of my very medicated, very pleasant birth. Thanks to the epidural, pushing the baby out h Khe td"as the precision and intensity of a yoga move, without the discomfort. I’m so focused that I don’t even mind when my obstetrician’s teenage daughter, who lives around the corner, pops in after the delivery to ask her mom for some cash.
    As it happens, the anesthesiologist, midwife, and doctor are all women. (Simon, stationed far from the business end, is there too.) The baby comes out as the sun is rising.
    I’ve read that babies look like their fathers when they’re born, to assure the dads of their paternity and motivate them to go out hunting (or investment banking) for the family. My first thought when our daughter comes out is that she doesn’t merely resemble Simon; she has his face.
    We cuddle with her for a while. Then they dress her in a chicly understated French outfit supplied by the hospital, complete with an ecru-colored beanie on her head. We do give her a proper name. But thanks to the hat, we mostly just call her Bean.
    I stay in the hospital for six days, which is standard French practice. I see no reason to leave. There is fresh-baked bread with every meal (no need to leave for a croissant) and a sun-dappled garden where I steal away for walks. The extensive in-room wine list includes champagne. On day three, I can’t stop saying to Bean, “You weren’t born yesterday!” Simon doesn’t even pretend this is funny.
    As if to emphasize that there are universal parenting principles in France, babies born here come with instructions. Each newborn is issued a white softcover book called a
carnet de santé
, which follows the child until age eighteen. Doctors record every checkup and vaccination in this book, and plot the child’s height, weight, and head size. It also has commonsense basics on what to feed babies, how to bathe them, when to go for checkups, and how to spot medical problems.
    The book doesn’t prepare me for Bean’s transformation. For the first month or so, she continues to look just like Simon, with dark brown eyes and hair. She even