Pamela Druckerman Quotes
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Where Americans might coo over a child's most inane remark to boost his confidence, middle-class French parents teach their kids to be concise and amusing, to keep everyone listening.
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Eating among the French certainly affected me. After a few years here, I gave up most of my selective food habits.
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A lot of French comedy is satire.
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I've gotten used to being a foreigner.
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I don't like rules, because rules, you have to follow.
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I guess we're all supposed to get used to living in a more dangerous world.
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Podcasts immersed me in colloquial English and put me back in the American zeitgeist.
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One of the maddening things about being a foreigner in France is that hardly anyone in the rest of the world knows what's really happening here. They think Paris is a socialist museum where people are exceptionally good at eating small bits of chocolate and tying scarves.
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I was scared to say I was in my 40s because at that point, it sounded really old, and to out myself as a middle-aged human - I felt very awkward about it.
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When I tell French parents that I know lots of American kids who will eat only pasta or only white rice, they can't believe it. I mean, they can understand how the kid left to his own devices might do that, but they can't imagine that parents would allow that to happen.
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One of the many problems with parenting is that kids keep changing. Just when you're used to one stage, they zoom into another.
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Earnestness makes British people gag.
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Soccer may not explain the world or even contain the world. But it makes the world a slightly happier place.
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In my 40s, I expect to finally reap the average-looking girl's revenge. I've entered the stage of life where you don't need to be beautiful; simply by being well-preserved and not obese, I would now pass for pretty.
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Get rid of the idea of kids' food. Kids can eat whatever adults can eat. You know, there is one dinner, and everyone has the same thing.
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In the English books, the American kids' books, typically, there is a problem, the characters grapple with that problem, and the problem is resolved.
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Remember that the problem with hyper-parenting isn't that it's bad for children; it's that it's bad for parents.
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When I left for college, I put Miami behind me and tried to have a life of the mind. I got a graduate degree. I traveled. I even married a fellow writer, whose only real estate was a dingy one-bedroom apartment in Paris, where we lived.
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Around my neighborhood, I'm known as the American who talks to her computer while she types.
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I've been vacationing in western North Carolina and northern Georgia since I was a kid. I arrive, marvel at the mountains, and put on an unconvincing Southern drawl.
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When you're the foreigner and your kids are the natives, they realize you're clueless much sooner than they ordinarily would. I'm pretty sure mine skipped the Mommy-is-infallible stage entirely.
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When we're in the U.S., my kids instantly start snacking all the time. I don't know how it happens. There is just more food available all the time. There aren't all these little different varieties of snack foods in France.
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Soon after Donald Trump was inaugurated, I got a letter from France's interior ministry informing me that I was now French. By the time it arrived, I'd been French for nearly two weeks without even knowing it.
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While I love walking past those beautifully lit bookstores in my neighborhood, what I mostly buy there are blank notebooks and last-minute presents for children's birthdays.