petite anglaise

I feel as though I should, by rights, be hankering after Tadpole #2 by now. The childminder certainly seems to think so: she never misses an opportunity to tell me how wonderful Tadpole is with baby Valentina, her six-month old playmate. Evidently Tadpole enjoys playing ‘mummy’, helping to administer bottles and stroking the baby’s face gently whenever she cries, cooing “qu’est-ce qui va pas, Ballon Tina?”

Very cute, I’m sure. But, for whatever reason, and despite the fact that I’ve always wanted two children, I find that I’m simply not ready.

I adored being pregnant, once the first three nauseous months were behind me. The happy hormones kicked in, and I floated through the next six on my own private MDMA cloud. Nothing could bring me down. Nobody could stress me out. Frogspawn and I were cocooned inside a cosy little bubble, insulated from the outside world, which could cease to turn, for all I cared, whenever he/she wriggled or kicked inside me.

It was a welcome change from my usual, bi-polar state, where the pendulum can swing without warning from one extreme to another, never giving Mr Frog time to run for cover.

As one of three daughters, even if I did fight tooth and nail with the sister who was closest to me in age, I do feel strongly about wanting to give Tadpole a brother or sister. Mr Frog, an only child, will never fully understand how much he has missed. Many of our recurring arguments stem from his inability to share, to put other people before himself. I don’t want Tadpole to grow up with that innate selfishness that comes of having no siblings.

But, although I am nostalgic for that blissed-out pregnant state, and do want Tadpole to have a brother or sister, I am putting it off. I can’t seem to make the leap from a vague ‘one day’ to a ‘soon’ or a ‘now’.

I can, when pressed, come up with a million convincing reasons to justify my hesitation. There’s the fact that we have to wait until next year when Tadpole starts pre-school, because we simply cannot afford full-time childcare for two children simultaneously. Giving up my job is not an option, financially speaking. Asking to work four-day weeks will already put a serious strain on our budget, if I exercise my right to do so when our second child is born.

I tell myself that I want to bide my time until Mr Frog has changed jobs (which is now hovering tantalisingly close on the horizon, due to a combination of fortuitous events) to see whether he will be on hand to help out more (or less). I cannot conceive of a life where I work full-time and also shoulder the full burden of responsibility for bringing up not one but two children. I have, unwisely, threatened Mr Frog in the past, saying that I flatly refuse to have another child until things change and I get more support from him. A pointless exercise in blackmail as it happens, as he’s in even less of a hurry than I am.

I think reasons like those could probably be more accurately described as excuses. The crux of the matter is actually that a selfish, self-centred part of me desperately wants to cling to what shreds of freedom and independence I still have left for a little longer.

I love Tadpole fiercely. But I also love the way that she can be ‘switched off’ at 8pm, leaving me time for myself, to read a book, write, surf the internet or watch a film. Even if going out is rarely an option. If I had a second, terrifyingly needy little being to tend to, that would all change for the foreseeable future. I imagine myself, exhausted, unwashed and cranky, collapsing in bed at 9pm, before Mr Frog has even shown his face, the apartment littered with dirty nappies, clothes and unwashed crockery. It’s not a very appealing scenario. It scares me. I don’t know if I can devote myself so selflessly to being a mother first, and a person, second.

What really doesn’t help, is that there is a hormonal time bomb ticking inside of me, muddling my thoughts even further, crying out that I can’t afford to wait too long. The risks to me and my hypothetical baby grow with every year that I procrastinate. But, while I would hate to look back one day, filled with regret that I did not conceive another child before it was too late, I don’t think that I should let this argument tip the balance either.

The only thing I know for certain right now is that I want Tadpole #2 to be just as desired as Tadpole #1 was. If that means biding my time, then the childminder and anyone else who has mentioned it to me will just have to hold their impatience in check.

It will happen if and when I’m good and ready.

I am struggling to chase images of this out of my head. It has haunted me ever since I first read about it. When I told Mr Frog last night, I was fighting back tears as I spoke.

I know it makes universally distressing reading. But, quite apart from feeling sick to the pit of my stomach whenever I think about Abigail Witchalls’ ordeal, my brain insists on replaying images of how I imagine the attack, based on her own harrowing description. I strain to imagine how she must have felt. And what she is feeling now.

…I am pushing Tadpole along one of the more secluded country lanes near where my parents live. I hear the hum of an engine, and the crunch of wheels on loose road chippings as it passes me by slowly, time enough to make chilling eye contact with the driver. I know, instinctively, that this person means me harm…

I think of Abigail’s children. The unborn child that may or may not have survived, and her son, Joseph, just two months younger than Tadpole. I shudder to think what effect witnessing these events may have on this fledgling person. Feeling a strangers hands grabbing him from behind, holding a knife to his throat. Sensing his mother’s terror as she walked towards him, wide-eyed. Seeing the stranger hit his mummy with the knife, making her crumple to the floor. Tipped over, still strapped into his pushchair, left helpless by her side. The blood. Wondering why she was sleeping. Knowing that something must be badly wrong.

The articles I have read so far don’t tell me how they were found. I only hope that help wasn’t long in coming.

Joseph may be, mercifully, too young to actually remember the events of that day in years to come, but how can they fail to cast a long shadow over his life?

My powers of empathy fall short of imagining the anguish of waking up in a hospital bed with no feeling in my limbs. Robbed of the power of speech. Unable to hold my child to me and hug him fiercely, to sob noisily with relief that he is unharmed. Carrying a child in my belly that I may now never be able to hold. Whose name I may never be able to pronounce out loud.

I am at a loss to understand such a random act of cruelty. But I’m sure that no mother who has read about Abigail Witchalls will feel entirely safe taking their child along a quiet country road ever again.

SCENE 1

At the parental home, in Yorkshire, I am discussing the arrangements for my upcoming wedding with my mother over a cup of tea. The date we have opted for is June 9th. I realise with a jolt that I have forgotten to send out any invitations whatsoever. We haven’t even decided whether to tie the knot in a church or a registry office. Or indeed booked anything. There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that it will be taking place in England though. An odd choice to have made, as I actually prefer the idea of a civil wedding in a mairie in France, me wearing a fabulous, but non-wedding like, frock, Mr Frog in a Hedi Slimane suit and Tadpole by our side, wearing flowers in amongst her curls.

