petite anglaise

I’m sure it’s normal, a matter of days before a piece of me goes on sale in bookshops, to fall prey to the jitters.

So far, those who have read “petite” all said complimentary things. Admittedly these were people who were supposed to be on my side – agent, publisher, friends, family – but I’m also beginning to hear feedback from interviewers/reviewers and people in the book trade who’ve seen an advance copy. It’s surreal when they say they liked it. I’m never sure how to respond. I suppose I should say ‘thank you?’, although my first impulse is to say ‘really? Are you sure? Why?’

I think I’ve had to read and re-read my own manuscript so many times in the course of the publication process that objectivity went out of the window long ago.

However my jitters have nothing to do with Joe Public reading “petite”. My nervousness is centred on what one particular person will think of it. Of my work. Of me.

You probably think it’s odd that The Boy, of all people, hasn’t yet read it yet. To be fair, it’s not out of indifference on his part, it’s due to a combination of me not wanting him to read it until it was fully finished/copy edited/proofed/corrected and him saying he preferred to wait until it was printed in its final form, with its cover on. I suspect both of us were putting off the inevitable. But now that I have a whole carton full of hardbacks sitting on the floor at the foot of my bed the inevitable can be put off no more.

‘Nice paper,’ he said when he got home from work and I handed him a copy. ‘And look, they’ve embossed the writing, it stands out more than it did on that proof copy you showed me before…’ He paused, looked at me intently. ‘So, I’m allowed to read it now, am I? Finally?’

‘Yes,’ I said, chewing my lip. ‘But, um, not when I’m actually here. I mean, I couldn’t stand it if you were reading it next to me, giving me sidelong glances. It would be excruciating.’

Since we’ve spent every evening together since, and he works all day, he hasn’t had chance to open it yet. (The métro to work is exclusively reserved for the ritual of Libération.)

Why am I so nervous? Well, frankly I doubt the book I’ve written is really his cup of tea. His favourite authors are people like Álvaro Mutis and Borges, at opposite end of the lowbrow/highbrow spectrum. Then there is the language barrier, which means he will understand the gist of the story, but he’s the first to admit that he’s unlikely to fully appreciate my style or voice, and nuances of meaning will be lost on him.

Top of my worry list, however, is the ‘Too Much Information’ factor. Which is why one of my favourite masochistic pastimes, at the moment, is imagining The Boy’s internal dialogue as he turns the pages.

‘Ah yes, she can be annoying like that,’ he thinks to himself, a lightbulb flickering on above his head. ‘So it’s not just with me, then…’

or

‘Oh, she used that line on me once!’

or

‘Ew, that bit was corny…’

I decided to ask him to read it when I’m a safe distance away, in England in early March, busy with promotion and too distracted to think about Him Reading My Book. This means, of course, that I’m deferring the inevitable for another whole month.

And when the deed is done, if he doesn’t like it, what then? Would I prefer him to be honest, and explain why? Or should he lie through his teeth if he wants to continue sharing my bed?

I am surrounded by a dense, dark, oppressive fog. I can’t see it, touch it, smell it, but it is real to me.

I sensed it on the periphery of my day, quietly, ominously gathering force. I pretended it wasn’t there, at first. I blogged about my daughter, made some notes for an interview, bounced flippant messages back and forth with friends on gmail and MSN. I suspect there was a vague undercurrent of hysteria, of volatility in some of those exchanges, but mostly I was successful at cloaking it in humour, denying its existence, even to myself. Until Tadpole was safely in bed, and the evening yawned emptily ahead. I tried to read a book, but the words wouldn’t stick. The walls crowded closer.

Words like “sad” or “depressed” are hopelessly unequal to the task of describing something so visceral. There is a heavy stone in my chest, a shallow shortness of breath, a desperate fluttering in my stomach. My body shifts gears and slips beyond my control. It’s poised for fight or flight, there’s a pent up energy it can’t contain. The overriding – utterly irrational – impulse is to release the pressure by lashing out at someone I love in some petty, spiteful, childish way.

I take a bath and wash my hair. I tidy the kitchen, manically. I pour another glass of wine. Finally, just before I turn off the lights, I reach for my phone and type a text message worthy of a hormonal teenager.

The results are woefully predictable. I provoke anger and incomprehension.

There is no earthly reason for me to succumb to the undertow, right now, when everything in my life is about as perfect as I can conceive of. I have everything I could possibly wish for. This Boy. The Book thing. Financial security. Nine days out of ten I’m happier than I can remember ever feeling. Why is it then that I seem to be hardwired to try, periodically, to destroy everything I touch? When the rational me, the real me, I hope, knows full well that I’m being unreasonable in the extreme. And idiotic. And wrong.

Hunched under the bedclothes, arms around my knees, I press my dry eyes tightly closed, willing it to stop; hating myself with a fierce intensity. Feeling stupid, pathetic and small. Terrified that one day I will go a step too far and exhaust the Boy’s reserves of patience. That he will see even this explanation as an attempt to abdicate responsibility.

When the feelings refuse to recede, I try to drive them away with words. And this helps. Not a lot. But a little.

For the past nine months I have been living in a shadow. Impossible to shake off, a suffocating cloud of self-doubt hovered above my head, darkening my every thought, my every gesture. Impossible to conceive of meeting a man (or boy) while I felt so brittle, so unsure of myself. Impossible to really appreciate this new life of freedom from the constraints of the métro boulot dodo routine I’d been locked into for so long.

Writing “petite anglaise” has often been a lonely, fraught process – and this despite all the reassuring noises from my agent and editor whenever I sent them a few chapters to read. Because the hardest task of all was proving to myself that I could actually pull this off and produce a manuscript of which I could be unreservedly proud; a manuscript which would do petite anglaise justice. And so I worked, fretted, agonised and procrastinated. Writing – which seemed so natural when it was for the blog – had now become work. Why was it suddenly so much less enjoyable, I wondered? Why was my favourite pastime suddenly a cause for teeth grinding? When I wasn’t working, I fought to suppress the guilt that I should be. Even though, arguably, when I wasn’t actually writing I could have made use of my free time by going to the cinema, say, or taking in an exhibition, I found I simply couldn’t. Instead I sat hunched over my MacBook, a gnarly knot of tension between my shoulder blades, surfing the internet, but taking very little pleasure in doing so.

I alternately overate or fasted. My moods, which have always had a tendency to swing without due warning from one extreme to another, now spiralled even further out of control. I had panic attacks: heart racing, breath snagging in my throat. On more than one occasion, meeting Mr Frog for lunch, I noticed my hands trembling when I picked up my fork. Whenever I snapped at Tadpole, voice shrill, patience on a short fuse, I detested myself.

Seeking some sort of temporary respite from my anxieties, and from spending so much time trapped inside my own head, rewriting my past, I drank to excess whenever I went out. Regretted it bitterly the morning after, when temporary euphoria gave way to blinding headaches.

Then, one fine day in May, I gave birth to the second draft. And even before the feedback began to filter back to me, the cloud began to dissipate. Because while, undoubtedly, there is still work to be done, I’ve proved to myself – to my inner editor – that I am equal to the task. Thirty-four chapters, almost 100,000 words: a satisfyingly thick wad of paper, the sight of which gives me a thrill whenever my glance falls upon it.

The gestation period almost over, I began to relax. My posture changed, the tension left my limbs, my skin cleared. I began to enjoy my free time with a clear conscience; to live in the moment. I still party too hard, on occasion, but that brittle edge of desperation, of hysteria has gone. I found myself flirting again, re-discovering a side of my personality which has been in hibernation for the longest time. It’s like meeting an old friend.

And so I am hell-bent on enjoying this summer, revelling in my new-found peace, savouring the lovely, melty moments I have been sharing, of late, with the boy who lives a few doors down the street, but who I could so easily never have met.

Life is good.

As I sat on the métro on the way to see some girlfriends yesterday, a bag containing chablis, Nutella and maple syrup wedged between my feet, I couldn’t help thinking back to happier versions of Mardi Gras, and in particular the 2006 edition, in honour of which I threw a pancake party and invited a few friends* from work to my old apartment. It was the first and last time many of them got to meet the man I referred to on this blog as Lover (a pseudonym to which a few readers strongly objected, but I felt then, as I do now, that given just how much time we spent horizontal, the name fit very snugly indeed).

A few days later Lover brought my dreams of an idyllic life together in the Breton countryside crashing down around my ears. I picked myself up, carried on, and so much other stuff happened shortly afterwards that I really didn’t know how to feel anything other than numb for a while.

What this means is that I’ve now been single for almost a full calendar year. It’s a state of affairs without precedent, because after much racking of brains and counting of digits, I can say with absolute certainty that the last time I was single for a Whole Year was in 1988. Although to be fair, at that time I’d been single for a total of fifteen years and was breathlessly awaiting the arrival of my first proper boyfriend.

How do I feel about this? Well, of course I’d rather be happily alone than with someone who was wrong for me. And yes, messing around with few strings attached seemed like fun for a while, but now just strikes me as utterly pointless. As for online dating, I check in to look at my profile from time to time but can rarely muster up sufficient enthusiasm to actually reply to my emails, let alone drag myself out on a blind date.

I know that this year without a special (adult) person by my side has been really good for me, in some ways. I’ve built new friendships, invested a lot more in existing ones and spent lashings of quality time with my daughter. I’m sure I needed to be alone, for a while, and that I’ll appreciate sharing the good, the bad and the ugly with a special someone all the more because of it, when the time comes.

But am I truly happy with this state of affairs? Is single the best thing since the invention of Nutella? Is single the new size zero?

I’d be lying if I said I loved it. Single still doesn’t come naturally to me and I doubt it ever will. So please excuse me while I go and comfort myself with a large pot of leftover nutella, a useful side effect of which is that size zero will never, never fit.

I frown at my face in the mirror. Make-up still looks good in the right light, but increasingly these days I find that foundation accentuates the fine lines around my eyes instead of concealing them. I prefer myself with my glasses on, because actually they hide a multitude of tell-tale signs. The days when I dreamt of laser surgery are long behind me.

Digging out a selection of eye-shadow colours, I proceed by a process of elimination. The dark brown one I should really throw away, it’s too severe, too ageing. The pearly pale colours are too “teenaged”. Which only leaves a nondescript matt beige and a dusky pink. I choose the former, applying it lightly with a brush. Less is more. The last thing I want is to look like I’m trying too hard. My lips, full and pouty, if slightly chapped, respond well to a coating of lip gloss.

I survey the finished product. Not bad, but not quite me either. My mother used to say she felt the same inside at forty as she did when she was eighteen. I don’t feel the same exactly, but whenever I look in the mirror I think I always half hope to see my eighteen-year-old self looking back at me, and can’t help but feel disappointed that she is never there.

Padding into Tadpole’s room in stockinged feet I open the wardrobe and deliberate about what to wear. I have always been what I would call “pear-shaped”, often with as much as two sizes difference between the top and bottom halves of my body. Despite my New Year’s resolutions and recent gym membership, there are few visible improvements as yet. Now, the party I am getting ready for called for “something red” in the invitation. Hmm… A raspberry-coloured dress bought years earlier, which drapes in a forgiving way around my curves is the only red item in the wardrobe which strikes me as appropriate for a party. I might feel a little overdressed, and if I get cold my nipples will definitely show, but I don’t have time to agonise further. The babysitter will be arriving any minute.

Tadpole looks up from her book and smiles. “Mummy looks like a princess,” she says. And means it. I give her a grateful hug. Thank god for unconditional love.

Later, at the party my friend and I joke about the fact that we are actually several years older than most of the other guests present (understandable, as the hosts are in their mid-twenties).

“You can tell we’re older, because all these younger girls are playing it cool, dressing down, and here we are with our grown-up dresses and our faint whiff of desperation,” comments my friend, wryly.

“Oh god, don’t, my confidence is hanging by a thread as it is,” I reply, and proceed to enlighten her as to the meaning of the wonderful British expression “mutton dressed as lamb”, before helping myself to another glass of red punch.

I’m thirty-four years old, and until now, most people didn’t believe me when I told them my age, or gasped when I told them I had a three-year-old daughter. But something – and I’m not sure what – seems to have dented my confidence lately. Perhaps it’s because there hasn’t been anyone who I could get excited about for a while, no-one’s admiration to bask in. Or maybe it’s the fact that my last boyfriend was significantly older than me, and these days I often run with a younger pack.

From experience I know that it’s impossible to be objective about what you see in the mirror. On a black cloud day I can’t help but hate my reflection. In the throes of a hormone peak I will feel big, regardless of what the scales might read.

I’m looking forward to the day when the mirror throws me back something I like. It will be a sign that whatever was faulty has been fixed, that the storm clouds have finally lifted.

And in the meantime, I’ll just keep on basking in the warm glow of Tadpole’s compliments.

2006 was nothing if not eventful.

I got dumped.
I bought my first home.
I got fired.
I got outed.
I was given an exciting opportunity.

2007 should be a little quieter, less turbulent. A few important dates loom on the landscape. A hearing at the industrial tribunal on 19 February. A first book to deliver by 4 July.

But the thing which I’d most like to happen sometime soon, the thing I finally feel ready for, is the only thing that you can never plan. The thing which you can guarantee will only happen when you stop hoping; when you look the other way; when you least expect it.

I’d like to meet someone. Someone I can lose my appetite over. Someone who fills my head with silly daydreams. Someone who has the power to make me smile at complete strangers in the métro. Someone who doesn’t follow this blog, ideally, as I’d like to be discovered little by little, not offered up in one king-sized serving.

