42 JUNE 2019 VOGUE.COM
Up Front Adopted Family
Paris more than a decade ago, I’d spent my first seven
years mostly in the company of other Anglophones,
and my command of French was not spectacular. How
likely were my possibly future stepchildren to respect my
authority if my reading level was below theirs?
When I pushed past the restaurant door and found
the three of them at a table in the back, they were in the
middle of a round of Défis Nature, a card game where
players compare animal statistics. The children were just
as they appeared in pictures: Zacharie a miniature copy of
his father, with eyes the size of dinner plates; Irène dark-
haired and pale, like a juvenile Snow White with missing
front teeth. They gave me little soda-sticky kisses on both
cheeks and watched as I dug through my purse for my
asthma inhaler. Inviting me to play a round, they giggled
when I haltingly shared what little I knew about marine
biology, and walked me through their favorite dishes on
the menu. I ordered extra eggplant.
Stéphane was glowing.
So far, so good, but then I’d liked my
own stepmother at first too. A lively
former real estate agent who wasn’t
shy with her opinions, she married
my brilliant, mischievous father when
I was ten. Their union lasted only
four years, but well before it ended,
she had taken to openly criticizing
my mother—who lived nearby in
Los Angeles and was working hard
to establish her own interior-design
business. When they moved across the
country and I refused to accompany them, my father and
I went years without speaking. I would do better, I told
myself. I would never compete with Zacharie and Irène’s
mother—nor monopolize their dad.
Stéphane’s custody arrangement gave him two weeks
with Zacharie and Irène every month, and I spent much
of this time with the three of them in his little attic
apartment. His bedroom was off the open kitchen,
and the kids were tucked up under the rafters in a loft
nook lined with hardcover comic books. After dinner
on weekends we’d all play Mille Bornes, the street-
racing card game with swinging early-1960s graphics
that I knew from my own childhood, thanks to my
Francophile mother. They appreciated my winning
technique: dispensing with attacks on other players
to concentrate on racking up miles. (I learned that the
phrase prout prout Camembert can be a devastating
clapback on a too-celebratory opponent when sidelining
them with a flat tire or empty tank.)
They asked me questions about my work as a travel
writer and journalist and thought it was cool that
sometimes I stayed in chic hotels just to write about them.
They liked to try their English out with me, their accents as
thick as custard.
As the weeks led into months, contours emerged.
Having been raised in 1970s L.A., I was appalled at the
amount of sugar they consumed. French kids start theirday with juice and toast loaded with jam, and consider a
pain au chocolat at 4:00 p.m. their human right. I could
see they resented it when I frowned at their requests for
orange juice after school. They also couldn’t understand
why I took so many vitamins. I tried to explain it was my
Californian illusions of self-improvement, but that went
over their heads. Irène, who has always loved to draw,
composed portraits of us all, featuring our personal
totems: “Stéphane and his telephone. Alex and her
medicines.” Even if I was now the resident hypochondriac,
I was touched to be included.
It was clear that I was not the most relaxed member of
this group—even as I compulsively wiped up the rings
their glasses of juice left on the table. They would flinch
as I did this, which shamed me. (I’ve now converted to
wax-coated tablecloths.) French children are raised to be
more deferential to adults than their counterparts in the
U.S., so I had it easier than I would
have back home. But the French
way is not perfect. The schools here
are oppressive and authoritarian
compared to the education I’d
received, encouraging (to my eye)
rote memorization rather than critical
thinking. I couldn’t contain myself
when Zacharie and Irène were required
to recite poetry they never discussed in
class: “You don’t even talk about the
author?” Not until junior high, they
said. Stéphane was a product of the
same system and pointed out that the
kids needed to maintain good relations with teachers who
could be surprisingly vindictive toward free spirits. I was
setting an unwise example.
All of this said, I had pretty well cleared the first stage.
Soon came time for the next: meeting Stéphane’s ex,
Marie-Pierre. I was intimidated—she is a formidable
woman with a serious executive job, who gives her kids
a proper domestic structure. Stéphane and I are both
freelance (he is a production designer), and with our
frequent travel and constantly changing schedules, we can
be like a pair of mutually reinforcing teenagers. Would
she write me off as a flake? As part of the problem?
We set a meeting at a little wine bistro near the
Buttes-Chaumont park, close to Stéphane’s apartment.
He was late, so it was just his ex and me for a half hour.
“It’s not very smooth of him,” she said drily, and we
ordered what would be the first of two bottles of wine.
Mid–second bottle, Stéphane had arrived, and so had
my Californian propensity to overshare: I told her how
much I liked her children. Zacharie’s sensitivity and
sweetness were touching, and I identified with Irène’s
punk brio. While she maintained her reserve, I was
clearly auditioning, presumptuously telling her about
her own kids, and I hated it. At some point during my
monologue, she corrected my French. This made her no
different than just about every other French person I
have known, but in that moment it stung.First I would meet
Stéphane’s kids, then his
ex-wife and his parents.
Could I become part
of his family without
disrupting it—or
disappearing into it?