Panic surges from my stomach to my chest and then flutters against my ribcage like a moth trapped in a lamp. OH MY GOD! It seemed such a long way off, and now, suddenly, the wedding is imminent. And NOTHING is ready!

SCENE 2

We are discussing wedding catering with a sour-faced lady dressed in a pink viscose suit. The poor woman is trapped in the eighties: her suit even has shoulder pads. You can see a dent between where her shoulders end and the padding begins.

The catalogue she is clutching between chipped fuchsia fingernails reads “Pamela Keates’ Wedding Treats”. She opens her ‘portfolio’ (as she calls it) to a page showing a photograph of cheese and pineapple cubes on cocktail sticks, ingeniously stuck into a grapefruit covered in tin-foil.

I am inwardly weighing up the pros and cons of having a break in the wedding proceedings so that people can go out and buy their own dinner and then return later for a party. I can’t afford to feed everyone, and if I can’t do it properly, I say firmly to my mother, who has reappeared looking at least twenty years younger, then I’d rather not do it at all. There will be no cheese and pineapple on sticks at any wedding of mine. Although I quite fancy one now, if the lady has any samples on her.

SCENE 3

I am sitting in a church wearing a horrible fluffy, meringue-like wedding dress in a cheap, white crinkly fabric. My legs itch. It looks like one I saw in a dodgy bargain shop I spied from a bus once at La Chapelle, where nylon wedding dresses and satellite dishes were sold side by side. A winning combination.

I can smell the familiar scent of my father’s pipe, so he must be around somewhere, waiting impatiently to give me away. The tobacco smell reminds me of car journeys when I was younger. I suffered from motion sickness, and the pipe smoke nauseated me even further. But it’s ten years since he’s touched that pipe, so he must be very stressed indeed today. Not a good sign.

From my vantage point seated in the choir stalls, I can see the vicar, who is motioning to me from inside the open vestry. I don’t understand what he is trying to tell me, so I smile and wave. I am feeling pleased because there are fellow bloggers in the congregation who have come to my weddding from afar and even agreed to do readings during the service. I do hope Anna won’t say “cunty” in front of my mum.

I resolve to get changed out of my dress as soon as the church part is over, mentally scouring my wardrobe for something suitable, but worried that the only nice things are probably in the washing basket or the ironing pile. As usual.

Suddenly I hear a jingle for the BNP bank playing over the speakers, with accompaniment from the church organist for added dramatic effect. I realise that the priest must have been trying to ask me whether I minded him playing ads over the PA system at the start and finish of his service. I cower behind my veil in shame and horror. I was under the impression that we had paid an extra fee so that there would be no commercial breaks.

I turn to Mr Frog to see if he is angry with me for allowing his profession to encroach on “our special day” ™, but actually the person sitting next to me is no longer Mr Frog, it is my first ever boyfriend. His skin hasn’t cleared up yet, so it must still be 1990. Which means that he must be seventeen, as must I. The church suddenly feels gloomier, the damp walls closing in. I am having trouble breathing.

* * * *

I wake up, to the sound of ambulance sirens in the street below and Tadpole chanting “Nee Naw Nee Naw Nee Naw” from her bedroom.

I turn to Mr Frog, still grappling to shake off the residual feeling of panic : “I had an awful nightmare.”

“What was it this time?” he murmurs, sleepily.

“I was getting married,” I say.

“Oh. Who to?”

Friday. There is a mysterious new billboard campaign in the metro. For now, only teaser images are on display: attractive men and women (pretend to) yawn in a very aesthetically pleasing manner, photographed in all-forgiving black and white. Not even the merest glimmer of a filling in the back of their wide-open mouths. It is very difficult, I note, to walk past these adverts without yawning back at them; regardless of the time of day.

I quiz Mr Frog to see if he knows what the campaign is for, being as he is an insider in this business, but he hasn’t the faintest idea.

Sunday. We drive to Mailly Champagne in a borrowed car to visit Mr Frog’s cousin. If indeed ‘cousin’ is the right word to describe the relationship between Mr Frog and his father’s cousin’s daughter. Are they second cousins? First cousins once (or twice) removed? More complicated still, what exactly is Tadpole to this lady’s children?

To complicate matters further, Mr Frog’s grandparents, originally from Northern Italy, emigrated to France post WW2 with grandfather’s sister and grandmother’s brother, also married to one another. The brothers and sisters have lived in adjacent houses in a tiny village, an hour’s drive from Besançon, ever since. This tightly woven genetic heritage means that all their grandchildren were cousins to the power of two. A gang of assorted tanned children would spend idyllic summer holidays in the grandparents’ village, roaming wild in the fields around the (former farm)houses, playing hide and seek in haylofts and paddling in the village lavoir. Inevitably, as the second bottle of wine is uncorked, Mr Frog and his ‘cousin’ are overcome with nostalgia for their childhood escapades and I tend to tune out as familiar anecdotes are taken out and polished, and undoubtedly embellished, for the nth time.

But this was all yet to come. We had to actually get there first.

Mr Frog was instructed to print out directions to Mailly at work on Friday, as some time has elapsed since our last visit. I don’t bother with a printer at home, and as a no-car household we don’t even possess a road atlas. En route, hurtling along a rain-drenched Autoroute de l’Est, I examined Mr Frog’s itinerary, dismayed to see that all we had to work with, courtesy of Mappy, was:

quitter l’autoroute à la sortie n° 25
continuer sur la N51
entrer dans Reims
continuer sur la Route de Louvois (passer par un rond-point)
sortir de Reims et continuer sur la Route de Louvois
continuer sur la D9
prendre à gauche la D26

It was about as clear as our misted windscreen. Particularly without any sort of map to refer to (Mr Frog had omitted to print one), and given French road signs don’t generally indicate very clearly which ‘D’ or ‘N’ road you are driving along, or take it upon themselves to point out which road is referred to by the locals as la Route de Louvois. My boss’s mantra echoing in my head - “never assume anything” - I decided that it was the last time I would ask Mr Frog to take care of that kind of thing.