I spent much of 2006 keeping men I met at arm’s length, or pushing them firmly away. Partly, I suppose, because no single person I met was “all that”. Partly because I’d been badly burned and no longer dared trust my instincts. But also due to the simple fact that there was so much going on, so much that was new and terrifying that I wanted to come to terms with all the change before I let someone else in.

Taking stock, as 2006 drew to a close, I was forced to admit to myself that there is something a little empty about this life I’ve been leading. Spending hours alone, writing about events in my past, by day. Partying a little too hard by night, whenever the opportunity presented itself. I’m no fool. I see the binge drinking and bad behaviour for what it really is: a symptom of my malaise, escapism, a temporary stress release mechanism.

It’s time to set my life on a healthier course. Time to let go of my anxieties and enjoy the opportunities which have come my way. Time to let someone in, should a worthy candidate present himself.

Time for petite anglaise to take a step back and let me do the living.

“So, what do you do in Paris?” says the friend of a friend I’ve just been introduced to.

“Oh, I’ve been here for eleven years now, and I was a secretary for most of that time,” I say. “And now, I’m, um, writing this memoir…” I let my voice trail off in a way that will make it sound like I’ve just said the most boring thing in the world, hoping to nip any further questions in the bud.

“You’re slowly getting better at this, see?” whispers my girlfriend, with a wink.

“Well, maybe, but I’m still blushing, you just can’t see it in this light,” I reply doubtfully.

I live in constant dread of having to tell people just what it is that I do for a living.

Since April, the question has been one king-sized can of worms. (Can one buy cans of worms? Aren’t they maggots? For fishing?) Because “I’m between jobs right now” or “I got fired” usually snowballs into more questions, and yet more, until the whole grisly truth comes out. It’s long, it’s involved, and I end up feeling oddly like I’m being interviewed rather than actually making conversation.

Ever since contracts were exchanged and it all became terrifyingly official, I have no longer been able to truthfully play the chômeur card, and so now I have to admit, bashfully, that I am writing to earn my bread and butter. “Admit” probably isn’t the right word, but the only other phrase which springs to mind right now is “own up to”, which isn’t much of an improvement, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Of course if I mention writing, the questions come even thicker and faster. And although I’m going to be a writer, one day, when I’m published, I don’t feel like I own that title yet. So I play it coy, hide behind my hair a lot (at least until that fifth drink, when my alter ego takes over and I probably say something along the lines of “I’m a little bit famous, can I grope your bottom?”) and attempt to keep everything as vague as I can.

Because book leads inevitably to blog. And my name is now connected to this blog in every conceivable search engine. Nasty pictures taken by photographers in the pay of tabloids who were clearly given the brief that they should attempt to look down my top, or up my skirt, are on display. Anonymity, however relative and fragile a concept that was, is no longer an option. And that is not always a good thing.

Twice recently I received worried emails the day after meeting someone new, the senders fretting about whether they were about to find themselves the subject of a forthcoming blog post (they won’t, I don’t cross those boundaries without permission of sorts). And those are the ones who knew what a blog was before we met. Those people who don’t know must undoubtedly think I am some sort of narcissistic self-centred weirdo when they hear that I share slices of my personal life with the internet at large.

And yes, those people were boys. And yes, what I’m really concerned about here, is whether it will hamper my chances of success on the dating market, my chances of finding someone a bit special once I’ve got my current teenage phase well and truly out of my system. Because you’ve got to admit that things are a little unequal, not to say unbalanced, if menfolk that I meet are able to read about my whole life on the internet before our second date, a state of affairs that leaves me feeling at something of a disadvantage.

So, it will have to be a blogger. Apparently there are currently three million blogs in France, so hopefully at least a handful are not written by teenagers and girls.

I’ll keep you, ahem, posted.

“So, what was it all like, that stuff, back in July?” a few people asked me this weekend.

These were people I hadn’t seen for a year or more. People who had met me once (while tipsy) back in the days when I was being branded an internet adulteress and I had that slightly indecent, back in the saddle, new relationship glow about me.

Not an easy question to answer. My responses ranged from “scary” to “surreal” to “terrifying”, and I didn’t feel able to elaborate. But it got me thinking nonetheless. About everything I didn’t/couldn’t say at the time.

When I think back to the weeks that followed my unceremonious dismissal, I see myself at home, shutters closed, Tadpole (fortunately) with her grandparents. I was in pieces. Watching ten episodes of Lost a day, back-to-back, in my pyjamas. I had little or no appetite. Sleep was elusive. My hair hung in a gnarly, unbrushed ponytail. I shook like a leaf if I so much as smelt a cup of coffee. Kind friends invited me for cups of tea, and I spilled my guts, talking at one hundred miles an hour, high on adrenaline.

My life was a web of lies. Or, to be more accurate, withheld information. My readers couldn’t know I’d been fired because I wanted that news to come out only when I judged the time was right, and when I was sure that coming clean couldn’t cause me any additional harm. My notary, estate agent and bank manager couldn’t know I’d been fired, because I was still figuring out whether I dared sign my loan documents without disclosing my new circumstances.

I spent two months in limbo, consulting lawyers, worrying about whether or not there was any substance to the threats of legal action, regularly speaking to my journalist friend but asking him to hold off, yet simultaneously fearing that by July, it would be old news. I had mixed feelings about letting the story run at all; agonised over whether I had more to lose than I had to gain.

The story ran on a Tuesday, and I had no idea it would be the first of many until my phone started ringing, in the middle of my ASSEDIC interview, where I was sorting out my entitlement to unemployment benefit.

I was scheduled to move into my new apartment five days later, knee deep in boxes, flitting back and forth making final preparations. The new place had no internet access, so any time I spent there meant I was offline, unable to see how my story was snowballing across the web. I built wardrobes, took deliveries of appliances, and waited in for technicians while simultaneously fielding calls and giving interviews on my mobile phone in French and English.

Paris was in the throes of a heatwave, and I dripped with sweat every time I so much as changed a lightbulb. But in between the furniture assembly and deliveries I scampered back to the old flat down the road to approve hundreds of comments and scour a mountain of email for the important stuff that needed answering immediately. To change into any clean clothes I could find and have pictures taken by some photographer while my arm rested against a scalding hot balcony railing. I answered my emails at midnight, wrote a piece for the Guardian at 3 am, dropped Tadpole off with Mr Frog at 7 am so that I could have my picture taken for The Sunday Times in a café (photos never used, to my disappointment) while people all around me drank their first coffee of the day, nibbled croissants.

It was scary. Surreal. Terrifying. There wasn’t a single moment when I didn’t worry that in exchange for fifteen minutes of “fame” which no-one would remember a few weeks later, I would be left with a handful of yellowing press cuttings and no prospect of working as a PA in Paris again. When my full name was revealed – and I wasn’t stupid enough to think this couldn’t be found, just naïve enough to think that it didn’t add anything to the story and therefore people might respect my wish not to use it – I was left wondering whether the gamble had been worth it, after all. Journalists were sniffing around my home village, trying to find my daughter’s name, to contact Jim in Rennes, Mr Frog, and god knows who else. I felt exposed, picked over and extremely foolish for thinking that I could remain in any semblance of control.

I could only hope against hope that the emails coming in from agents and publishers represented some sort of genuine interest, although I didn’t have the time to explore those avenues just yet.

The day before I moved flats, there was a hasty trip to Ikea. Mr Frog and I had decided to make use of the van I’d hired (which he was driving), so that I could pick up a few things, and he could buy Tadpole a new bed and find some plants for his flat. We stopped for a snack; I knocked back an ill-advised espresso.

A few minutes later, in the lighting section, I had an enormous panic attack. There were people everywhere, but I didn’t care, all I wanted to do was let my legs go out from under me and curl up in a tight ball on the floor. My heartbeat was rapid, erratic; I couldn’t breathe. Stricken, I stared at Mr Frog, wide-eyed, unable to speak. I wanted to be hugged, for someone to whisper calming words in my ear. But Mr Frog couldn’t be that person. It was too much to ask of him. Instead I found a chair, put my head between my knees and took deep breaths until the feelings subsided. Not completely, but just enough for me to stand up and carry on, gripping the trolley with white knuckles.

I still get the panic attacks, although less often, less intense. Waterstones, Birmingham, August. An Italian restaurant in York, October. I always do my utmost to hide them from Tadpole, and whoever I may be with. Good things have happened since July and I feel lucky, grateful and slightly disbelieving in equal measures. But when every single thing in your life changes – your boyfriend leaves, you move house, you lose a job, find a new career – all in the space of six short months, it cannot fail to knock you sideways. It will take time to make sense of it all, to process, digest, and make it a part of who I am, not just something that happened to me.

I’m not quite there yet, but I hope I will be, soon.

I find myself strangely unperturbed that there are no men to speak of in my life at the moment.

A few month’s back, among the flurry of well-meaning comments and emails, a few people trotted out that old chestnut about how some me-time would do me good. That alone doesn’t necessarily mean feeling lonely; it can be a very positive, healthy state of affairs. I knew that there was some truth in these words, but at the time I was still feeling brittle, wobbly, and just a little bit lost at sea. Feeling good about being alone seemed remote and unattainable, and I wasn’t even sure it was what I wanted to aspire to.

After all, I’d been “with someone” for the best part of the last decade, and was terrified I could only function as half of a couple. And what was more, single motherhood was a concept I found terrifying, riddled, as it can be, with negative connotations.

But somehow, over the past few months, so gradually that I barely noticed, a subtle change wrought itself. And one day I realised I had finally arrived in that place people had spoken of. I have found a level of self-sufficiency I never would have thought possible. The ability to revel in my new-found freedom.

I feel whole. More complete than I did when I was living en couple.

The new apartment symbolises this new phase in my life. I chose it, alone. Pored over the paint colour charts, alone. Sanded the walls and painted them, alone. Decided on a kitchen plan, bought some new furniture. There will be no-one’s imprint but my own (and Tadpole’s, although if I’d gone with her paint colours, I do not think the outcome would have been a happy one).

On my Tadpole free nights, I seek out the company of friends. After dabbling a little with internet dating, I decided not only that I couldn’t be bothered to invest enough time or energy in it – whether it be to find a mate, or just to satisfy more pressing needs in the short term – but also that there simply isn’t enough of me to go round. And what time I have, I prefer to spend with friends, old and new, rather than stumbling tongue-tied through an interminable dinner with a stranger, secretly wishing we had arranged to meet for just a coffee instead.

So let the men cross my path, or not. I’m not actively looking any more.

In London recently, I marvelled at how my two good friends from university, who had been confirmed bachelors for many years, were now attached, whilst I was not. A surreal reversal of what had long been the status quo. And yet it soon became clear that in some ways they envied me.

One of them noted that because of Tadpole’s existence, I am doubly free. In his opinion, the fact that I’ve already had a child means my body clock has stopped its ominous ticking, and I am free to go forward, unhindered by those considerations. Choose a companion who doesn’t want children of his own without it being a problem, if I want to.

It was an interesting point, I thought, and not one I expected to hear. (Whether I agree, is another thing entirely, I’m not sure I do.) I always imagined single motherhood would be perceived by others as a life filled with constraints. A negative state of affairs. I have certainly been experiencing it as a positive phase of my life, but I didn’t think other people would fully understand.

Sometimes it makes me very happy to be proved wrong.

The hour is a little after midnight. I am fiddling around on my computer, trying to fill in a hellishly complicated ASSEDIC form for my nanny, whose contract is almost finished. I am loath to turn in, even though I am exhausted from a lengthy trip to Ikea, because I doubt I will be able to sleep, thanks to the jovial racket emanating from my neighbourhood’s football fans.

The conundrum is this: open the window and hear whooping, car horns a-beeping and, more worryingly, people singing along to something cheesy which I suspect may be Claude François, or slowly broil to death in my apartment.

I can’t escape the feeling I am being held hostage.

* * * * * * *

The year is 1998. Mr Frog and I are moving into our first shared apartment, on rue Richard Lenoir, a stone’s throw from Père Lachaise. The day has been uncommonly stressful, despite the fact that Mr Frog didn’t actually possess much in the way of furniture to begin with.

After delivering his belongings to the new flat, we made the mistake of heading off in the rented van to Ikea that very same day. Predictably, we buy half the shop, including elephant ice cube trays and a Klippan sofa. Arriving home, we realise that said sofa will not budge beyond the narrow hallway of our building, and certainly cannot be manoeuvred into the courtyard from which our apartment is entered. As it is a bank holiday weekend, a monte-charge cannot be procured for several days, and when it can, hiring it will likely cost as much as the sofa itself.

We also realise that we have missed the deadline for returning the van, and will have to pay for an extra day’s rental.

Hardly an auspicious start to our life together.

Once the tears have dried, I graciously allow Mr Frog to go out with some friends to watch the final, leaving me to unpack our belongings and assemble the remaining furniture. In peace.

Except of course for the small fact that France are playing in the final, and the streets are alive with the sound of men watching sport, loudly. I haven’t yet plugged in the television, but there is little point. There is no mistaking that sound people make when a goal is scored. No room for ambiguity whatsoever.

I know the score.

* * * * * * *

Eight years have passed, almost to the day, and I can’t help marvelling at the symmetry of it all. My imminent move, today’s trip to Ikea (and I don’t know what they put in those meatballs, but I believe they are evil, and am holding them responsible for all my retail bulemia), new beginnings…

As for the football, I resolve to wash and dry Tadpole’s Italia t-shirt dress, which is currently liberally smeared with ice cream fingermarks, in time for the final.

I keep getting this unnerving feeling of dislocation. As though I’m looking down from far above, contemplating myself going about my daily business with an unhealthy degree of detachment.

