Read Bringing Up Bebe for Free Online Page A

and get none.) Parenting magazines run long features on how to minimize the damage that pregnancy does to your breasts. (Don’t gain too much weight, and take a daily jet of cold water to the chest.)
    French doctors treat the weight-gain limits like holy edicts. Anglophones in Paris are routinely shocked when their obstetricians scold them for going even slightly over. “It’s just the French men trying to keep their women slim,” a British woman married to a Frenchman huffed, recalling her prenatal appointments in Paris. Pediatricians feel free to comment on a mother’s postpregnancy belly when she brings her baby for a checkup. (Mine will just cast a worried glance.)
    The main reason that pregnant Frenchwomen don’t get fat is that they are very careful not to eat too much. In French pregnancy guides, there are no late-night heapings of egg salad or instructions to eat way past hunger in order to nourish the fetus. Women who are “waiting for a child” are supposed to eat the same balanced meals as any healthy adult. One guide says that if a woman is still hungry, she should add an afternoon snack consisting of, for instance, “a sixth of a baguette,” a piece of cheese, and a glass of water.
    In the French view, a pregnant woman’s food cravings are a nuisance to be vanquished. Frenchwomen don’t let themselves believe—as I’ve heard Ame Kvestilrican women claim—that the fetus wants cheesecake. The
Guidebook for Mothers to Be
, a French pregnancy book,
says that instead of caving in to cravings, women should distract their bodies by eating an apple or a raw carrot.
    This isn’t all as austere as it sounds. Frenchwomen don’t see pregnancy as a free pass to overeat, in part because they haven’t been denying themselves the foods they love—or secretly binging on those foods—for most of their adult lives. “Too often, American women eat on the sly, and the result is much more guilt than pleasure,” Mireille Guiliano explains in her intelligent book
French Women Don’t Get Fat
. “Pretending such pleasures don’t exist, or trying to eliminate them from your diet for an extended time, will probably lead to weight gain.”
    About halfway
through my pregnancy, I find out that there’s a support group in Paris for English-speaking parents. I immediately recognize that these are my people. Members of the group, called Message, can tell you where to find an English-speaking therapist, buy a car with an automatic transmission, or locate a butcher who’ll roast a whole turkey for Thanksgiving. (The birds don’t fit in most French ovens.) Wondering how to bring cases of Kraft macaroni and cheese back from a trip to America? You ditch the elbow noodles, which you can buy in France, and put the cheese packets in your suitcase.
    Message members find a lot to like about France. In online forums, they marvel at the fresh bread, the cheap prescription drugs, and at how their own toddlers now demand Camembert at the end of a meal. One member chuckles that her five-year-old plays “labor strike” with his Playmobil figures.
    But the group is also a bulwark against what are seen as the darker aspects of French parenting. Members exchange the cell-phone numbers of English-speaking doulas, sell one another breastfeeding pillows, and commiserate about French medicine’s penchant for giving kids suppositories. A member I know was so reluctant to subject her daughter to French public preschool that she enrolled her in a brand-new Montessori, where the little girl was—for quite a while—the only student.
    Like me, these women see being pregnant as an excuse to bond, worry, shop, and eat. They fortify each other against the social pressure to lose their baby weight. “At some point I’ll get around to it,” one new mother writes. “I’m not going to waste precious time weighing out lettuce leaves now.”
    The most salient dilemma among pregnant Message members and other Anglophones I know is
how
to give birth.