Suffice to say that we managed to add almost an hour onto our initial ninety minute journey, driving around in pointless loops, phoning relatives for garbled verbal directions and swearing not a little. On Tadpole duty, I had the pleasure of singing the theme tune to ‘Postman Pat’ approximately forty times, enthusiasm levels rapidly dwindling, to stave off an imminent toddler meltdown.

I think this may be my new definition of hell.

On the way home to Paris, several hours later, after a very French afternoon spent entirely à table, feasting and knocking back champagne from cousin’s husband’s family vines, I plugged my trusty ipod into the car stereo and let it shuffle, only nudging it on a track if I judged the selection too chaotic or profanity filled for toddler’s ears. The car stereo was hardly top of the range, the road surface was noisy, and a piece of the rubber seal on Mr Frog’s window was coming away, the cumulative effect of which was a fearsome amount of background noise. I cranked the volume up one notch, then two, then three, straining to hear the lyrics. Tadpole was reading her books, seemingly in a world of her own.

We embarked on a magical musical tour: Suede chasing Electronic, hot on the heels of Duran Duran and Goldfrapp. I eased the volume up progressively. Tadpole still didn’t react. I only realised an hour later, when I clambered into the back of the car, that there were actually more speakers back there. Just behind her head. We spent the rest of the journey in a guilty silence, traumatised that instead of giving Tadpole an eclectic musical education, we might instead have robbed her of the faculty of hearing altogether.

Monday. Feeling drained and listless after protracted car journey and champagne abuse. The posters in the metro still feature beautiful people yawning. Only now there is a tagline plastered over the top. “Re-Vittelisez-vous!”

I feel rather cheated that it is nothing more exciting than yet another incitement to drink bottled water.

I suspect it will take more than water to perk me up today, unless it is boiled and poured over powdered caffeine. With a crystal meth chaser.

Would you think it terribly rude if I sent you here again today?

Feel free to post any comments here at the mother ship - they may subsequently find their way onto the expatica site.

I bring Tadpole’s gourmet dinner - sweetcorn (canned), green beans (frozen), mini pasta shapes and a slice of cheese - through to the living room and set it down on her little table. Pulling out her chair, I swiftly flip over the flower seat cushion with its week old yoghurt stain. Ni vu, ni connu. Anything to reduce the lengthening list of Things Which Need Doing around the apartment. I am also pathetically grateful to whoever took it upon themselves to invent reversible clothing for small children.

Tadople is sitting on the sofa, her magic drawing pad laid across her knees. This toy is another life-saving invention, as a toddler left unchaperoned with coloured crayons can, and will, wreak untold havoc. And I fear our white walls might prove to be a very inviting canvas.

Magic pen poised in the air, Tadpole’s head is cocked to one side. She appears to be listening to something, fierce concentration etched into her wrinkled brow. I know that expression. It’s my thinking face. The one which Mr Frog always tries to smooth flat with his forefinger.

“What’s the matter, baby girl? What is it?” I enquire, noting that she is dribbling again. Which means she probably won’t eat her painstakingly prepared meal, because she never does when she’s teething. Only biscuits, fruit and chocolat will do.

“Noises.”

I listen. I can hear traffic in the street, five stories below. The hum of the video recording Eastenders for later. A dog barking in the park, as its owner takes it for a bowel-relieving walk. Nothing else.

“What noises? Mummy can’t hear anything.”

“Noman, ” she says earnestly, turning towards me, motioning towards the ceiling with her free hand. “Up dere. Noman. Shoes on. Noisy!”

A noman, in Tadpolese, is what you and I would refer to as a snowman. Similarly a snake is a ‘nake, a snail is a ‘nail (or sometimes a ‘cargot tout chaud’). But quite what Tadpole thinks a snowman would be doing in a sixth floor apartment on a mild April day, I cannot imagine.

“There’s no snowman upstairs. What are you talking about, silly?” I venture cautiously, somewhat perplexed.

I recall my well-intentioned explanations of the sounds we hear every day from the surrounding apartments, which Tadpole has recently become ultra sensitive to, not to say a little afraid of. I did explain that a man lived upstairs (we even went upstairs and I showed her his front door to help get my point across), and I told Tadpole that when the man walked on his wooden floor with shoes on, it made a “TAP TAP TAP” noise. Just like her own shoes when she sprints giddy lengths of our corridor, or when she tries on mummy’s shoes and clatters periously across the parquet. (Sincerest apologies to our downstairs neighbour, whose patience must be wearing thin.)

The following day, she had talked about the noisy man. He wasn’t actually home at the time - he keeps very unsociable hours indeed, not heard for days, only to arrive with what sounds like an entire harem of stiletto clad females at 5am on a weekday. He even caused me to knock on our ceiling with a spare curtain rail (stashed under our bed), in the manner of a cantakerous old maid, on one occasion.

“There’s no man up there right now. I can’t hear anything.” I must have replied.

So despite my best intentions, Tadpole evidently now thinks the abominable snowman lives upstairs. And listens out for him, fearfully. So much for my powers of explanation.

“It’s not a snowman, sweetie, it’s just a man. A MAN. Like daddy.”

“NO! ‘NOMAN, ” Tadpole replies stubbornly.

I know better than to argue when my daughter adopts that tone. I pick up her magic pen and we draw a picture of a very friendly and approachable snowman. With big shoes on (artistic licence). Walking on a wooden floor.

Artist’s note: snail, butterfly and bumblebee added under duress. Parisian apartments do not, in my experience, harbour a variety of insects and molluscs.

Prior to meeting Mr Frog, one other Frenchman stole petite anglaise’s heart, a long time ago. Well, it wasn’t exactly a Frenchman, more of a Frenchboy. Or a FrenchToyBoy, to be precise.