It’s like an experiment. Or some sort of test. The aim is to place myself in interesting, unexpected situations, pushing against my own boundaries, moving further and further away from the rather mundane, pedestrian life I led when I first started writing petite anglaise; all the while this other me quietly observes from afar, furiously scribbling, recording anything noteworthy.

Sometimes I wonder whether I am living my life, or whether this blog is living it for me.

How much are the decisions and choices I make affected by the fact that I will not only have to live by them, but, more importantly, will feel compelled to spin webs of words around them afterwards? To what extent can feelings, whether of pleasure or of pain, become artificially intensified by the very fact of groping for les mots justes with which to pin them down? Does the act of dissecting thoughts and motivations bring me closer to some sort of truth? Or, conversely, adulterate it so thoroughlly that I no longer know my own mind?

I suspect the fact that Tadople has been waking me at 6.00 am every day this week has thrown me off kilter. I’m tired. A little low. Vulnerable to an invasion of creeping, insidious doubts and prone to self-indulgent navel gazing. It’s just the way I am.

But let me pose a question to fellow bloggers all the same: do you think that writing your blog has changed you in any way?

I move slowly through the park, my steps perfectly in time with the music filling my head, hair buffeted by squalls of wind. The asphalt is coated with a thick layer of pale pink blossoms; the tiny flowers drift, confetti like, from the trees, into my hair, onto my shoulders. I flick at them, absent-mindedly, lost in my thoughts.

A year ago today, I wrote a post about leaving the father of my child. Re-reading those words now, it almost feels as though they were written by someone else. I suppose, in some ways, they were. The woman who wrote them had been sleepwalking for the longest time. She knew her life wasn’t making her truly happy – and writing this blog had helped her come to this realisation – but was terribly afraid she did not possess the strength to break away, start a new life. She was beginning to see the light: that being a mother didn’t have to mean burying her own personality, her own needs, deep inside; denying their very existence. That way only bitterness and simmering resentment lay.

There followed a turbulent year of dizzying heights and desolate lows, filled with an intensity I would never trade for a return to my old life. Out of the ashes of the relationship which ended in March stepped a woman who has finally learned how to feel comfortable in her own skin. Who has understood, at long last, that being alone can make a person feel more whole than being one half of an ill-matched couple.

Out of habit, I still lie on the right-hand half of the bed, rarely straying over the invisible line which divides it in down the middle. But I no longer sleep fitfully when there is no-one by my side. And the nightmares have left me.

I move slowly through the park, buffeted by the wind, music filling my head. And realise I am smiling at no-one in particular.

I choose my outfit, my undergarments with care, because I know from experience that a drink, with him, will lead to much, much more.

In the bar, I bask in the glow of his attention, happy in this moment, knowing full well it will be fleeting.

He seems most comfortable recounting anecdotes, in that theatrical way of his. His stories seem to form part of a cloak he draws around himself; a shield which I don’t even attempt to penetrate. Superficiality is an integral part of the unspoken pact between us.

I lie in bed, his sleeping body curled around mine, his arm around my waist, marvelling that someone can be so close, skin against mine, but simultaneously seem so remote, so inaccessible.

When we part the next day and I hear the words I fully expected to hear – “well, I guess I’ll see you in a month, when I get back” – I feel a twinge of something I was determined not to feel.

A brief pang of remorse that I may have been selling little pieces of myself to the lowest bidder.

A New Order obsessed fifteen year old is still trapped somewhere inside this thirty-something body: I will never cease to be a sucker for an old school synth.

Which goes some way, but by no means all, to explaining why instead of sleeping right now, I am listening to some freshly downloaded Tiga on my headphones with the bass turned all the way up, revelling in the richly layered synths of “High School” and wishing I could be on a dancefloor, eyes closed, skin tingling, letting the sound wash over me.

This petite anglaise wants to go clubbing. Soon. To let out all of that pent-up naughtiness fizzing beneath the surface. The only ingredient lacking at the present time is willing, like-minded partners in crime (as I can’t exactly ask Mr Frog and his gang any longer, can I?). Any readers who might be partial to electronica in the Vitalic/Tiga/Miss Kittin vein, feel free to drop me a line at the usual address.

Every day I don my mask and go about my business. On good days, the happiness is not merely skin deep, it wells up from the very core of my being. I smile with my lips, my eyes and my heart.

On bad days the cheerfulness is forced and brittle, a thin veneer so easily shattered, my smile almost indistinguishable from a grimace.

On in between days I flit between the two states, one second positive and confident; the next casting around for something, anything, to break my fall.

People tell me I’m supposed to be revelling in this single state. Making the most of the time I have alone to form deeper friendships, give more of myself to my daughter, to learn how to be simply me. Undiluted, uncompromised, no longer bending to the will of a partner.

There are days when all this rings true and the world seems such an intoxicating place. When uplifting music on my iPod will make me smile in the métro at no-one in particular; when I want to hug myself with childish glee. Ahead of me lie inviting blank pages just begging to be covered with lurid, bold strokes.

There are days when everything feels utterly pointless if there is no special someone to share things with. Someone who hangs on my words. Someone who holds me tightly and buries his face in my hair. Someone who cares deeply about what is going on inside this head of mine. Someone to whom I can entrust my soul for safe keeping.

The mad social whirl, the party clothes and negligent new underwear are just pathetic ruses. I use artifice to try to trick myself into forgetting what is really lacking. I feed on superficial pleasures to fill the void.

I may be fooling everyone else.

“Switch me onto standby mode,
Until someone presses play”

Happy Violentine – Miss Kittin

I was tempted to name my last post “epitaph”. A part of me had been brutally severed. My hopes, my dreams now lay smouldering on a pyre. It seemed fitting.

When I typed those brave-faced words, they were an expression of how I wanted to feel, a few days or weeks or months from now. Something to aspire to. Then, somehow, after hitting the “publish” key, I realised I was genuinely beginning to feel that way.

Taking a step back, looking critically at the last few months, I see that much of my time was spent waiting, feeling despondent about being apart, dealing with the guilt of Tadpole’s impending separation from her father, smothering my doubts with a pillow. Negative feelings which crushed my spirits with all their ominous weight, preventing me from enjoying the here and now.

Now I find myself appallingly fragile, but intact, and somehow lighter. I no longer have to do battle with those demons any more; the weight has lifted. Only now do I see, with startling clarity, how impossible it was to continue following that ghost of a dream.

All the same, much of the past few days remains a blur. As I go about my daily business, my mind is elsewhere, playing my favourite memories in a continuous loop, until I’m ready to lay them to rest. On the surface, I laugh and joke, say positive, brave things, make plans for Tadpole and me. I’m going to buy a little flat, I say. On a whim, I’m going to the South of France for a few days, a holiday of sorts. People are rather surprised at how much better I seem, already. An indecently rapid recovery?

But I can barely bring myself to eat. I go to bed only when I’m thoroughly exhausted, so that I cannot lie awake craving his warmth. His touch. All day long there is a fluttering inside my chest, a constant edge of panic I cannot shake off, but which no-one sees.

This morning, in the crowded métro, a couple caught my attention. I saw their embrace out of the corner of my eye, and something inside me twisted, pulled. I couldn’t tear my masochistic eyes away from the woman, the way she looked at her companion, with hunger. I know I looked at him that way too, once. Sometimes, all I wanted was to crawl inside his skin.

Then, when I reached my destination, I saw another woman, elderly, confused. She stood by a rubbish bin, manically tearing up a piece of paper into smaller and smaller pieces, scattering them on the station floor like ragged confetti. Every few seconds she repeated the same two words, in an identical strangled voice, as if a needle were jumping on a record and playing the same disembodied phrase over and over.

“C’était magique.”

It was. It truly was, for a while. But I refuse to believe that it was my one and only shot at magical. Soon, I will renounce living in the past tense, move on.

Soon.

I am subjected to nightmares involving lifts on a disturbingly regular basis.

In last night’s episode, I found myself alone in an unfamiliar lift cabin, when suddenly, without warning, it began to plummet downwards, picking up speed, the air whistling past my ears as the cabin lurched towards the bottom of the shaft. Bracing myself for an imminent impact, back pressed against the wall, I almost wept with relief when inexplicably the cabin ground to a halt, a hair’s breadth away from the bottom, and a woman’s arm appeared through a trap door in the ceiling, beckoning me to safety.

At this point, I awoke and burrowed deep into the sanctuary of Lover’s armpit, heart still racing.

Unsettling experiences involving lifts abound in my mind’s nocturnal meanderings. Cabins which dangle precariously from a single frayed cable, rocking from side to side as I hold my breath and silently pray. Cabins which have no walls, little more than unstable metal platforms, which lurch drunkenly from side to side in cavernously wide shafts as I press myself to the floor, attempting to cling on. Lifts which shoot off in unlikely directions at high speed, or stop at a great distance from the exit door so that I have to jump over a yawning chasm to reach safety.

Bizzarely, in my waking life, I don’t suffer from claustrophobia or vertigo. And taking lifts does not perturb me in the slightest: I should know, I take four of them every single day.

The first is cramped, carpet-lined, and coffin-like and conveys Tadpole and me to the ground floor of our apartment building. I should probably be suspicious of this lift in particular, as I’ve read countless horror stories about the appallingly slack maintenance of lifts in privately owned accommodation in France, and to anyone peering through the lattice work of the lift shaft, it is plain to see that the cables are furry. But, thus far, it has never been out of order for a single day.

The second is in the nanny’s state-owned tower block, which got an honourable mention in a recent post on account of the pervasive odour of urine often to be found inside the cabin.

The third is in the Buttes Chaumont métro station, one of the few Parisian stations which boasts a large capacity lift, on account of how far underground the tunnels run, in the bowels of the earth, beneath a former gypsym quarry. Stairs do exist, but taking them is a fool’s entreprise.

The fourth and final lift which I take every weekday is a modern, marble and mirrored lift which propels my reluctant self to the office every morning.

I have never been trapped in any of the above, nor have I experienced any mishaps while travelling in them, so I can see no logical reason for my brain’s uncanny fixation. But no doubt a psychoanalyst would find interpreting these anxiety dreams childsplay: a powerless petite, watching her life rush past her, spiralling out of control, paralysed by The Fear.

Whatever the reason, what I did not need was for lift n° 1 to utter a deafening groan as it made its descent early this morning, jolting me instantly into a vivid flashback of the previous night’s dream.

“WHAT WAS THAT?” shouted Tadpole, nervously, pupils widening.

“Oh, don’t worry, it’s just a silly noise,” I countered, with artificial joviality, trying not to communicate my disquiet to my daughter, lest we end up having to take the stairs up to the fifth floor on a daily basis if, god forbid, she develops a lift phobia.

Thankfully, the lift arrived at the ground floor without making any further vocal protests, the folding door drawing back to release us only moments later.

“QUICK MUMMY! GET OUT!” shrieked Tadpole, leading me to believe I may not have managed to play it quite as cool as I had hoped.

I stepped out of the lift, on shaking legs, and we went on our way. One down, three to go.

I am thirty three years old, and a mother. The lady in the local boulangerie stopped calling me “Mademoiselle” quite some time ago.

Why is it then that most of the time I feel like I’m only pretending to be a grown up? Putting on a front. Going through the motions of what seems to be expected of someone my age, unsure whether my heart is really in what I’m doing. From the vantage point of childhood, grown ups seemed so different, so complete, so together. The phrase “one day, when you are grown up…” held such tantalising promise.

But here I am, with three decades already behind me, and I’m not quite sure I belong here. Underneath the play acting, there is a girl who often wonders why adulthood doesn’t feel like she thought it would.

I ceased to grow upwards at the ripe old age of eleven, when I watched, in helpless despair, as the other girls in my class at school overtook me. That same year, I became a woman in the childbearing (as a theoretical possibility) sense, prompting my mother’s gift of a rather chaste paperback about love and sex, with a cover photograph of a young man (German porn star moustache) and woman (flicked back Abba fringe) perpetually trapped in the late Seventies, unaware that oral sex existed.

My first physical relationship, at seventeen, was a landmark, but I wouldn’t describe it as a coming of age. I look back fondly at the young girl I was at the time, enthusiastic about the new pastime I had discovered, and fiercely possessive of my boyfriend in the manner of a small child with an exciting new toy.

I took control of my life and finances when I left home for university, aged nineteen, but I wasn’t yet a fully formed person. More a mass of contradictions: obsessed with grades, ferociously competitive, but also a thrill seeker who spared little thought for her own personal safety. It was a time for exploration, for defining my own boundaries away from the constraints of the parental home.

Somewhere in my twenties, I think I started to grow into my own personality. There was the slow, painful realisation of the fact that being top of the class at school does not automatically equip a person for a brilliant future, if that person has no particular ambition in life. Dreams were diluted with a dose of pragmatism; sacrifices were made in order to remain in the country I decided to call my home.

In my first “proper” job, once the elation at finally having money had abated, and I tired of spending every single Saturday afternoon on a spending spree, “adult” concerns started to insinuate themselves into my brain. Peers were buying flats and houses. Suddenly, amassing savings and acquiring property became a major obsession. Panic: was I missing the boat? Saturdays were a whirlwind of estate agent’s, apartment visits and mounting frustration.

Friends began to marry. I wondered whether that was something I wanted, or felt I should want. Practical reasons aside, I found myself incapable of answering this question. Somewhere along the line, I seemed to have mislaid my romantic, girlish fantasy involving a princess dress, possibly because circumstances dictated that I would be footing the bill. Mr Frog and I had moved in together out of sheer pragmatism, not as a result of some conscious decision to take things to another, more serious level.

