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The American Fertility Association Blog
My Life in France
July 23, 2009 - Thursday
Posted by Ken
On our recent vacation to Paris, my spouse and I picked up a couple copies of Julia Child’s “My Life in France” forming the world’s smallest book club. As we began reading, we would share passages with each other that held special meaning to us. When we got about a third of the way in, we both were struck with the following:
“I, too, had tummy troubles. Ever since our trip to Italy with Philapop, my stomach was no longer a brass-bound, iron-lined, eat-and-drink-any-amount-of-anything-anywhere-anytime machine that it had been. I had suffered bouts of feeling quite queer the entire time we’d been in France. “It must be something in the water,” I’d say to myself. But when I continued to feel suddenly sick and gaseous, I declared: “Aha, pregnant at last!”
We had tried. But for some reason our efforts didn’t take. It was sad, but we didn’t spend too much time thinking about it and never considered adoption. It was just one of those things. We were living very full lives. I was cooking all the time and making plans for a career in gastronomy. Paul—after all his years as a tutor and schoolteacher—said that he’d already spent enough time with adolescents to last him a lifetime. So it was.”
It was just one of those things.
There was an acceptance of the fate that she and her husband had been dealt that I found really powerful. Clearly this was not a choice for Julia and Paul, but, as with everything in life, she took it in stride, and kept moving forward.
As a couple that has chosen childfree living, this passage resonated with us. She spoke of living “very full lives” and we thought; well we’re living very full lives, too. All will be well. At the end of the book, Julia discusses a time in life when friends and family began to die:
“Then came a period when our intimate friends and family began to slip off into the Great Blue Yonder. Charlie and Freddie died of heart attacks. Jim Beard died in 1985, at age eighty-one. Jean Fischbacher died the following year, at age seventy-nine. Simca, living alone in Le Mas Vieux, refused to put herself into a retirement home or to ire a nurse. I worried about ma belle soeur, but, as always, she was determined to do things her own way.
“I do often think of we childless ones, with no offspring to lean on,” I wrote Simca. “Avis, for instance, who evidently has only a year or so to live with her internal cancer, has her grandchildren to take her shopping, etc. Eh bien, we shall take care of ourselves . . . which we do very well. But I realize at our time of life the great difference between ourselves and those who have produced!” There were melancholy moments when I wished I had a daughter of my own to share things with.
But we cooks are a hard lot: Escoffier survived to be eighty-nine, after all, and my old chef Max Bugnard lived to be ninety-six. Perhaps Simca and I would make it to eighty-five, or even ninety.”
Memories of both our moms at the end of their lives came flooding back to me. I remembered vividly how, when they were dying of cancer, they had their sons and daughters to care for them. The thought “what about me” crossed my mind at the time, but I quickly dismissed it. “I’ll be fine – we’ll be fine.” And we very well may be. God knows I’ve seen parents abandoned by their children in their times of need all too often, so having children is certainly no guarantee of being cared for when one is sick or dying. Nor is a desire to have nursing care that you don’t have to pay for the reason that people should have a family.
But now the issue has resurfaced and I can’t get it out of my head. What will happen if we require long-term care?
And why we are so obsessed as a society with a baby, and not equally obsessed with the quality of life at the end of life? How much money is spent by the medical industry to help people conceive, relative to what is spent to provide our grandparents – once considered wise and treasured resources – the best care we can give them? Why will insurance pay to institutionalize a person, sometimes relegating them to substandard care and abusive treatment in so-called rest homes, but won’t pay for at-home care, which is far less expensive and much more humane?
Where does the breakdown happen along the continuum of life and why don’t we provide a seamless standard of care from pre-conception through death? With the debate raging on health care, this is the perfect time to be asking these questions.
Quotes from “My Life in France” by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme, Anchor Books, © 2006, pp 101; 329-330.
Ken Mosesian
Executive Director
Categories
Child Free Living
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