I was twenty-one, spending a year living in Rouen while working as an assistante d’Anglais in a Lycée in a nearby town. I should add that I already had a boyfriend of two years, from university, with whom I was thoroughly smitten. Or so I had thought.

Strolling around the pedestrian centre of Rouen with a couple of girlfriends, we had paused by the famous Gros-Horloge to buy crèpes from a street vendor when I laid eyes on him for the first time. My friend Claire gave me a nudge and pointed out a tall boy striding towards us with an Alsatian on a leash, flanked by a couple of shorter friends. “That’s Mr R’s son. You know, the English teacher who invited me over for dinner with his family last week. He’s not bad looking, is he?”

I looked up, made eye contact. Then recoiled, with a sharp intake of breath. I felt as if I’d been shot, saved only by a bulletproof vest. I knew in an instant, without the palest shadow of doubt, that if he would have me, the boyfriend and I were history.

I don’t know what it is that makes a person react so physically to a complete stranger, seen but not yet spoken to. I don’t possess much in the way of spiritual beliefs, but after that violent jolt, which defied any rational explanation, notions like meeting someone known in a previous life, or having a single pre-destined soul mate suddenly seemed less far-fetched, even to a sceptic like myself.

Weeks passed and my all-consuming obsession with the boy deepened, fuelled by a few excruciating evenings in each other’s company amongst mutual friends, during which I was incapable of forming a coherent sentence whenever he looked my way. We kissed, finally, in Paris, in the dark, laid out in sleeping bags on a friend’s floor. Surrounded by other slumbering bodies.

What followed was unquestionably the most intense relationship I have ever experienced. And by far the most unhealthy, the most turbulent. Raw, jagged emotion, fated to be as damaging as it was thrilling. The boy: brooding, moody, subject to bouts of depression. Me: insanely possessive, jealous and insecure. Uncharacteristically so, in fact. The product of a vulnerability that only he seemed to awaken in me.

I was terrified that The Boy would meet a French girl of ‘his own age’ at Rouen university. Eaten alive by a corrosive jealousy when he talked (far too often) about his ex-girlfriend, or left her letters lying around his bedroom (on purpose?). Knowing all the while that I would be returning to university, in England, in a few short months’ time, and aware, on some level, that this was not the sort of relationship which would survive in long-distance mode.

We met, many years later, in a bar in Paris, and raked over the embers together. He looked different: short haired, fuller faced. No longer any trace of the pronounced cheekbones and endearing moody smudges beneath his green eyes that had once held such a power over me. That old chemistry seemed perilously intact, however, and we resolved not to meet again.

It was safer that way.

So absorbed was I in the article I was reading – a clipping from Saga magazine courtesy of my mother, in which several elderly ladies recount their experiences of being reunited with the children they had put up for adoption in the sixties - that I almost missed my metro stop. This is not unusual, as I have the ability to almost entirely block out my surroundings when I read - I say almost, because this doesn’t work when there are buskers equipped with microphones and amplifiers. If I turn up to work a little late, my boss invariably asks me which book should be held responsible.

I leapt up, and lunged towards the doors, only to find my escape route barred by an attractive young couple. She was arty-looking, probably beaux-arts, with silky dark hair piled atop her head, faux carelessly, and secured with a pencil. A lot like my mental picture of how Vit Webb must have looked in her art college days. He was clad in jeans and a blazer, olive skin and Roman nose barely discernible behind a floppy fringe. He reminded me of my own university boyfriend. Positioned squarely in front of the doors, they were kissing passionately, eyes firmly closed, oblivious to the commuters around them. It was nowhere near as unattractive a spectacle as this couple described in a previous post. On the contrary, it was quite aesthetically pleasing, in a Hollywood kind of way. It did nonetheless pose something of a dilemma.

How was I to reach the handle to open the double doors, which they were virtually leaning on? Should I prise love’s young dream apart? Or slide an arm around their waists to spring the door open, which could potentially result in their toppling out onto the platform, lips still locked together?

I chose to clear my throat loudly instead, cheeks flaming with an unnecessary, “oh so British” embarrassment. Such is my genetic heritage.

Remarkably, the couple did not flinch, nor interrupt their passionate embrace for even a second; they simply took a couple of admirably synchronised steps to the left, leaving the door unobstructed. One of them even pulled the door lever, so that it sprang open just as the buzzer began to sound. I scampered off, gratefully.

This little episode has left me feeling strangely wistful. I realise it has been an eternity since I gave in to the urge to kiss passionately in public, or indeed felt such an overwhelming need in the first place. I don’t remember the last time I felt locked in a private little bubble with my partner, seeing only him, caring not a jot about what passers by might think. I feel achingly nostalgic for a younger, more carefree me, who felt everything so intensely. I don’t know if this person has gone for good, is temporarily in hiding, or whether it is age, comfortable familiarity or motherhood which has driven her underground.

I have no answers to these awkward questions. I only know that sometimes I can’t help but feel as though I am missing out on something. As if I were only half-alive.

The first thing Tadpole has said to me every morning for the past two weeks - because she is nothing if not predictable - is:

“Bébé cats?”

It’s my own stupid fault. One Sunday morning, at the appointed hour for Maisy Mouse, a ritual whereby Mr Frog and I transfer our pyjama clad, half-slumbering bodies from bed to sofa, drifting in and out of a rodent-infested sleep while Tadpole squawks with delight at her video.

One of the episodes is entitled ‘cats’, and tells the story of a stray cat which makes itself at home in Maisy’s laundry basket. Maisy wakes up to a chorus of miaowing in the morning, only to find a litter of kittens in among her undergarments.

I don’t know quite what possessed me to mention to Tadpole a whole two weeks ago that one of mummy’s friends has a cat, which has baby cats, just like in Maisy. And that we would be going to see them. Soon.

Because of course Tadpole has not yet developed any notion of time. In Tadpole-time, everything is happening right now, in the present. Our conversations are limited to the subject of what she is in the process of doing, or what she wants to do, right now. There is no point whatsoever enquiring what she has been up to with the childminder on any given day (a pity, as I would like to know more), or what she ate for lunch. Words like ‘yesterday’, ‘tomorrow’ and ‘weekend’ hold no meaning.