We dithered, disagreed, and never made it as far as marriage, but the decision to try for a baby was a conscious one, not taken lightly, even though we could not help, once more, but be influenced by our circle of friends, many of whom were embarking on the same adventure at that time.

I suppose I thought that as an adult I would feel more certainty. Know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I wanted certain things out of life. Not just allow myself to be swept along like driftwood, falling into step with everyone else, mixing my metaphors, unsure of my destination.

After all the changes that 2005 wrought on my life (and Tadpole’s, and Mr Frog’s), I have clearer plans for the future than ever before. I dream of moving to the country with my Lover, renovating a house, learning to drive again. The possibility of having another child. I’m almost certain that these are the things my heart desires. But sometimes I am still haunted by the feeling that I am just a child pretending to be a grown up, yearning to play in a Wendy house, with new toys, a new doll.

Cooking lunch for my Lover on Boxing Day, I couldn’t chase away a mental image of my daughter playing with her toy cooker, with its (pink) plastic pans. Watching myself at play, pretending to cook dinner like a grown up; like my own mother.

Does being a grown up just mean playing an extended game of mummies and daddies, with bigger toys, and real genitalia?

I suppose I hoped that the act of leaving Mr Frog would magically transform me into a different, more positive person. There would be no more black cloud days. I would shed my skin, and start afresh.

When I first met Lover, caught up in that heady seratonin rush of excitement and boundless optimism, everything seemed not only possible, but blindingly simple. A bright new future was mapped out as far as my imagination could reach. I saw a wedding. Another child. A renovated ruin in the Breton countryside. A new life, far from the stresses of the capital city, a dream I’ve harboured ever since I became a mother. A chocolate box village school for Tadpole, so much more appealing than the austere maternelle on the avenue Simon Bolivar with its forbidding, barred windows and the sinister plaque which never fails to send a shiver down my spine, recounting how many of their Jewish pupils were deported during the Second World War. Lest we forget.

Everything seemed like childsplay when we hatched our plans under summer skies, walking hand in hand through the Thabor park.

A few months down the line, try as I might, I can’t ignore a growing, gnawing anxiety, a vague sensation of malaise. Is this my natural state of being? As the well-worn cliché goes, you can run, but try as you might, you cannot escape from yourself.

The hairline crack in our plans, I see with the benefit of hindsight, was the timing. I was adamant that I must wait a year or more, for Tadpole and Mr Frog’s sake, before I made any move. Time enough for us all to adjust to the new status quo. Time for wounds to begin to heal. Continuity for Tadpole, who would live in the same flat and spend her days with the same nanny until she was of an age to start school.

Time for the initial euphoria at the newness of our relationship to abate, so Lover and I could look calmly at our plans in the cold light of day and be sure that we were doing the right thing.

So here I now wait, in a limbo of my own making, increasingly aware of a creeping, subtle fear lapping like cool water around my ankles, rising slowly, inexorably up my calves towards my knees.

I lie, half submerged in my bath, eyes defensively closed, and panic. How will I adapt to a new life in the provinces, away from the city which has been my home for ten years? Will I be able to carve out a little niche for myself in rural Brittany? Will a Rennes employer have any use for a high flying bilingual city secretary? If not, what then? How long can I afford to spend looking for a job, before the funds run out? Will we really have enough to live on; to renovate a crumbling barn or farmhouse? Will Tadpole be happy?

What gnaws away at me most persistently is the knowledge of the separation I will inflict on Tadpole and her father. No more mid-week nights spent at daddy’s house. Instead, alternate Friday evenings spent in a TGV train, ferrying Tadpole to Paris, then catching a train straight back again. The same, in reverse, for Mr Frog on Sunday evenings. While I can’t conceive of staying in this city indefinitely against my wishes, purely to give Tadpole and Mr Frog the gift of proximity, I feel criminally selfish for planning to separate them in this way.

I know that I still want all those things my Lover and I talked about last summer. Desperately. Inevitably though, in this limbo of waiting, the hard realities of what I am contemplating are starting to hit home; naïve optimism is giving way to trepidation.

Seven or eight more months remain. I bury my head into the crook of Lover’s neck and close my eyes, breathe deeply. He knows me. He knows that worrying is one of the things I do best.

But I think he is puzzled, and hurt by the fact he is powerless to banish the clouds completely.

Because I never experienced jealousy when I was in a relationship with Mr Frog, I wrongly assumed I had kicked the habit.

Not so. The green eyed monster was only lying dormant; in prolonged hibernation.

I wonder now whether this absence of jealousy wasn’t a warning sign, which should have alerted me to the plain fact that my feelings didn’t run deep enough. I was complacent, secure in my belief that whatever our failings as a couple, he wouldn’t look elsewhere. Despite late nights spent in the office in the company of pneumatic young stagiaires, and nights out on the town with colleagues, to which I was never invited. Which could have been a cause for concern, but only aroused resentment and bitterness that I was trapped at home, while he was out in the real world seeing people and socialising.

Now, for the first time in eight years, I am subject to bouts of totally irrational, corrosive jealousy. I hate myself for even having these feelings. As if wildly unpredictable mood swings weren’t enough for any man to deal with.

It’s not that I don’t trust the man in my life, or the women he is friends with, whether they be old flames or not. On a rational level I know that he is a very moral and proper person. I also know that he is so hopelessly smitten with me that he is willing to overlook all my failings. But this is purely irrational, and no amount of reasoning – with him, or myself – can lay these demons to rest.

Because I’m not jealous of anyone in his present. It’s his past I have a problem with.

Sometimes I find myself wishing I could erase whole swathes of his history. Those dark times when another woman was there to pick him up when he stumbled and fell, to comfort him, to heal him, to put him back together again. Wildly contrasting highs and lows, moments which I fear were more intense than any we may live together.

I know that these things have made him who he is today. Her influence has helped to mould him into the person I fell in love with. And yet, even though I understand this, I want to make these times disappear. To erase them. Overwrite them.

This jealously is a form of masochism. When I’m alone, feeling low, I torture myself. Willingly. Vivid pictures of their shared past swim before my eyes and try as I might, I can’t banish them. Words that he used to describe that period of his life, in emails I received long before we were an item, play over and over inside my head, refusing to be silenced.

I can’t make this stop, so my strategy is to share these feelings with my lover, preventing them from festering quietly below the surface, only to erupt one day and cause irreparable harm.

I can only hope that one fine morning I will wake up and realise these feelings have left me.

I soon arrived at the conclusion that for a working mum, committing “adultery” would be logistically rather complicated.

A typical day consisted of getting Tadpole ready, dashing with her to the nanny’s, leaping into the metro, breezing into work five minutes late and then doing the whole thing in reverse come 6pm. From Tadpole’s bedtime onwards, I was “free”, but trapped inside the flat, unless there was a babysitter on offer. Hence my strong presence online.

But I simply had to take things further after our first meeting and its rather dramatic dénouement. I couldn’t not. I needed to know.

I had never been unfaithful before. I had very black and white ideas of what was right and wrong, and any sort of cloak and dagger behaviour or sneaking around was most definitely wrong in my book. Nor had I experienced a modern electronic courtship, punctuated by rapid fire exchange of text messages and emails. But over the next week the feeling that something momentous was happening intensified with every shred of contact. I had to see him again, and soon, whatever the consequences.

He evidently felt the same as I did, despite his huge reservations about interfering in my life and causing me to lie to my partner. After all, he’d been on the receiving end of this type of behaviour in the past, and described the experience as “wretched”.

I lost five kilos that week. I shook like an alcoholic with the DT’s, adrenalin coursing through me. I barely slept at night. It felt as though guilt was etched indelibly into my face, and I couldn’t quite believe that Mr Frog hadn’t noticed that something was amiss.

Fear and excitement were bound together in such a way that I couldn’t work out where one began and another ended. I caught myself staring at my daughter through hot tears, barely able to grasp the enormity of what I was contemplating and what it would mean for her. My only desire was to curl up in a ball under the bedclothes, shut out the real world and lose myself in the scenes which were playing out across the inside of my eyelids. Making dinner or attempting normal conversation with Mr Frog was hell; an agony of going through the motions, my mind elsewhere. I took evasive action, in the form of long baths or evenings spent cowering behind my monitor; he snoozed in front of the television in the next room, happily oblivious.

When the time came, my alibis were rehearsed and ready. I told my boss that the childminder was sick and left work abruptly. I dashed, heart racing, to a hotel in the Marais. I spent an afternoon there. And an evening. And a morning. In between, I picked up Tadpole and waited for the sitter to arrive; I crept back to our non-marital bed in the small hours.

The very next evening I told Mr Frog I would be leaving him. Because even though I couldn’t be sure what it was or would develop into, this new, very precious thing I had stumbled upon, what I did know was that me and Mr Frog were a thing of the past, and had been burying our heads in the sand for far too long.

I asked my Lover to buy a one-way ticket to Paris, so that I could pretend he was here to stay for good.

I had been cautioned, by many of the people who read petite anglaise and wish me well, that after the desolate lows of last week, I should be aware that spending time with my Lover would no doubt prove to be a palliative therapy, relieving the symptoms and reducing the suffering without curing the root causes. Problems would be forgotten, temporarily, but would not miraculously dissipate.

They were not wrong.

I spent a simply heavenly weekend in his company. The most mundane things, like shopping for food in the supermarket, or fetching a DVD, were blissful. We talked. We strolled around my neighbourhood. We went to bed at unlikely times of day. Happiness was pottering in my flat, knowing he was in the next room making a cup of tea.

Sometimes I almost had to pinch myself to see whether it was all real. I think he felt the same. A couple of months ago all he knew of me was what I had written. Now there he was in my apartment, contemplating the strangely familiar view from my balcony, known to him previously only as the header image at the top of this page.

I was however conscious of the demons lurking just on the periphery of my vision. I would catch sight of them, fleetingly, out of the corner of my eye, and knew they were waiting to pounce in a moment of vulnerability.

From time to time I would wobble dangerously: some trifling thing would bring sudden, unnecessary tears to my eyes and my spirits would plummet. A sensation of falling, similar to that which I get sometimes when hovering between sleep and wakefulness, ‘landing’ on my bed with a sudden jolt. I was torn between attempting to put on a brave face for my Lover, or baring my soul and running the risk of wounding him, making him feel powerless. Because even when he is with me, holding me in his strong arms, and not stranded at the other end of a phone line, there is only so much he can do to help.

I chose honesty. Because that is what we do best. Love might not make me invincible, but as long as I am mindful of this, and know that I do still need to exorcise my demons without his help, we can weather this storm together.

I fell into a hole yesterday.

Not literally, of course.

Despite the fighting talk in my last post, despite the fact that my lover is coming to stay with me for two weeks while Tadpole is away on vacation with mamie et papy, I suddenly felt overwhelmingly sad. Fragile. Brittle. Exhausted.

I knew it was a temporary bout of depression, and that I wasn’t seeing things clearly, but that didn’t help. I couldn’t find my way out.

Tadpole was adorable. She saw me crying silent tears and came to give me a big hug. She fetched a tissue for my runny nose (I have a summer cold – it is not helping).

“Mummy’s tired. Mummy fait dodo on di bed,” she said, maternally, climbing up onto my bed and motioning for me to join her.

Not that I would actually be allowed to sleep. I’d barely closed my eyes when she screeched “WAKE UP!”, only milimetres from my right ear.

I opened my eyes, pretending to have been woken with a jump, and Tadpole thought this was so hilarious that we had to repeat the exercise at least ten times.

There is nothing worse than finding yourself unable to muster up even the ghost of a smile when you are playing with your child.

In 1995 I would probably have ordered a snakebite and blackcurrant in a damp and dingy cellar nightclub, with a name like “The Swamp” or “Moles”.

This weekend’s drink of choice was a pitcher of Pimms and lemonade, the classiest of which was served in the private gardens of the Royal Crescent Hotel.

I think that sums up nicely how we have changed in ten years.

The “reunion”, which started out as an ambitious plan to reunite a whole host of fellow “eurostuds” (European Studies and Modern Languages graduates), was actually a rather a low-key, intimate affair. So much the better. There were two or three people I really wanted to catch up with properly, and not having to feel obliged to make polite small talk with lots of others meant I could concentrate my attention fully on those who mattered.

Walking around the campus alone on Friday, before everyone else arrived, with 1995 vintage Renaissance on my Ipod, I let my feet guide me to the house where I lived in my first year. The curtains in the window bore the same leafy pattern. The trees in front had grown, and now almost obscured my third floor window. I stood there for a long while, letting memories wash over me.

Going to university, for me, was about becoming a new person. Starting over in a place where no-one had ever known me as a bespectacled, swotty, shy teenager. Leaving behind the heartache of the traumatic split with my first boyfriend, and the friends who had turned out to be more his than mine. It was about re-inventing myself. The exhilaration of living my own life, far from the constraints of the parental home, going out whenever I pleased, spending my (ahem, well, the government’s money) on precisely what I chose, answering to no-one but my own conscience.

I loved my new life, my new friends and the new me wholeheartedly, and spent the happiest years of my life to date in Bath.

Ten years later, in the process of shedding my skin and re-inventing myself all over again, I stand at a crossroads and contemplate a future far from the city of light.

I like to think that ten years from now, I will no longer refer to my time in Bath as the happiest years of my life.

A train carries me in the direction of Paris, away from my lover, at breakneck speed.

There is a plane to be caught the next day, a long-anticipated university reunion to attend in Bath. However, the excitement I felt when I first booked that trip, my elation at the possibility of a weekend where I could slip back ten years and catch a fleeting glimpse of my twenty three year old self, has largely evaporated.

I wish I wasn’t going alone.

