Yo' Momma

Your mother is so French…

that when you were younger she insisted that you call her “maman.” The strange thing is, is that she’s not even really French. Her Francophilia began early on in high school when she became infatuated with Serge Gainsbourg and the French New Wave. She began affecting a slight French accent, which at first people thought of as slightly odd yet charming, but quickly became boring and pretentious. However, your mother never noticed the disapproval of others, or if she did she remained unconcerned. In fact, it may well have been this very disapproval that sent her ever more deeply into her love of all things French. She was simply too cosmopolitan, too avant garde, for Rochester, New York, and in her senior year she chose to study abroad in France. After a tearful farewell from your grandmother, your mother boarded a Pan Am flight bound for the City of Light: Paris! During the flight, she was so giddy she could hardly sit still and she plied the young stewardesses with questions about the Left Bank and the Champs Elysees. They took turns crouching next to her coach class seat to tell her about the nightclubs and discotheques that dotted nighttime Paris like glowing embers, calling out to the young and adventurous. They dreamily recounted stolen kisses and romantic views of the Seine from the ponts. Your mother swooned when they described Mont Martre and Ile de la Cite, dreaming all the while of a dark-eyed Frenchman to walk with her arm in arm down the narrow streets.

Hours later, when the plane arrived at Charles deGaulle airport, your mother was met just past customs by her host family, a slightly overweight yet cheerful couple and their 12-year old son. They drove with your mother not to Paris or even the outlying suburbs, but to Chartres, where she spent the next four months walking by herself to and from a small school house. The lessons were dreary and her host family forbade her from making the trip to Paris. Her only solace came at night when she would stare for hours out her second story window at the glowing image of the cathedral, one of the great wonders of European architecture. On weekends, when her chores and schoolwork were finished, your mother would walk to the cathedral and wander among the throngs of tourists. She never spoke with anyone, not wanting to reveal herself as an American. Hours later she would walk back to the modest house of the host family, but backwards, slowly backwards, always with an eye on the spires of the cathedral, careful not to trip over anything, hoping for something to happen, something she might one day tell her children about, anything.