So imagine the mess I have got myself into by mentioning the cats, when they were bald, blind and not very interesting at all, and would remain that way for at least a fortnight. At that stage, to all intents and purposes, they were unvisitable.

Hence our daily discussion along the following lines:

Tadpole, hesitantly: “Va voir bébé cats?”

Me, patiently: “Soon, darling, they are still too small”

Tadpole, more forcefully: “Go see BÉBÉCATS?”

Me, calmly but firmly : “Not yet. We’ll go at the weekend.”

Tadpole, stamping her feet and seemingly convinced that if she shouts it loud enough, it WILL happen: “VA. VOIR. BÉBÉ. CATS!”

Bidding my patience farewell and resorting to similar tactics in the (vain) hope of making myself understood “NOT. YET. NO. BABY. CATS.”

Silence.

Tadpole frowns. I can almost see her thinking. Then,

“BABY CATS!”

Desperate measures are called for.

“Hey, shall we go in the kitchen and see if we can find some biscuits?”

I think it may be time for me to invest in the book ‘Toddler Taming: A Survival Guide for parents’, because my last line of resistance, although effective, is likely to contribute to rising levels of obesity in France.

Thankfully, baby cats are go for tomorrow. What worries me now, is that one visit will never be enough. Am I doomed never to hear the end of this?

With the benefit of hindsight, I realise I should have just gone to visit them in secret, unaccompanied. To be honest, I was only using Tadpole as a rather transparent pretext to go cuddle some cute little fluffy kitties myself.

Serves me right.

update:

We went, we stroked, we managed to come home empty handed. But guess what Tadpole’s first words were the morning after?

My hair hurts. I used alcohol as an antidote to my habitual shyness at the ‘Paris blog-t-il?’ soirée held at the Entrepôt last night and am now feeling as if I may shatter into lots of small, dehydrated pieces if I move too quickly. I hope you will forgive me for the brevity of today’s post.

Over two hundred Parisian bloggers had signed up for the event, and the turnout was impressive. There were lots of MALES, which surprised me, as when I organised the expat blogmeet (remember that Eiffel tower poster which everyone thought I had doctored to look like a g-string on purpose?), it attracted an overwhelming majority of females. Mind you, some of the men were not wearing stickers showing the name of their blog and may just have been there hoping to seduce young bloggeuses.

I met lots of very nice people, caught up with a couple I already knew and had my picture taken with a very fetching and well-travelled teddy bear.

I only hope that the blogger who said he actually preferred seeing people’s avatars to meeting them in the flesh wasn’t referring specifically to me…

I tiptoe into Tadpole’s room and kneel by her new bed, where she is sleeping peacefully, surrounded by her favourite teddies. I can hear her slow, regular breathing (with a hint of snoring, caused by her blocked nose), and bend to smell the baby shampoo on her honey-coloured curls, noticing a flicker behind her eyelids, which I take to mean she is dreaming. Tears stream silently down my face.

I go back into the living room, where Mr Frog is in his habitual evening position, lying on the chaise longue in front of the window watching TV.

“She looks too grown up!” I wail. “I feel like we’re forcing her to grow up too quickly. She’s not even two yet, and we’re already dismantling her cot…”

“Mais non, n’importe quoi, bien sûr qu’elle est prête, elle s’est endormie ravie de son nouveau lit. We’re not forcing her into anything. And anyway, it was your idea, n’est-ce pas?”

I blow my nose loudly and start clearing up the toys and remnants of Tadpole’s dinner from her new mini table and chairs, which she is now using instead of her highchair. Provided, that is, that I sit on the other chair opposite her, which I suspect will not prolong the life of that particular piece of furniture, given I weigh five or six times more than your average infant.

One of the things I find hardest to judge as a parent is when Tadpole is ready for something new. So I end up measuring her against other children, which I know you are not really supposed to do. People I know with slightly older toddlers have bought beds, so I thought we should. Keeping up with the Jones’s. The fact that Tadpole could almost get her leg over the barrier, ballerina style, seemed to suggest that she was outgrowing her cot, but as she goes to bed wearing a straitjacket sleeping bag anyhow, once that is firmly fastened, she’d have to pull a Houdini-like stunt in order to make her escape. The sleeping bag, and the safety barrier on the side of the new bed, are cunningly designed to prevent her from deciding that she would rather play with her train set, or pay mummy and daddy a visit in the middle of the night. Nevertheless I don’t doubt it is only a matter of time before I am awoken by an almighty crash, whereupon I will find Tadpole standing on her head, cocooned legs in the air.

When I pause to think how far we’ve come, I simply cannot get my head around how quickly Tadpole is learning and changing. The progress is so gradual; it is only when I conjure up an image of her crawling in reverse gear this time last year, that I feel overwhelmed by the speed of it all. Back then, she babbled cheerful nonsense, devoid of any actual English or French words, but now she can recite ‘Mary Mary quite contrary’ (glossing over some of the words, like a French speaker doing an approximate rendition of an English pop song, parrot fashion, not fully understanding the meaning of the lyrics). This progress is bittersweet, like the joys and constraints of motherhood itself: on the one hand I look forward impatiently to the day when she will be potty trained, but on the other, I am nostalgic for the snuffly, terrifyingly needy baby animal she was, not so long ago.

And, if I’m honest, I feel slightly guilty for spending weekdays apart from her, unable to savour every minute to the full.

We are driving on the péripherique (translation: ring road of death) in a borrowed car and I am talking too much, as usual. Mr Frog rudely interrupts to enquire whether we needed to take the direction Charles de Gaulle exit which I can now see receding in the wing mirror. Clearly it was a mistake to assume that as we have already made this journey several times, my navigation skills would not be required. Never underestimate Mr Frog’s lack of a sense of direction. I remember one of our first dates, where he pointed at Notre Dame and asked me which church it was. He had been living in Paris for four months at the time, and lived nearby, a stone’s throw from the Jardins de Luxembourg. I hastily pull out the Ikea (French pronunciation: “ee kay ya”) catalogue and improvise. We’ll try to the one at Paris Est instead. For a change. Anything is better than having to retrace our steps.