I know we will have a fantastic jaunt down memory lane. I also know that I will have to bite my lip so as not to tell anyone who cares to listen with the story of how I met a lovely man two short months ago. A man who fell in love with petite anglaise before he even met me. Nor will I tell them that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I intend to marry him one day.

Every single time I close my eyes, whether it be in a train, a metro, at home in bed, or even, for the briefest second, in front of my monitor at work, I see his face. I taste his skin. Flashbacks to moments of overwhelming intensity cause me to inhale sharply.

Soon after I began writing petite anglaise, the blog was mentioned in the Guardian newsblog. That day I almost skipped around the office. I was unable to share my glee with any of my colleagues, so I hugged my glowing secret to myself.

That is how I feel today. Almost by chance, I have stumbled upon something unbelievably precious, which not many of my nearest and dearest dare to believe in, at this early stage.

I smile a secret smile whenever I think of what we are, and will be.

Paris is rapidly losing what little hold it still had over me.

I spent most of the return train journey dangerously close to tears. Saying goodbye to my lover after another idyllic weekend is becoming more and more of a wrench, even if I was, simultaneously, looking forward to seeing Tadpole after four days away. To add insult to injury, my ‘reserved’ seat had been double booked, meaning that in the absence of any other vacant seats, I had to spend the entire trip sitting on a fold down strapontin in the area between two carriages. There didn’t appear to be any air conditioning – or any oxygen for that matter – and my attempts to read a book were thwarted by my head dipping forwards at regular intervals as I fought a losing battle to stay awake.

I arrived back in the capital late on Sunday afternoon, at my lowest ebb, and began the interminable journey home to collect Tadpole. The métro was humid, and packed with sticky, scantily clad bodies. The connections involved what seemed like hours of trailing along corridors, heaving my bag up and down flights of stairs, and hurrying down moving walkways, all of which were heated to an uncomfortable temperature – which a Delia recipe would probably refer to as a ’slow’ oven. When I emerged from the exit onto my avenue, drained and dehydrated, I was greeted by the choking fug of car exhaust in the cloying, syrupy air and the familiar wail of sirens which form a permanent soundtrack to this city.

As the lift rose to my floor, I felt for keys in my pocket. They were heavier than usual, weighty with the recent addition of keys to my lover’s home. I closed my eyes and imagined that the lift would obligingly deliver me to his front door, instead of here, where only an empty flat awaited me. Devoid now of Mr Frog’s presence, cleared of all his belongings. Strangely though, it doesn’t feel like it is Mr Frog who is missing. Even though my lover has spent only one day and one night here, he has left behind his imprint, like a watermark, in every room.

As I waited for Tadpole and Mr Frog to arrive, and for the kettle to boil, I slid down the wall until I was seated on the soothing, cool tiles of the kitchen floor. The tears finally came.

If home is where the heart is, I mislaid mine in Rennes.

Over the past month my inbox has been groaning under a torrent of messages, from the caring and supportive to the damning and judgemental, with every shade in between. The comments box is only the tip of the iceberg. I have read more well-intentioned advice than I know what to do with.

Everybody sees a situation like mine in a different light, depending on what life has thrown at them; what kind of baggage they have picked up on the way. Sometimes the subject makes people distinctly uncomfortable: one friend I confided in seemed to find it impossible to talk about the breakdown of my relationship with Mr Frog without casting a slightly anxious eye over his own situation, almost squirming in his seat.

When people give me an insight into their own, similar, experiences, I have to tell myself to bear in mind that what worked for someone else, while it often makes interesting reading, can never be wholly relevant to what is happening in my life. Every situation is unique.

I’m not complaining. After all, when someone takes the time to type a long email to a person they have never met, it shows that they care enough to volunteer a point of view, write some kind words, or share their own, sometimes painful, experiences. I am very grateful for this, but endeavour all the same to take whatever is offered with a pinch of salt.

There are those who believe I should have “worked harder” to save my relationship with Mr Frog. Those who caution me against throwing myself headlong into a new relationship so soon, and advocate some time alone first, to adjust to the new status quo. To help Tadpole adjust. Those who are pessimistic, predicting that once the first flush of infatuation wears off, I will realise that I have made a terrible mistake. Those who advise me to keep Tadpole separate from the new adventure I am embarking on, for months, or even years. Those who feel the need to admonish me for having even contemplated leaving Tadpole’s father in the first place to selfishly pursue my own happiness. How dare I put myself first? What kind of a mother am I?

I reserve the right to put my hands over my ears like a child and chant loudly so that I can’t hear any of these words. I reserve the right to listen to my heart, and follow its lead, wherever it may take me.

Am I being selfish? Self-centred? Probably. I feel sure that I am doing what is best for everyone involved, but then I would, wouldn’t I? I wonder whether anyone can ever really be objective about their own motivations? Don’t we all feel tempted to tweak reality to fit in with our long term goals? To persuade ourselves that what we are doing is ultimately for the best?

All I know is this: I love, and I am loved. More deeply, on more levels, than I ever believed possible. I don’t really subscribe to notions like fate, or divine intervention, but I do marvel every day at the fact that I ever crossed paths with this person. I’ve found something, someone I didn’t even know I was waiting for, until now. I want to surrender myself to this feeling, to him, completely.

So don’t ask me to wait. Or take a break, and revisit this a few months down the line. It’s simply not an option for me. For us. I’m no fool, and I will force myself to tread carefully for the sake of my daughter’s well being. She is, and always will be, at the centre of my universe. Mr Frog will remain an important figure in my life too, both for Tadpole’s sake, and because I value him as a friend. But while I’m waiting, impatiently, for the next phase of my life to begin, taking small, measured steps towards it, I reserve the right to hug myself gleefully every time I think of the gorgeous things that my future holds. To laugh to myself in the metro. To smile at my monitor when I receive mail.

No dark cloud can leave a shadow on this.

I had the most wonderful, sensual, exciting, beautiful weekend. I felt so incredibly alive. Awakened. As though until now I had been merely sleepwalking through my life.

Now, back in Paris, back at my desk, nose streaming with a summer cold that manifested itself on the train journey home, I wish I didn’t feel like I simply dreamed it all.

I wish that Mr Frog hadn’t been sick this morning and bombarded me with distressing emails all day. I feel his pain, but I think I am the last person who can help.

It seems that there can be no happiness without guilt and remorse. No pleasure without anguish.

It almost feels like I’m being punished. Divine retribution.

Soon, I will have a bed, but no mattress. Cable TV, without a television set. I am rather pathetically relieved, with hindsight, that the computer is mine, all mine. As is the stereo. And the bookcase.

Oddly, the only item we have almost come to blows about so far is the exercise bike. The exercise bike which I rarely use, and which Mr Frog has never used, not even once. It serves mostly as a rather oversized thermometer and as the guardian of the evil ironing pile (until said pile becomes so large that the clothes topple off). I’m not sure who will wrestle custody of the cursed contraption yet, as Mr Frog changes his mind every other day, but I rather think I’d prefer to see it go. At least then it wouldn’t sit in the corner of my bedroom, eying me balefully and making snide comments about my thighs when it thinks I’m not listening.

There will be gaps, where pieces of furniture once stood. I suspect that the flat is going to seem too big, for a while. Especially on the nights when Tadpole will stay over at daddy’s place.

Which of my two sofas will I lie on, I wonder? Which side of the double bed will I favour?

Mr Frog has found a new place to live and will be moving out in ten day’s time. His bachelor pad is 200 m from our/my front door, just across the road, and has panoramic views of Paris, apparently. He jokes that he will be watching me with binoculars from his balcony. I love the way he still has the power (and the inclination) to see the funny side, and to want to make me laugh.

For Tadpole, I think the fact of daddy being close at hand will be helpful. She’ll accompany him to the same baker’s shop, and the same supermarket (where the checkout lady always gives her a kiss), and he’ll still be able to take her to the childminder’s house, some mornings. Business as usual. Anything that can lessen the inevitable impact on Tadpole’s routine has to be good, I feel.

It is also comforting for me to know that if I am struck down my a blinding migraine attack and can’t cope alone, or there is some sort of emergency, Mr Frog will only be a couple of minutes away. But I know I can’t expect him to be ‘on call’ either. I have made my bed, and will have to lie in it.

Which will be rather uncomfortable, until I get this mattress problem sorted out.

I’ll admit that I’m feeling weird about the act of blogging at the moment.

Although I’m only telling you part of the story, sharing what I want (or feel compelled) to write about, to get out of my system – all the while keeping in mind that I must respect Mr Frog’s absolute, unquestionable right to privacy by refraining from stringing out our dirty laundry across the internet for all to see – I still feel awkward and uncomfortable.

First, there was the flood of comments and emails. Lovely, supportive messages from people who admitted that no, they didn’t know me, but said they *felt* as though they did. People who said that reading “endings” caused them to shed a tear, or to think about me all weekend. That reading about Mr Frog and I affected them as much as hearing about a couple of close, non-virtual friends splitting up. They offered advice, a place to stay, a shoulder to cry on, or even to send me comfort food by airmail. I was touched by the warmth contained in those messages, and surprised at the emotions my words had visibly stirred up, but it remained virtual all the same. And I was painfully conscious that there was far more going on in my life than the little I was telling. So readers were making judgements without being in possession of anything like the full facts. Which didn’t seem fair on Mr Frog, for one.

The stats climbed steeply. I began to fear that I might feel tempted to exploit what was happening in my personal life for its drama potential. Worried that I already had. Alternately racked with guilt and childishly gleeful about the extra hits petite anglaise was getting. (I suspect there were lots of repeat visits, in any case, out of concern, to see if any more news was forthcoming).

Someone once asked me whether having the blog couldn’t potentially influence my actions in some way. My response was something along the lines of: “No way! Read what I write and you’ll see! I write about the mundane, the trivial, the everyday. I don’t lead a fascinating life, or make myself do things in order to have something to write about…”

Now I am wondering. Are my actions skewed by the fact that I know I may write about them afterwards? Is the very fact of having a blog, and one which has always peddled the naked truth, akin to having countless cameras trained on my every move in a ‘Big Brother’ house, making it impossible to behave naturally, impossible to live life the way I would have before, when it wasn’t under this self-inflicted scrutiny?

You may suggest that I should just blog about something else: trot out a light-hearted little piece about Parisian life, or elaborate on that funny thing that Tadpole did this morning. To that I would counter that it is impossible for me to do whimsical and amusing when I am wandering around in a permanent daze, I haven’t slept properly for weeks and am feeling in turn blissfully happy about the glowing new perspectives that the future seems to offer, and melancholy about this page which is being turned and the effect it will have on our little family. There is little space in my head for anything else.

Mr Frog and I are living in limbo: we have decided to separate, but the change this has wrought remains virtual. We wake up side by side every morning, and follow the same daily routine. He comes home; I fix some pasta and ask about his day. The only outwardly visible difference is that the coffee table is littered with A-Z maps and ads for 1 bedroom apartments. Inside our heads, much has changed. But nothing concrete seems to reflect that yet.

You may suggest that I stop blogging for a while. I won’t like it if you do, and I don’t actually know whether I can. It is a powerful addiction and I don’t know that I want to kick the habit at this point in time.

I feel weird. But bear with me. I’m sure it will pass.

For today’s post, kindly follow me.

And my I point out at this juncture that I categorically do not wear red nail varnish.

I wish I knew how to behave.

If Mr Frog had shouted, or cried, or lost his temper, stormed out and slammed the door behind him, I would have known how to react to that. I expected fireworks and melodrama. I felt I deserved them, somehow. Here was I, stammering in a low, guilt-ridden voice that I had finally found the strength to walk away from this relationship which was not what I wanted any more. Where, in my opinion, it was plain to see that we were both deeply unhappy. Here was I confessing that I hadn’t come to take this decision without any outside help: there was another person involved. It’s not that I wanted to inflict pain. Far from it. But some kind of reaction would have been nice.

Nothing.

Not a moan or a whimper on my account. There was genuine anguish as he grappled with the idea of having to live apart from our daughter, and possibly see her less often. There were demands for reassurance that his role as daddy would never be challenged. This was the outcome I had told myself I expected, that I had hoped for, as I rehearsed my lines earlier that evening, but I found the total absence of any emotional response in relation to me galling nonetheless.

“What about me?” I wanted to yell. “You’re losing me too. Me! Do I really leave you completely indifferent?”

I suppose we have both known for a long time that we were now together by default, even if we rarely dared to admit or acknowledge it, even to ourselves. For the sake of our Tadpole. Out of inertia. Or fear of change and upheaval. So where the jagged emotions should have been, there was now just a gaping void.

Part of me feels cheated. After working myself up to this finale over a week of sleepless nights and adrenaline-fuelled days, it was a resounding anti-climax. I wanted to be wept over bitterly or gallantly fought for. Mourned, or regretted just a little.

So that I felt like I was someone worth having in the first place.

I have never partaken of a meme before – at first, because I didn’t really know what one was, and later, because I took the snobbish view that memes constituted lazy blogging. However, I’ve climbed off my high horse today because the prospect of being interviewed by blog goddess Zinnia was just too tempting. If you haven’t already discovered the beautifully written ‘Real E Fun’ (and I am mortified to say that I didn’t spot that obvious anagram for the longest time), then I strongly advise you to do so. In fact, it’s an order.

So, here goes:

Your writing, on your blogs, is excellent and enjoyable. Do you do any other kind of writing, and if not, would you like to?

Coming from Zinnia, that is a compliment indeed. Thank you. I’m blushing and I don’t quite know where to put myself.

Before I started writing as petite anglaise, the last person who complimented me on my prose was Mr Jones, my G.C.S.E. English teacher, back in 1989. I went on to choose languages and history over English, and never once looked back. As a career PA (by accident more than by design), I actually spend most days typing other people’s words, and no, sadly I don’t do any other kind of writing.

Looking back over my archives, I feel the discipline of writing every day, purely for my own pleasure, has taught me an awful lot. I’m just getting into my stride, but I really enjoy doing it. And, well, if another opportunity were to present itself, who knows?

If, for some reason, you (and Mr Frog and Tadpole) could no longer live in France or England, where would you choose to move your family to and why?

That is horribly tough. If language were no barrier, I think of the places I have visited so far then Italy appealed the most. But I abhor being somewhere I can only communicate with a phrasebook in my hand. The other language I studied at university was German, but my experiences there – through no fault of the German people, may I add – have put me off somewhat. The only other place I have visited where I immediately felt at home was New York, but I don’t much fancy living in a broom cupboard.

If I had to run for the hills, because, say, the copy of my criminal record (requested in conjunction with my naturalisation application) arrives in the post tommorow with WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE written all over it, then I’d plump for New Zealand. I’ve never been, but it has always appealed to me. Even pre-LOTR.

What is your ideal job?

If I was brave and financially secure enough to make a career change tomorrow it would be a toss up between going back to school to study creative writing, web design or translation. There was a point in my life several years ago where I was torn between doing a translation MA and a bilingual secretarial diploma. I went for the most affordable option, and I do harbour some regrets.

You write about many things, but very little about your friends. Are friends important to you?

A terrifyingly perceptive question. I think there are a number of factors at play here.

First of all, I don’t think I should write too much about people outside my immediate circle who don’t know about the blog. I tell my stories, and talk about my feelings, not other people’s.

Secondly, my friends from home and university are all in the UK, and we are all less mobile these days, with our young children in tow. The result being that I don’t see them as often as I would like. But I love the way that even if we see each other once in a blue moon, it is like we were never apart.

Thirdly, I have found that expat life in Paris means that you inevitably make friends only for them to move on, because they were only passing through in the first place. I don’t have a single really good friend in this city right now, I’m sad to say. Lots of potentially good friends, but job and parenting commitments mean that I rarely get chance to follow things through. I’m now trying actively to do something about this – with blog meet ups for example – because friendship is important to me and my life would be far richer for it.

If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be and what would you do?

I’d like to see life through Tadpole’s eyes. To potter about drawing pictures, singing songs and feeling loved, unconditionally, without a single care in the world. Just for a day.

Knowing my luck, I’d pick the wrong day and end up teething and throwing tantrums.

If you would like to be ‘interviewed’ by me, then please let me know in the comments box. First five to respond OUI will have the dubious honour.

How Mr Frog would spend a bank holiday, alone, in Paris

MORNING

Peek through eyelids surreptitiously as frantic petite scampers around apartment readying travel bag and uncooperative Tadpole for weekend away. Groan at the merest suggestion of curtains being opened to facilitate packing of colour-coordinated clothing and hasty application of make up. Upon hearing front door slam closed, roll over and go back to sleep.

EARLY AFTERNOON

Ease self out of bed and into warm embrace of bathtub. Emerge only when skin has wrinkled to pruneau-like consistency. Dress. Head to neighbourhood McDo for takeout lunch, ignoring well-stocked fridge and kitchen cupboards.

Hop on Vespa and head H&M Opéra-wards, whereupon purchase ridiculous item such as WHITE trousers. Knowing full well that good lady non-wife will inevitably demand return of aforementioned garment on grounds of impractical nature and own manly aversion to involvement with washing machine/dryer/iron. (Real reason, not stated, is dubious nature of fashion decision. Previous shopping trips without spousal guidance have yielded: string vest (green) and cowboy hat. Case closed.)

Meet friend for coffee, make most of freedom by smoking entire packet of cigarettes.

EVENING

No plans as allergic to making arrangements in advance. Dinner courtesty of Allo Pizza. Play GTA: Vice City whilst eating crisps and multi-pack of Haribo assorted sweets. Fall asleep on sofa while watching Fight Club/The Godfather. Again.
 
 
How petite is spending a bank holiday, alone, in Paris

MORNING

Leap into action at sound of alarm. Feed, water and clothe Tadpole and put finishing touches to weekend bag. Bark various orders at Mr Frog emerging from bathroom only minutes before taxi due to arrive.

As front door slams, instead of taking book to bed as initially planned, experience sudden and overwhelming desire to clean child-free apartment from top to bottom, including waxing wood floors, reorganising wardrobe, polishing every single pair of shoes and scrubbing at limescale in bathtub with stiff brush.

10 AM

Exhausted.

Water plants on balcony. Cold gust of wind serves as belated reminder that am wearing only jeans and bra at this juncture. Beat hasty retreat indoors. Wash hair. Write blog post.

AFTERNOON

The plan: make most of rare commodity that is “me-time” for much-needed bout of retail therapy (if shops open at Etienne Marcel). Which will happen, unless succumb to evil voices in head suggesting today would be really good day to clean windows/wipe down walls/wash pushchair cover/launder bedclothes.

Note to self: perhaps Ipod will drown out voices?

EVENING

Chain self to computer, in attempt to finish off website for family business (work in progress since November 2004). Proof read text, sniggering like teenager at every mention of word ‘erection’. Break for ironing intermission.
 
 

Why oh why it is that even though I constantly lament not having any time to myself and a sleep deficit which must amount to about two months full-time bedrest, I feel compelled to spend a precious bank holiday Thursday (one of the rare jours fériés not falling on a weekend or abolished by government in 2005) doing chores?

This girl needs saving. From herself.

I’m going back to university.

Only for a weekend, but I’m so very excited about the prospect of going back that I don’t know how I’m going to contain myself until July.

It will be an informal reunion, bringing together a few modern linguists, ‘95 millésime, and anyone else they fancy inviting, and when an email was forwarded to me, I surprised myself with my own enthusiasm. Two hours later I had an alumni number, a room reserved in halls with the rest of the gang, had cajoled my boss into signing my holiday form and booked some flights. Only then did it occur to me to ask Mr Frog if he minded being left alone with Tadpole for three days.

Apparently ten years is about the time when most of us start to hanker after some sort of reunion, so the timing is spot on. The people I am most looking forward to seeing are actually those I have been in semi-regular contact with all along, but I don’t get to spend time with them as often or for as long as I would like, distance and motherhood not permitting. So I can’t wait to reminisce over a few drinks and revisit some of our old haunts. I want to soak up the atmosphere of this place where I spent what I fondly remember as the happiest years of my youth. I want to pretend, just for a couple of days, that I am in my early twenties again. It’s a shame I haven’t hung onto any of my college clothes. It would have been amusing to show up in my blue doc martens with beads strung on the laces. My tastes have evolved a little since my indie, student grant thrift shop days however and many things have been given to the Red Cross (to Mr Frog’s relief).

There will be many other former students present who I literally haven’t see in a decade, since graduation day itself. I’m sure I’ll recognise them all, and they me, but I haven’t the faintest idea who and what they have become.

I will have to perfect a potted resumé of the last ten years. Let me see:

“I taught at the Sorbonne Nouvelle for a couple of years, as a lectrice. Adamant that I wanted to stay on in Paris, but not exactly bitten by the teaching bug, I went back to the UK for a few months and returned armed with a bilingual secretarial diploma (and a London Chamber of Commerce gold medal for best ‘oral’ in the country – which I think is in my underwear drawer somewhere). My glittering PA career has taken me from investment bank to internet startup to luxury goods empire to current position of wicked blog-idleness. I moved in with Mr Frog eight years ago and we have an adorable little Tadpole who will be two years old in June.”

What I will probably do, knowing me, is look shifty and defensive and mutter under my breath that I’m “just a secretary”, brandishing a picture of my daughter as proof that I have done something meaningful with my life. I will have to work on not being visibly overwhelmed with jealousy as I hear about glamorous jobs in the wine trade, in film production or the diplomatic service. Of course, depending on how many drinks I have knocked back in order to steady my nerves, I may just grunt, or content myself with eavesdropping from my vantage point under the table.

I have touched on this subject before. It’s not that I’m ashamed of what I do. Most days I enjoy it, actually. My only goal, upon finishing my education, was to live and breathe French. What I would actually do for a living was by the by. But I can’t quite shake off the guilt I feel about not having ‘fulfilled my potential’ in some way. I was always a swotty, straight-A student, fiercely competitive, constantly striving to be top of the class from pre-school to college. My schoolteachers predicted great things and encouraged me to aim high. But at the end of the day, I realised that being top of the class had been my only real goal; it had been an end in itself, not a means to achieve some higher purpose in the long-term.

Most of the time I don’t give this subject a second thought. But the prospect of meeting all these high achievers has reminded me how much I detest reading Friends Reunited. You remember that girl at school who was more interested in boys than actually doing any work? Who barely scraped through her GCSE’s? Who was spotted at L’s 16th birthday party having sex standing up against the front of the house, and then, later again on the swing in the back garden (with a different partner)?

We predicted that in a couple of years she’d be pushing a pram around Bell Farm council estate, hair pulled back into a Croydon face lift.

She’s a bank manager now.

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.

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.

I somehow managed to cut the umbilical cord which binds me to my computer last night and spent some quality time on the sofa. I watched a film. A slow-moving, thought-provoking film with not a car chase nor exchange of gunfire in sight, which means that I watched it on my own, with only a box of tissues for company. Mr Frog’s reaction to ‘Dirty Pretty Things’ which we watched at my insistence at the weekend: ‘Mais rien se passe dans ton film!’ The last hour was set to a backing track of his gentle snoring. So this time he was banished altogether.

‘My Life Without Me’, (‘Ma Vie Sans Moi’ in French) stars Sarah Polley, who bears an uncanny ressemblence to Julianne Moore. It made me think a lot, shed a few tears, and threw my life sharply back into perspective.

Since the beginning of the year, for reasons which are still rather opaque to me, there has been an undercurrent of panic running through my life. From time to time something triggers a full scale attack of ‘can’t get my breath-tummy doing somersaults-everything going fast-pure adrenaline rush’. My concentration has been shot to pieces, my work has suffered and my eating habits have been rather erratic. I can identify some of the things that have been bothering me, but thinking rationally doesn’t really help. The panic feels like a physical thing, out of my control, and telling myself sternly to pull myself together won’t make a blind bit of difference. I’m an emotional yoyo. Mr Frog never knows quite what to expect.

The first time this happened to me, I was eighteen years old. I was on A-Level study leave when my first boyfriend/love/person I knew ‘carnally’ broke up with me. The shock sent me into a tailspin. I was a mess, but I didn’t have time to be, I had work to do, exams to pass that would decide which university I would go to. A nice doctor/family friend prescribed me with some ‘beta blockers’ and everything slowed down to a normal speed. My powers of concentration returned. Everything came good in the end, I got my grades and it was really no more than a temporary glitch in the grand scheme of things. But it’s no coincidence that my classic exam anxiety dream involves discovering that my A-levels are due to start the following day but I am unable to find my revision notes.

‘My Life Without Me’ showed a few weeks in the life of a young mother, Anne, who lives in a trailer in her mother’s back garden with her husband and two young daughters. She learns that she has an untreatable form of cancer and only a month or two left to live. Anne is not the sort of person to waste time raging about how unfair life has been to her, or to wallow in self-pity. Instead she makes a list of ‘Things to Do Before I Die’ in a garish pink notepad. And sticks to it. Without telling anyone. She records a message for each of her daughters for every single birthday until they turn eighteen, while sitting in her car on a break from her job as a night cleaner. She visits her father in prison. She tries to find a suitable woman who might become a companion to her husband and a mother to her children – because she knows that life will have to go on without her. She lives every single instant with a new intensity. It’s a film about life, as the title suggests, not about death.

The Anne character has a ‘pure soul’, she is totally unselfish, un self-absorbed. Everything I am not. I carry around inside of me a negative list: things I want but can’t have, things I’m discontented about, things I want to change about Mr Frog, his job, my job, our life together. All the while I am guilty of not making the most of the life I am actually living.

Time for some changes around here.

My Ipod is called Boris.

He is named after the ladybird in Paperplay. I couldn’t find a picture of him, so his playmates Itsy and Bitsy will have to do. All Boris requires now is a ladybird outfit. I particularly like the way a feather-light caress to his belly in the dark recesses of my pockets turns the volume up and down.

Now that the computer is restored to its original fantastic, if rather sonorous splendour and I’ve just about got to grips with XP, I can now waste entire evenings transferring rarely played cd’s full of Napster-era mp3s on to my new friend. With the result that this morning’s metro ride included a musical voyage down memory lane to my 30th birthday.

It was a bittersweet ride.

My thirtieth birthday was to be the last time I drank (home-made mojitos on this occasion) in almost two years. Only a week later I discovered that I was ‘with Tadpole’. It was the end of an era. The freedom I had always taken for granted was already slipping away from me. And as is always the way, it was never fully appreciated until it was lost. The freedom to go out after work on a whim to take in a film or have a few drinks or dinner. To indulge in a spot of retail therapy when I needed cheering up. To decide I fancied a DVD or a snack and just grab keys and coat and leave the flat. To hop on a metro with only the contents of my pockets for company. To discover previously unknown areas of Paris, stopping in a random café for brunch. To improvise plans with friends.

If you peel back the layers of enforced adulthood, responsibility and obligation, that carefree girl still exists somewhere inside. She doesn’t care about mortgages and job security and sorting out the nanny’s payslip (because the rules have changed. Again). She wants to throw caution to the wind and spend an indecent amount of money shopping; she wants to flirt and dance and get tipsy and turn the stereo up loud. She wants to be alone sometimes. She wants to fly away in an aeroplane and explore the world. And she comes alive when I put my Ipod on.