Leaving the A4 at Champigny, as instructed, we drive around the roundabout four times before spotting a helpful Ikea advert on a bus shelter. I am very thankful for this, because even with my superior navigation skills I cannot make any sense of the relationship between Ikea’s map and the actual lay of the land in front of me. We find the right road, and sail past the carpark entrance, taking an impromptu tour of Villiers sur Marne. Finally, at 11.30 am, we pull into the carpark. Not at 10 am, as I had hoped.

The layout of Ikea Paris Est is cunning. Arriving at the top of the stairs, a delectable food smell greets your nostrils as you pass the restaurant. After visiting the vast showroom level, flagging somewhat and thirsty from the dry, air-conditioned atmosphere, there it is again, as welcome as an oasis in the desert. I resolve to stop there for a Tadpole lunch break before the lunchtime rush starts. We only need to buy a Tadpole bed, a Tadpole-sized bookcase and a mini table and chairs (also for Tadpole), but somehow we end up looking at everything, as usual. I release Tadpole from the confines of her pushchair in the children’s section, so that she can test her new bed for size. At first it is fun, watching her try out rocking chairs, a small wooden tractor and a wendy house, all the while clutching a large plastic piggy bank. I give other, equally powerless, parents a conspiratorial wink when Tadpole finally puts the pig down, attention caught by a wooden train set, and spirit piggy away, hiding him in a bin full of plastic plates. It soon becomes clear that there will be no way of getting her out of there which doesn’t involve kicking, wailing and a runny nose wiped on my clothing. Her flaming cheeks have teething pain written all over them, and when she starts crying on red-cheek days, she sometimes forgets to stop.

We arrive at the café. There are approximately fifty people in each queue. Tadpole is incapable of standing still, so this is a Very Big Problem. Mr Frog storms off back to the children’s section with her, leaving me to queue and make important lunch decisions alone. He motions to me that I should phone him, but when I do, I get his voicemail. I look around me and realise with a sinking feeling that I have missed my chance to grab a special tray-carrying trolley, resigning myself to either not eating very much, or pioneering precarious new methods of plate stacking. I pray that my credit card payment will be accepted at the till (in France there is often a minimum amount, usually € 15 - approx £ 10.00), as I have precisely 24 centimes in my purse. Some time later, I make my way unsteadily towards a table carrying a couple of salads, some bread rolls, a plate of heart shaped chocolate covered biscuits and some D’aim bars (Dime bars in every other language). Luckily Mr Frog chooses this moment to haul the still protesting Tadpole over. I ease her chubby thighs into the snugly fitting high chair, which has the advantage of immobilising her legs altogether, then stuff a piece of bread in her mouth, for some temporary respite from the howling. I sit back with my cup of tea, priding myself on my parenting skills, but wishing that this could all be over.

Lunchtime in Ikea is odd. I suspect some people must make the journey just to eat there. I see a suspiciously large number of unaccompanied adults carrying 2 euro kiddie meals off to remote corners of the dining area. Someone (who probably doesn’t have to spend the whole day in there) has had the bright idea of placing a piano in the middle of the dining area. I dread to think how much decomposing food is trapped between the keys. Lunch is eaten to a soundtrack of ‘chopsticks’ and random plinkety plonking as every greasy-fingered youngster takes their turn. Mr Frog and I snap at each other, toddler-stress getting the better of us. Tadpole, on fine form, refuses to eat everything but a breadroll and two chocolate biscuits.

After queuing for the (one) baby changing area, we descend wearily to the lower level, bracing ourselves for the moment of truth. Will they actually have Tadople’s lit évolutif and table and chairs in stock? I fear that if they do not, I may have to be dragged out of Ikea kicking and screaming. And foaming at the mouth. Luckily all is where it should be, and we unload our bounty at the checkout. Somehow along the way we have also amassed one wooden train set, two flower cushions for Tadpole’s chairs, plastic beakers, plastic plates, a throw for the sofa and a picture frame for my vitriolica thumbnail poster. It could have been worse: to our credit we have resisted both the scented candles and the ‘fun’ ice cube trays for the first time.

I giggle at a family struggling to stuff a king-size matress into the back of their small hatchback car. I feel a little less smug when we attempt to load the Tadpole bed into our borrowed Yaris verso. The front of the box arrives at gearstick level. I secure some rope around the seat headrests and across the front of the carton in a pathetic attempt to make the car less of a potential deathtrap.

FOUR WHOLE HOURS from door to door. I give thanks to the Lord that this bed can be extended to a maximum length of two metres, and may even see Tadpole into adulthood.

I don’t plan to repeat that experience again in a hurry.

I am about to start running Tadpole’s bath when the doorbell trills.

‘DDDRRRRIIIINNNGGGG!’

I don’t care for this agressive French doorbell sound. Give me a gentle English ‘Ding Dong’ any day.

I put my eye cautiously to the peephole. I have not ordered any takeaway curry (after my last disappointing experience involving half-raw naan bread daubed with pink food colouring), and I am not expecting visitors. If it is one of those earnest but tedious young men trying to sell me a Trotskyist newspaper, I reserve the right not to answer the door.

It’s old Mrs Gibolain, the widow who lives upstairs.

“BONSOIR MADAME! OH LÀ LÀ QU’IL EST BEAU!” she yells, spying Tadpole, who is pushing her train up my trouser leg. I have told Mrs G that Tadpole is a she, but I suspect she may be a little deaf. Tadpole grips my leg anxiously, probably wondering why the lady with two big sticks and a hairy chin is shouting at mummy.

After a long conversation, which I imagine most of the building overheard, I establish that Mrs G needs some help with her television set. The home help must have switched it off while Mrs G was out at her hospital appointment (I have seen ambulance men come to fetch her, on occasion, and I imagine these are the only time she ventures out of her flat), and she hasn’t been able to switch it on again. Her late husband bought the TV, but passed away without showing her how to use the remote control. She has left it permenantly on the same channel (France 3) ever since, turning it on and off only at the main switch.