I can’t help feeling that Boris is just a little bit dangerous.

extract from petite30 playlist:

DMX Krew: Good Time Girl
Chemical Brothers: The Test
New Order: True Faith
DJ Rap: Good to be Alive

It occurs to me that I should have posted something especially for the folks surfing in from the bloggies site. Kind of a potted introduction to petite anglaise in 30 seconds. So, it’s a bit late in the day (voting ends tomorrow), but here is something I have cobbled together hastily as I rather unexpectedly got given work to do this morning.

Greetings! I bet you missed the very subtle link to my about this site page, located in the menu to your right. It has a blurred and slightly comical webcam shot of yours truly (not wearing satin pyjamas, but you only have yourselves to blame for that) and a smidgen of background information, should you want any.

Thirty two things will explain both why there are 32 things, as opposed to 100 or 56, and will give you a few more clues as to what I’m about. I’ve had lots of emails from boys who particularly liked number 17.

Below are links to some of my favourite posts:

• a post a day is about why I blog and what’s in it for me
• letter, is part of a three-post series on my search for my biological family (see post category: adoption)
• french kissing is about just that, but not with tongues
• métrétiquette is a part one of two posts on how to survive the Paris metro
• Wee Oui! is one of my posts on rearing a bilingual Tadpole (other posts about language and bilingualism can be found under the category ‘parlez vous franglais?’)

Question time:

I’ve never produced a FAQ because things tend to get answered in the comments box, but if you do have a burning question, fire away, today is your lucky day.

In a novel I read recently, ‘Notes on a Scandal‘ by Zoë Heller, there was a passage that leapt out of the page and struck me forcefully. It has come back to haunt me many times since. Usually when I am reaching for the Teletubbies video. Again.

One of the protagonists expressed an unpalatable truth that I know I was already aware of on some level, but prior to actually seeing it in writing, I would never have dared admit it, even to myself.

“It was so much easier being a parent when one was performing for another adult… Dealing with her daughter is never easy, but it’s pretty much impossible without the motivation of an audience. If there’s no one about to witness her patience and kindness, she finds herself too weary to tackle Polly’s sullen mystery.”

I don’t think I’m a bad parent. But I know for a fact that I am a better one when someone I seek to impress is within earshot. If Mr Frog is in the next room, regardless of whether he’s actually paying attention, I am much more engaged with Tadpole, far more likely to try to teach her a new word, or invest some energy in eliciting a giggle. So that Mr Frog can hear what a good mummy I’m being. It’s a form of showing off: ‘Hey, look what a wonderful parent I am!’ Or of competition: ‘look how much better I am at this than you!’

When daddy’s not around, I may, flying in the face of all those principles I had before Tadpole was born, let the TV murmur in the background while Tadpole is eating her dinner (or smearing it all over her clothes). I may even leaf through a magazine while she splashes around in the bath with her toys. What can I say? I’ve been at work all day, and although I’m thrilled to see Tadpole, I have bathed her more than 500 times in the course of the last year and a half and there are only so many games you can play with some cups and a few plastic animals with holes in (although I dread the day that she learns how to squirt me back).

We have some amazing moments, Tadpole and I. There are instants which are indescribably precious to me, where she gets a particular sparkle in her eye and I just know that she’s going to give me one of those precious little kisses that she rations so carefully. But there are also moments when she is insufferable and frustrating (“no No NO NO!”) and I yearn to skip the evening routine altogether, put her to bed and close the door.

When the audience in question is the mother-not-in-law or the childminder, then I am all the more motivated to play the role of ‘perfect mum’, because with these women, not only do I seek to impress, but I feel I have even more to prove and my abilities are under constant scrutiny. With my MNIL, I feel the need to demonstrate that I am irreplaceable. It took her a while to adjust to behaving like a grandmother (as opposed to a mother) with Tadpole, and initially I felt threatened, and indeed wounded, by her behaviour. This feeling has subsided, but I know it has had a lasting effect on our relationship, at least from my point of view. And I know that it has affected the way I behave with Tadpole around her. I will also admit that I am not above using bilingualism as a weapon to exclude her when it suits me.

With the childminder I am understandably a little insecure. After all, this woman spends more hours per day with my daughter than I do. She is much older than me, and has a huge amount of child-rearing experience which it’s difficult not to resent sometimes. I sense that it will be she who decides when Tadpole is ready to be potty trained, just as it was she who suggested to me that Tadpole was ready for solid foods or a pair of ‘proper’ shoes. So when I arrive to pick up Tadpole and she hurls herself into my arms I experience a mixture of genuine glee at seeing my daughter, and a satisfaction at being preferred. Followed by the perfect mummy ‘act’, wholly for the childminder’s benefit.

Now that I am now conscious of this tendency to play to an audience, it is impossible to gauge for myself where the natural ends and the performance begins. The borders are blurred; the colours weep into one another.

I try to convince myself that it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. Tadpole will simply be happy that I’m drawing or singing songs with her or reading that extra story. But then again, children can be terrifyingly perceptive. The miracle of speech is also a looming liability.

I fear it is only a matter of time before I overhear Tadpole explaining to the (anti-TV) childminder that she often watches the Teletubbies while she eats her breakfast. Or asks me in front of grandma why we only ever read more than one story at bedtime when we stay at their house. Or worse…

I have a busy morning ahead so I hope to write a proper post later in the day, but I wanted to share a quote from the book I am currently reading – Non-Fiction by Chuck Palahniuk – which I think has some relevance to anyone out there who writing about their life on a daily basis, whether it be in screenplay, book or blog form. The following excerpt is taken from the essay {You are Here}, and it echoes some of the concerns I expressed here.

“..maybe we’re headed down a road toward mindless, self-obsessed lives where every event is reduced to words and camera angles. Every moment imagined through the lens of a cinematographer. Every funny or sad remark scribbled down for sale at the first opportunity.

A world Socrates couldn’t imagine, where people would examine their lives, but only in terms of movie and paperback potential.

Where story no longer follows as the result of an experience.

Now the experience happens in order to generate a story.”

I’m not selling anything here (apart from possibly my own soul). In fact I pay for a domain and an ISP, carry no google ads, and write purely for my own pleasure and amusement. But I still sometimes wonder how healthy it is…

I think the deluge (not to use the expression ‘tsunami’ because I fear it is now an ‘off limits’ word in any context other than 26 December 2004) of new visitors yesterday sent by Michele needs some explanation. It is a game played on Michele’s site to send her visitors off to discover a new blog every day. They came, they saw, they commented. Maybe some of them will even come back. But I notice my regular blogfriends were very quiet throughout. And I missed you. Come back!

I was mulling over in the metro this morning (metro time is ME-time, if I have a seat I read, if I am standing I daydream) how blogging has changed my life.

It’s amazing what difference writing a few paragraphs a day for a modest but faithful audience of like-minded people with too much time on their hands can make. But it undeniably has.

Now, when I have a discussion with my colleagues over lunch, I no longer even know myself whether I’m picking their brains for material for a future post or just having a normal friendly conversation. Unwittingly they have become guinea pigs, even though they know nothing about petite anglaise.

What next? Will I move on to provoking arguments with colleagues/shopkeepers/members of my family so that I can reproduce them verbatim here in one of my rants? Will I put myself into dramatic situations simply for their blogging potential?

Mr Frog is aware that his actions have become ’subject matter’ too. So if I were to come home and find him, say, wearing my clothes, then his exploits are likely to be published on the interweb sooner or later. Likewise should he make an amusing mistake when speaking my mother tongue.

Sadly he doesn’t have time to read this blog very often, and I teased him the other day that I could be having a torrid extra-non-marital affair and writing about it in the public domain, and he would still be the last to know. He did receive a number of emails back in September telling him that it was high time he made an ‘honest woman’ of me after my post about marriage, and went on to read all the comments that post elicited. I half wondered at the time whether he would try to make blogging history by proposing to me in the comments box.

I have made references in the past to how I feel about his parents, and slipped in a few hints (about suitable Christmas presents for example. Ahem!) just in case he were to pass this way. So it would seem I am also trying (and failing) to use this weblog as a way of communicating with my partner.

Yesterday in conversation with an uninitiated person, I accidentally referred to our daughter as ‘Tadpole’. Twice. Eyebrows were raised at this rather odd choice of pet name. I suspect the day I find myself signing a work email or a cheque as ‘petite anglaise’ is not far off. What started out as a mere nom de souris is becoming a person in her own right. Have I unleashed a monster?

On a positive note, I have re-discovered how enjoyable it is to create something all by myself and indulge in a small amount of writing every day. It fills the void left by settling for a string of jobs which didn’t really stimulate my whole brain after I finished university. I have found, to my amazement, that I actually like fiddling about with geeky things like css, and am in the process of creating a site for my dad’s business as a way of learning more. For fun. Who would have thought it?

Writing every day makes me think about words and language more. The spellcheck reveals to me how frenchified my English spelling is in danger of becoming if I don’t make more of an effort. Thinking about my subjects before I write often helps me to find clarity and sort out my muddled head. A form of free therapy.

Seeing that a post has attracted lots of interesting (and sometimes very lengthy) comments gives me a warm feeling inside. Praise in my comments box makes me blush. Amusing comments sometimes cause me to laugh out loud at my desk. My confidence has had a considerable boost and I think I walk taller as a result. And whatever happens in my often stressful life as a working mum, I have this jardin secret which keeps me sane and causes a little half-smile to play across my lips every time I think of it.

What a difference a blog can make.

The possibility of a meeting was not mentioned at first, as both of us were treading carefully, anxious not to rush things and frighten the other away. So we began by exchanging photographs, and more letters.

Obviously I look nothing like my adoptive family. My sisters both have wavy auburn hair and freckles and are often mistaken for one another. I have dark blonde hair and a pale complexion, and I’m petite in comparison. I have always wondered what it would be like to see echoes of myself in someone else’s face. I reasoned that if there were visible proof of our shared genetic heritage, it would help me to establish an immediate bond with my biological parents. I suspect they were just as disappointed as I was when the likeness was not immediately apparent.

I spent a long time poring over the photographs searching for genetic clues. Undeniably, when I was very young, I looked a lot like one of my twin brothers. However it is almost impossible to detect any similarity between the thirty something me and the teenager he has become today, and I struggle to see anything of my father or my other brother in me.

My mother’s face is deeply lined, despite the fact she is only in her mid-forties. It reflects the fact that life has not been kind to her. I can trace faint lines in the same places on my own face, but I hope they will never have cause to become as pronounced. Our features are not similar, but people have told me there are fleeting moments when we do have the same facial expressions. On one recent photograph, where we are both squinting towards the camera with the sun in our eyes, one such instant has been captured and the resemblance is quite striking.

I now see my biological parents two or three times a year. Letters are exchanged, but less frequently than in the beginning. For me at least, once the curiosity about the circumstances surrounding my birth had been satisfied, knowing the details of their day-to-day life was not so important to me, so there is inevitably less to say. The person I wanted to get to know was the fifteen year old girl who gave birth to me, and so it is when my mother talks about the past that she holds my attention. It would have been enough for me to hear her story, be reassured that she was well and happy and not harbouring too many regrets about having me adopted. I could have lived without continued contact. I hope this doesn’t sound callous.

For my mother on the other hand, getting to know me represented the beginning of a healing process. Once she had told her story she could start to find a way to exorcise the guilt which had been poisoning her life ever since she gave me up for adoption. There is no way I could break off contact now without inflicting more pain. I decided to go looking for her, and there are consequences to my actions.

I do feel a great deal of empathy for her, especially now that I too have experienced pregnancy and motherhood. In her company I am far more at ease than I would expect, given how little we know each other. But there is no escaping the fact that our lives have been very different and we struggle to find common ground. I have been to university and now live in a foreign country; she never left the village where she was born. I suspect I intimidate her a little.

My adoptive family will always remain my ‘real’ family, as far as I’m concerned. They raised me, loved me unconditionally and have seen me at my best and worst for the past thirty years. Their upbringing made me who I am today. When I have a problem, my first instinct will always be to reach for the telephone and call mum. The names ‘mum’ and ‘dad’ belong only to them. My sisters may not look like me, but we grew up together, we have a shared history. Regardless of blood ties, I don’t think the twins will ever feel like brothers, right now they are more like distant cousins.

I know that my biological family would like to see me more often, but there is a limit to how much I feel able to give. It is delicate finding the right balance, reconciling my needs with theirs. I do understand that they, and particularly my mother, feel the need to play a part in my life going forward, and in the life of her first grandchild.

I don’t regret seeking out my biological mother. Positive things have come out of it. But it hasn’t all been plain sailing, and I don’t think it ever will be.

Home from work, I reached into the post box and pulled out a handful of junk mail. And also a cream coloured envelope with an unfamiliar postmark. I had seen the handwriting on the envelope once before: it matched the signature on my adoption paperwork. It felt as though all the blood was draining out of my face as I stumbled blindly along the hallway to the apartment, clutching the letter. I didn’t allow myself to open the envelope until safely inside.

“Thank you so much for your letter which I hoped you would write one day…”

Tears streamed down my face as I read and re-read. One passage made me sob out loud. After some time had passed I became aware of my surroundings again and realised I was sitting on the stairs, my bag still around my shoulder, in semi-darkness. The front door stood ajar, my keys dangling from the lock.