She was very sorry to trouble me, and had been hoping to waylay her neighbour on the sixth floor, a young man who doesn’t keep very sociable hours, but despite calling out for help every time the lift stopped at her floor, no-one answered.

I offer to come upstairs with Tadpole and take a look. Mrs G makes her way back to the lift, with some difficulty, while I hold the heavy metal door open. She needs two crutches to get around, after undergoing a hip replacement last year. It occurs to me, with a sharp stab of pity, that it has probably taken her at least fifteen minutes to manoeuvre herself to my front door. I make a mental note to leave her our phone number so that she can call next time she needs some help, saving herself another arduous journey.

Tadpole and I press on ahead up the stairs and into her dimly lit flat. It smells musty, like second-hand clothes in a charity shop. The faded wallpaper which covers every available surface, including the doors, must have been very fashionable in 1948. The poky living room is crammed with rustic furniture better suited to a farmhouse: a hefty wooden dresser and a solid table and chairs vy for space.

I spy the offending television in a corner of the room. While Tadpole plays with her train under the table, I jab impatiently at the remote, which doesn’t seem to be working. I try the main on/off switch, which catches on the second attempt. Tadpole leaps halfway out of her skin as a talkshow springs into life at full volume, knocking her head on the underside of the table. I brace myself for her wails, but she just looks rather puzzled - I can almost see cartoon birds twittering as they fly in circles around her head.

The television is so loud that at first I don’t hear Mrs G calling from the corridor, where she is struggling with the lift door. She shuffles painfully slowly back into her apartment, thanking me for my kindness. We take our leave, but she insists on fetching a dusty bag of boiled sweets from the dresser, and after keeping a few for herself, hands me the bag for Tadpole. They are clearly not Tadpole-friendly, but I thank her for them anyway. Mr Frog’s reaction when he got home was “where have the old-person’s sweets come from?”

I can’t get this little episode out of my head all weekend. First I worry that I didn’t put the television on the right channel, so Mrs G’s routine has been turned upside down. Then I wonder how often the aide menagère pays her a visit. The thought that if she falls and hurts herself one day, no-one will hear her, haunts me. I marvel at how she survived that summer where our apartment warmed up to 40°C and stayed that way for two whole weeks. I wonder whether she has any family close by, and whether they come to visit.

Memories of my great grandmother come flooding back. I remember my mother visiting her every day, to check that she hadn’t left the gas on by accident, or the front door wide open. Sadly she was transformed from a sweet and reasonable soul who didn’t want to be any trouble, to a paranoid, distrustful shadow of her former self almost overnight. Like her, Mrs G is probably past realising that she can’t really manage on her own. Maybe, despite her family’s insistence, she clings stubbornly to her apartment, infused as it is with all her memories of her late husband.

There must be so many Mr and Mrs G’s hidden away in shabby old flats in this city, invisible to the rest of us, barely coping behind their closed doors. Existing, but not really living.

I make a mental note to get out of the city long before I get old.

I am lying on my tummy on the living room floor, making a picture with my fuzzy felts. The scratchy carpet tiles make my bare legs itch.

I like playing games on the khaki green and beige squares: it’s a bit like a giant game of snakes and ladders. I sometimes hop across the room, trying to land only on the green squares. If I land on a beige one by accident, the monster which lives in the dark, shadowy space behind the sofa will come out and get me. So I’m very careful.

My face is bent close to the sticky fuzzy felts’ board so that I can see what I am doing. I am four years old and no-one has realised that I need to wear glasses yet.

The telephone trills and mummy steps into the hall to answer it. I can see her through the doorway. She has her back to me and she is playing with the spiral cord with her free hand. It sounds like she is talking to daddy.

I am sorting through the pieces of felt for long yellow bits to use as sunbeams, when I am suddenly aware of a movement in the corner of the room, down by the skirting board behind the standard lamp.

It’s the plug. It’s moving on its own again.

I want to cry out and make mummy turn around, but I don’t seem to be able to make any noise at all. Not even a little squeak. I want to get up and run away, but I am like fuzzy felt, firmly stuck to a velcro board.

The plug silently detaches itself from the socket in the wall, and turns its three-pronged face towards me, its prey. It slithers forward, head raised, pulling the wire taut in its wake, until the prongs are very close to my face. Rearing up like a snake, it is poised to strike…

As a child, I had a rather overactive imagination. The plug and socket scenario, and the shape on the end of the radiator next to my bed, which I thought looked like a face, were recurring themes. Short-sightedness didn’t help matters. In the darkness, objects always seem more sinister, but when your eyes make all the edges vague and fuzzy, it is ten times worse. The dressing gown dangling from a hook on the back of my bedroom door, harmless by day, by night became a sentinel standing guard in the doorway so I couldn’t get out.

Tadpole is just starting to feel afraid of things, I think. Every time she walks into her bedroom, the first thing she does is close the double doors to the walk-in wardrobe where all our clothes hang, and where the hoover lurks in the shadows, if someone has left it ajar. She used to play inside that cupboard, but not any more. Whenever she hears a noise from another apartment, like footfalls on the parquet floors above us, or workmen sanding the walls next door, she stops what she’s doing and looks at me, eyes wide with fear. And yet a couple of weeks ago she would have been oblivious to these sounds.

At night, I hear her whimper in her sleep or cry out, occasionally waking herself up. My mummy radar, tuned in to every little sound she makes whether I like it or not, wakes me instantly.

I know I can’t really protect her from her own, fledgling imagination. I know that a vivid imagination is a wonderful thing, and I dare to hope she will lose herself in books, like I did as a child, and write fantastical stories when she is at school.

But despite knowing all these things, I creep into her room, anxious not to rouse her if she is still sleeping, and murmur noises of reassurance, wishing I had the power to keep the monsters at bay and make her dream of shiny, happy things.

And definitely not plugs and sockets.