And so, finally, I was able to read my biological mother’s version of the events surrounding my birth. She had been hoping against hope for almost thirty years that I would make contact with her one day. Having me adopted was not exactly her choice, as her parents (with whom she had always had a difficult relationship) had pressured her into taking that course of action. I was shocked to read that my sixteen-year- old mother had spent ten days in the maternity hospital after the birth, feeding me, bathing me and holding me in her arms, before giving me up. She remembered vividly driving away from the hospital in her parents’ car, her arms empty.

A couple of years later my mother got back together with an old flame and they married when I was four years old. More than a decade passed before she felt able to try for any more children. Eventually they had twin boys. The thing that she found hardest to explain to me, the main reason for her feelings of guilt and regret, was that the man she had married was my biological father.

When I finally made the decision to write, first and foremost I wanted to contact my mother to let her know that things had turned out well for me, that I was happy, that I was contemplating starting a family of my own. In return I hoped to find out that her life had not been ruined by her teenage pregnancy, that she had moved on and been happy too. I didn’t know for sure whether the address I had used was correct, whether my grandparents would pass on the letter to my mother, or indeed whether she would ever reply if she did receive it.

The one thing I had never contemplated, and I don’t know why, was the fact that my biological mother and father might actually be together.

I was a mess for a while. I couldn’t read the letter without crying and I read it every single day, more than once. I suppose I was unprepared for the emotions I had stirred up: I had no inkling I possessed such strong feelings, but they must have been lurking beneath the surface all along.

It was overwhelming. Far more than I had bargained for. I had wanted to find out about my biological mother. Instead I had found a whole family. And I wasn’t sure I knew what to feel about that.

The year was 1972. In those days it was the done thing for single teenage mums to have their children adopted. My biological mother was fifteen when she realised she was pregnant, and no longer seeing her boyfriend.

I was adopted at birth by a couple who had been unable to conceive and had spent several years on adoption agency waiting lists.

The photographs taken of mum and dad holding me in their arms on the day they finally brought me home speak volumes. My new mum looked radiant.

I cannot remember a time when I was not aware that I was adopted. I was told when I was too young to understand so it feels like I’ve always known. Two years later when my parents began proceedings to adopt a baby brother, my mother discovered she had conceived naturally. I have two sisters. The three of us are very different, although they look similar, and I do not. But I don’t remember ever minding this fact. Or feeling less loved.

As a child I liked to shock adults by mentioning out of the blue that I was adopted and took a perverse pleasure in their visible discomfort as they tried to gauge how they should react. Being adopted made me feel a bit special. It was also full of dramatic potential. I had (I suspect very common) fantasies about my biological parents being fabulously wealthy and my one day inheriting a fortune. A favourite daydream was that I would see someone with my face walking towards me in the street and just know that we were related. A half brother or sister, or my mother herself. Or I imagined being attracted to a younger guy, only to find out that he was actually my half brother.

At the magic age of fifteen I thought a lot about the hell my biological mother must have gone through – not an easy thing to conceive of, as I hadn’t even had my first kiss at that stage – and I was deeply superstitious about history repeating itself.

Mum, a family history enthusiast, showed me all the adoption papers and even got hold of a copy of my biological mother’s birth certificate. The papers showed her maiden name, and gave scant details about her circumstances: she had met my father in the park, failed her ‘O’ Levels during the pregnancy. We knew her parents’ address, so I always knew that answers to any questions I might have were less than an hour’s drive away from where I lived with my adoptive family.

Whenever I talked about being adopted, my friends said that if they were adopted they would search for their parents. They would have to know. My reticence was a mystery to them. But it didn’t strike me as necessary to find my mother. I already had a family and, although we had our ups and down, like everyone else, I didn’t ever feel as if any important part of me was missing.

I had also convinced myself that my mother would have tried to put the whole traumatic experience behind her, and now quite possibly had a family who knew nothing of my existence. She might not want any contact with me. After watching the film ‘Secrets and Lies’, I admitted to myself that another of my fears was that my mother would be like the Brenda character, and if we ever did meet, we could well have very little in common.

So for a long time I did nothing. Until one summer’s day in 2001, when I decided to write my biological mother a letter.

click here for further posts about adoption.

I would describe myself as an agnostic, I think. I don’t have any strong beliefs about the existence or non-existence of some kind of deity. But I don’t have any certainty either, so I don’t think the word ‘atheist’ is appropriate.

I was christened Church of England, and as a child went to both the C of E and Methodist Sunday schools in my village. Not simultaneously, I hasten to add. I ‘defected’ to the Methodists because my friends went there and it was more laid back; I crossed back over to the other side when I was too old for Sunday school to join the choir. The Methodist choir in the village church was made up of old ladies with pink rinses and thin, reedy voices, the attraction of the C of E choir on the other hand was the ‘proper’ flowing robes and wooden crucifixes on a string and that musically they took themselves rather more seriously. And if my memory serves me correctly I think there may have been a boy I was interested in. Although quite how I thought I’d make an impression wearing my NHS glasses and choir robes I really don’t know. I quite enjoyed the singing, but I remember the Sunday services being particularly tedious as the priest wasn’t much of an orator and his sermons were long drawn out affairs.

My subsequent fall from grace came about for several reasons.

I got lazier and I started to want a lie-in on a Sunday. I also started to resent being ‘forced’ to do anything. On principle. I was entering a phase where I questioned everything, religion included. I wasn’t at all sure I believed in any of it, and even if I did, I failed to see how attending church every week was necessary.

And then there was the A-Team. Choir practice was on Friday evenings. So was the A-Team. Everyone at school watched it and I hated feeling left out. Faced with such powerful arguments, and after I’d accidentally overslept three Sundays in a row, my mother realised there was no point forcing the issue. I was eleven years old. I’ve attended a couple of weddings and carol services since. Other than that, I tend to visit churches to admire their architecture when we’re on holiday.

Now I am a parent. We live in a country where catholicism is the main religion, but state institutions (and therefore all schools) are secular. The Frog is a non-practising Catholic, although he did attend a private Catholic infant school with real nuns (ostensibly because it was close to his mother’s place of work) and even went on a school trip to the Vatican to see the Pope one Easter.

My dilemma is this: what do I teach the Tadpole about religion? Should I buy her a book of bible stories some day – for her general culture and because I think many of the principles taught by Christianity are sound guidelines to live by – and explain that some people believe in God, but that I’m not one of them?

Am I going to deprive her of the magic of seeing a nativity play at Christmas and singing carols? The right to have a crush on a guitar playing Sunday school teacher or choirboy? How will I explain to her what happens to people when they die when the time comes without upsetting her if I’m going to leave angels and heaven out of the equation?

Clearly the Frog and I both had some religious education and then were free to make up our own minds when we were old enough to do so. How can I give Tadpole the same freedom?

When the Frog and I decided the time had come to procreate, it never once occurred to me to give up my job.

First compelling reason: money. Despite the Frog’s executive title, his job in advertising doesn’t pay any better than my secretarial 9-5. One salary will not pay the rent and would certainly not stretch to a mortgage. It was hard enough surviving on state benefits (about € 450 per week) for the five months I was on maternity leave. If I’d extended this (possible in theory up to 3 years) I would have received no financial aid whatsoever, just the right to claim a job from my (very pissed off) employer at equivalent pay once the time was up.

Secondly, in France the number of women who return to work far outnumber those who do not, and childcare is pretty affordable in comparison to the UK. I pay about € 700 a month for a full time childminder, who looks after the Tadpole and two other girls in her own home, but also takes them to the library, to a music appreciation class and a playgroup, as well as to the park every afternoon. If I’d managed to get a place in a state run crèche (which would have required relentless badgering of the directrice de crèche on my part, something I wasn’t motivated enough to do), it would cost even less. It means that continuing to work is financially more attractive than staying at home.

Finally, and most importantly, I was going out of my mind home alone. Everyone I know in Paris works, and during my leave I couldn’t shake off a feeling of guilt that I should be working too – the same feeling I get when I’m off work ’sick’ with nothing to do but watch daytime television. I had no other stay at home mum friends to speak of, despite the fact that I belong to an expat mums network. It was summertime and everyone was away on holiday, and in any event they tend to live at the other (more affluent) side of Paris, and the pediatrician’s advice (which as I new mum I followed to the letter) was to avoid the hotbed of harmful bacteria that is the Paris metro for the first twelve months or so. The perspective of continuing to spend long days alone with only the tiny, and to be honest at that stage not particularly entertaining, Tadpole for company was terrifying.

It’s now just over a year since I returned to work, and I have to say that despite the loudly voiced reservations of my family in England, it is working really well. Tadpole loves her childminder, and has formed a very strong bond with the other two children she cares for. They greet each other in the mornings with cries of excitement and bisous and it’s a lovely sight to behold. The time we do spend together is really precious and I love the look of delight on her face when I arrive to collect her in the evenings. After which we play. Until Eastenders starts, by which time she must be tucked up in bed.

For my part, I have an adult life by day, filled with grown up conversations that don’t revolve solely around being a mother. And yes, discussing what is happening on Eastenders or 24 ,or whatever else I happen to be watching, and bitching about our bosses is the kind of social contact I do not feel able to live without. I don’t think about Tadpole much during the day, because my life as a mum and my life at work feel very separate, but on the way to pick her up in the evenings I can feel my excitement growing as the metro draws closer to home.

In summary: I’m a working mum out of choice and I’m happy that way.

So, why is it then that I felt so horribly guilty whilst writing this post?

I am regretting my rant about hypochondriacs somewhat, as I have a sore, ‘grated’ throat and swollen glands today and am feeling particularly sorry for myself (although I’m told my husky voice is quite sexy). I really fancied a day in bed, but my Britishness dictated that I must turn up to work drugged up to the eyeballs instead, blow my nose ostentatiously, generally cough and splutter over my colleagues and propagate my germs more efficiently through the air conditioning system.

Plus it’s bonus/evaluation time of year, so a bit of conspicuous martyrdom can’t hurt.

I have posted in the past about my place of work and some of my colleagues. I was initially reluctant to say what I do for a living, but I have decided to ‘come out’ today.

I’m a secretary. There, I said it. Or Personal Assistant if you prefer. Quite frankly I don’t give a damn what you call it: I’ve had roles where I virtually ran the office where I was a ’secretary’ and others where I did mind-numblingly tedious work as a ‘PA’. The title in itself doesn’t mean a great deal.

In my various incarnations I have worked for a team of investment bankers (fast moving, lots of arrogant people, well-paid), for a start-up (don’t talk to me about stock options), in the office of the president of a luxury goods empire (free perfume, good Christmas presents, rather stifling atmosphere) and now for a small English firm (Cadbury’s chocolate, Tetley tea, beers after work).

After university my only goal was to live in Paris and learn to speak French like a native. First I taught, and once my time on the exchange programme was up, I decided to do a bilingual secretarial diploma. What I first saw as a well-paid, stop-gap job while I worked out what I really wanted has become what I do and who I am. And I enjoy it: organising things/people appeals to the bossy, obsessive side of my nature. The fact that I have to work in French keeps me on my toes. But while I’m not ashamed of being a secretary, I can’t help feeling that I was supposed to have more ambition, that I owed it to myself to aim higher, that I haven’t done myself justice.

The downside to this job is that my longevity often depends on that of my boss. I have left more than one company because my boss did, and I had no desire to be ‘inherited’ by someone I had no affinity with. Affinity is also a problem – it is important to get on well with one’s boss, but not too well or else the rumour mill will crank into action and before you know it the entire office assumes you are having a torrid affair.

I recently watched the film ‘The Secretary’ (odd but intriguing), which has left me with some rather disturbing mental images.

I don’t see any parallels with my job. But please excuse me while I just go and pick up a fax with my teeth…

Mr Frog won’t marry me.

Until recently, this didn’t bother me at all. I have long thought that marriage was not for me. I don’t practise any religion. I’m sad to say that I consider myself a bit old for a white dress, and neither of us comes from a wealthy family, so we would be the ones footing the bill. Spending cash on a wedding comes low on my list of priorities. More importantly though, I’ve just never thought it necessary. We are happy as we are, and have been for almost nine years, and I couldn’t really see how a ring on my finger would change anything.

However, my point of view has changed with the advent of the Tadpole. For admittedly rather unromantic reasons.

France, patriarchal society that it is, has still not got around to passing the law which was supposed to give unmarried couples the right to give their child both their surnames. It was supposed to come into force back in September 2003, but was quietly shelved and will allegedly resurface in 2005. Unless it’s postponed again. So the Tadpole has her father’s surname only. I feel a pang of jealousy every time I see it written down: it is a name that they share and which I do not.

Incidentally, whenever I travel alone with her, I take her British passport. As our surnames don’t match, if she was using her French ID card I could be asked to prove that I am her mother, and even be asked for a legal document in which her father gives me permission to take her out of the country! When she’s travelling as a Brit however, I could be a child smuggler for all French customs care, and am waved straight through.

My other arguments in favour of marriage include the fact that I’d like to get dual British/French nationality in order to be able to vote here, as French politicians’ actions tend to have a direct bearing on my life. I’d also like to get my hands on all Mr Frog’s cash and his share of our flat (when we buy one), should anything happen to him, and vice versa. Even his pension if we make it that far. As it stands, despite the small detail of having had a child together, I have as much right to inherit his stuff as a flatmate would (i.e. zero). Granted, Tadpole would inherit, but I suspect that would make for complications if she were a minor at the time.

So, I’ve changed my mind. Not because I have suddenly become pro-marriage, but because sadly the French legal system does not move with the times (there are just as many unmarried couples with children as there are married ones these days) and relegates me to the position of second class citizen.

Mr Frog, however, remains unmoved by my myriad pragmatic arguments. If you want to have a go at convincing him on my behalf, be my guest:

Monsieur Frog@gmail.com