The rasping, abrasive noise of coffee beans grinding in the machine sets my teeth on edge. I yawn and stretch, glad to have the kitchen to myself, and begin inspecting my shoulders. There is nothing worse than arriving at work and realising half way through the day that what I thought were clean clothes actually have toothpaste, snot and/or dribble on the right shoulder - Tadpole’s favourite nestling spot. I dab at the offending white marks with a moistened tea towel and then bend to examine my trouser legs and wipe off some breakfast milk which Tadpole has deposited at mid-thigh level.

After a quick application of Mac foundation in the ladies room, I’m just about ready to enter the world of grown ups again.

Unfortunately I have an French comptines playing in a continuous loop in my head, as Tadpole was on energetic form, complete with dancing and chanting this morning.

Along with her perpetual favourites, ‘Blaa blaa Black Sheep and ‘La capucine’ (if anyone can explain to me the meaning of the non-French exclamation of “YOU!!!” at the end of this rhyme, I would be grateful), she was singing the following little ditty (caps show her emphasis):

Les petits poissons DANS L’EAU
nagent, nagent, NAGENT, nagent, NAGENT
les petits poissions DANS L’EAU
nagent aussi bien QUE LES GROS

Little fish swim just as well as big fish. Mmm. Something tells me this verse was written by a man, attempting to convince himself/the world that size doesn’t matter.

I detest it when the weather decides to be so glorious that I am obliged to venture out, regardless of whether I actually want to.

Saturday. A day of wholesome family activites. Bébé nageurs at 9 am (because, as you may recall, I queued for half a day to get a coveted place in the Saturday session) - during which Tadpole, tightly wedged in a polystyrene ring, executed giddy circles around me until I grew dizzy and developed lockjaw from continuous reciprocal grinning. A spot of windowbox gardening on the balcony - where I inadvertently showered several passers by with potting compost, only realising I had done so when a chorus of indignant “É! Ô! Ça va pas l� haut?”’s assailed me from five stories below. The tricycle quest - an adventure requiring me to cross the sweaty threshold of GoSport, an act against all my principles, as I heartily detest every conceivable form of sport, with the exception of snorkeling. The indignity of always being picked last for team sports at school has left scars all over my self-esteem which may never heal.

Sunday, I awoke feeling sluggish and slothful, craving a day filled with nothing but cocooning, as the French are fond of calling it. I longed to curl up like a cat in front of the window and snooze in a patch of sunlight, or to steal some precious me-time to read more of my book. Of course none of those things are actually possible when you have a toddler bouncing on your midriff and entreating you to ‘faire le cheval?’

As the afternoon drew to a close, Mr Frog became insistent that we had to go to the park and ‘make the most’ of the lovely weather. I looked up at him, dejectedly, from my den under the dining room table, where Tadpole and I had created a makeshift wendy house and were entertaining several teddies with (virtual) afternoon tea and biscuits.

My suggestion that he might enjoy spending some quality time outdoors with his daughter sans moi was met with dismay. He claims that when chaperoning Tadpole alone, he cannot endure the pitying, oh-look-a-poor-single-parent glances. Bribery, in the form of offering to do his share of the housework while they were out, was unsuccessful. Mr Frog can be very stubborn when he puts his mind to it. I reluctantly got dressed, packed bubble mix, sippy cup, nappy and wipes into my bag and we headed for the Buttes Chaumont en famille.

Mr Frog and I habitually rave about how wonderful it is to live a stone’s throw from the largest park in Paris, and it’s true that I do love my idyllic walk to the childminder’s in the mornings, when I have the place pretty much to myself, give or take a few joggers and dog walkers. Tadpole and I mimic the birdsong, and I pick blossom from the trees for her to study, which invariably makes her sneeze.

On this unseasonably warm April Sunday however, the park ressembled a teeming Côte d’Azur beach in high season. Bodies lolled everywhere. Old folk lined the benches, families and clutches of young people were sprawled over every available patch of grass. On the main thoroughfares it was mayhem: tricycles plowed into pushchairs, tired children screeched as their parents attempted to drag them away from the adventure playground and home for tea. The so-called relaxing stroll was turning into a stressful nightmare. My patience faltered and then flatlined. I was irritable with Tadpole, who had decided she wanted to balance on the kerb but absolutely not hold my steadying hand. I had visions of milk teeth embedded in the pavement. When Mr Frog lit up a cigarette, I launched into a tirade about how I didn’t want to nurse him for years when he finally succumbed to a well-deserved lung cancer. I hated myself for being so needlessly unpleasant, sincerely regretting leaving behind the haven of tranquility of our apartment.

As we approached the man-made lake (a rather unappealing shade of khaki, undoubtedly in need of a thorough clean), the obstacle course began. There are all manner of paying activities for little people in the Buttes, designed to ambush desperate parents, who will, when at breaking point, gladly pay through the nose for a few minutes of peace and quiet: pony rides, a horse-drawn carriage, a Guignol (French version of Punch and Judy) puppet show, swings, a duck fishing fairground-type game and a merry-go-round. Should one manage to escape all of these unscathed, the final hurdle is the kiosk selling candyfloss and garish helium balloons. A stroll through the Buttes with a tantrum-prone young child could easily cost upward of € 20.

For this reason I invariably leave my wallet at home on such occasions. A decision I came to regret as I stood downwind of the stand selling crèpes and Belgian gaufres.

Something in me snapped. I hated the park, despised the mocking sunlight and craved my duvet. I left a bemused Mr Frog and Tadpole gaping at me open-mouthed and stormed off home.

I wonder whether it is possible to suffer from reverse SAD?

No, this one isn’t an April fishy.

A virtual friend pointed out to me that a montage at the beginning of this bbc news 24 programme featured images from www.petiteanglaise.com.

Only people already familiar with petite anglaise would have a clue what they are looking at, mind.

I feel a bit naughty now. I’ve had so many sympathetic comments, and long, concerned emails, that now I realise that if I do actually get dooced one day, now that I have cried wolf, no one will believe me…

Let’s hope that never happens!

(In France, for some reason, April fools day involves fishes. Children try to pin paper fishes on each other’s backs, allegedly, although I have never actually seen it done.)