I picked Mimi up from school on a Friday afternoon in June. In the pitch-dark dortoir, or nap room, I located my four-year-old among the tiny bodies curled up on miniature bunk beds. She opened her eyes and smiled. It was time for our adventure.
A train and a chauffeured car ride later, Mimi and I were clinking crystal—fresh-pressed OJ and champagne, respectively—in the lobby of Coquillade, an 11th-century Provençal hamlet cum 21st-century resort surrounded by olive groves and rolling vineyards. A cypress-tree-lined path led to our palatial suite outfitted with a Finnish sauna and private terrace overlooking the lush Luberon Valley. The next morning, Mimi nodded off in a bike seat as I peddled us past Julius Caesar-era stone bridges and sun-drenched fields of lavender. When Mimi stirred, we stopped so that she could gather a bouquet as diligent bees buzzed from flower to flower. The air was warm and honey-sweet.
The Provence trip and swanky amenities were perks of my job as a travel journalist, and I readily accepted them for Mimi. She knew that things at home had recently changed, that suddenly maman and papa had separate apartments—but she didn’t grasp why. She didn’t know that we wouldn’t be traveling to New York that summer, to be with my family and her American cousins, as we had every year previously. She had no idea that, per a French judge’s decision, I required my soon-to-be ex-husband’s authorization to travel overseas with her, and that he refused to give it. If divorce tends to be hell, divorce in a foreign country with a child involved is the ninth circle, particularly when your partner plays the one card that will never be in your hand.
What Mimi did know was that she was going to be a florist when she grew up, and if that didn’t pan out, a painter. With all the things that were beyond my control, a weekend in the land of lavender and sunflowers was one thing I could give her.
I didn’t have a passport until college. One study abroad session in Salamanca, where I spent days with Cervantes and nights with cervezas in smoky discotecas, and I was hooked. I returned to Spain to live twice, in Madrid and then Bilbao, and studied abroad in Paris during grad school. It came as a surprise to no one that I ended up marrying a French-Spanish guy, or that after two years in New York, we decided to give his native city, Paris, a try. It was ironic, then, that a Quixotic spirit led me to France and ultimately, I found myself unable to leave. Although I could legally travel to New York, the idea of leaving behind my French-American daughter didn’t sit well. I discovered the bitter flavor of resentment, of feeling simultaneously pushed from the only home I had known in France and trapped in a city that was his, not mine. So began my summer in Paris.
One early Monday morning, outside my apartment, Mimi clung to me. How much? I asked her. Moon and back, she answered. I pried her little hands from around my neck, passed her to her dad, and they disappeared into a car. I wandered around the 9th arrondissement, where every corner held memories of us—the butcher shop we’d visit when I was pregnant, to indulge in one of the glistening, twirling, roasting chickens, their fat dripping on piles of crispy potatoes; Cafe M, where we would stop for a verre when Mimi was a baby and we were beaming new parents, and one glass always turned to two, and we took to calling Mimi la doyenne of Cafe M—memories of happy times and, occasionally, unhappy times, when I assumed we’d always be together, regardless. Alone, I felt as empty and aimless as a paper bag.
It’s not like you’re trapped in Oklahoma, said my friend, as she pressed a knife into a terrine de campagne au poivre. We were seated hip-to-hip at the marble bar of a Belleville restaurant called Soces, double-dating a pork paté and oeufs mayo topped with silvery sardines. True, I laughed, and popped a cornichon into my mouth. For a newly single food and travel writer, there were worse places to be stuck. Free from the heaviness of an unraveling marriage, I could rediscover the city. I could try to enjoy the feast, even if it wasn’t moveable.
During the days when Mimi was with her father, I wrote, and evenings were easily filled—at the Filmotèque, where I watched Eternal Sunshine for the umpteenth time; in a candle-lit cave à manger where girlfriends and I passed around bottles of funky pét nat and plunged forks into ceramic bowls of burrata topped with chili crisp and ceviche showered in dill. Road trips to the Hauts-de-France and weekends in le Sud.
When Mimi returned, I became a mom again. Her pink scooter was her chauffeured vehicle all over town. I tugged her to the zoo in the Bois des Vincennes and aboard lumbering river cruise ships on the Seine. We rolled to the Eiffel Tower, where she chose a fistful of teeny tower keychains from a salesman’s blanket, and to the Place de Clichy cinema, where we splurged on the extra large bucket of popcorn.
One Sunday afternoon, we scooted to the elegant Park Monceau for a playdate picnic. While Mimi and her friend climbed on a statue of Frédéric Chopin, the parents and I sat barefoot on a blanket with baguettes and slowly softening cheeses. The mom said that they were soon traveling to Spain to visit her family and then to Germany to visit his. Her almond eyes filled with empathy. What about you, she asked. We’ll be here, I shrugged. The pit in my stomach rose to my throat as the reality of my powerlessness washed over me once again.
The fun and the sun culminated in a first-class tantrum. I lugged Mimi and the scooter all the way home, then up five floors to our apartment. I poured my now sleeping child onto my bed, which was just behind a bookshelf from hers. I stroked her blonde curls and said the silent prayer familiar to all moms in the thick of a difficult divorce: God, I hope I’m doing a good job.
Mimi had traveled with her dad to Brittany for two weeks and when she got back, my mom arrived from New York. I spotted her in the crowd at Charles De Gaulle, backpack strapped to her front to fend off any would-be thieves aboard her Air France flight. Her face crinkled as she swallowed back tears and outstretched her arms. My eyes welled up, too. I should have been flying eight hours to visit her, yet there she was, showing up for me—confirmation that the will to protect your child is unending.
We spent our days rifling through home goods stores near the Madeleine church. In the evening, we’d pick Mimi up from a neighborhood camp program and skitter over to the Terrasse Choron. While much of the city was teeming with tourists, my quartier petered out to a quiet lull. We’d sit on sticky Gatti chairs with our icy drinks, the condensation sliding down the glasses, and soak in another languid August night. My typically shy daughter would march inside and ask the young waiter with a mop of inky black hair for a scoop of strawberry ice cream. Bien sûr, ma grande, he’d answer. Mimi and I were both starting to feel like regulars.
For five years, I had existed in Paris as a we. During my summer in France, I discovered that I could rebuild a nice life as a me. The boundaries of my Paris had expanded. New memories were thrown into relief and old ones were falling out of focus. The heartbreak and the hardships would always be part of my Paris story. But they could also be just the beginning.
In the final gasps of summer, we decamped for a few days to Deauville, a couple of hours from Paris by train. On the beach, Mimi’s fist held a taut white string, on the other end of which a cobalt blue butterfly with lemon yellow streamers fluttered in the sea breeze. Her golden ringlets danced with the wind and her rainbow-striped bikini seemed electrified under the cloudy sky. My mom, with her white baseball cap and cotton T-shirt that screamed “SALT LIFE” on the sleeves, helped Mimi with shepherding the kite. I lay belly-up on a towel, propped up on my elbows. My daughter turned to me with a toothy grin and a light in her eyes that could not be dimmed by matters of the adult world. She was concerned with the kite and the barrel-chested man scooping wiggly, translucent jellyfish out of the water and how many sea shells we could collect and whether I would let her have another orange ice pop. And it was better that way.
One day she might understand how hard I fought to keep her blissfully unaware that summer; how many times I carried her up those stairs; how many miles I pulled her on that pink scooter; how many smiles I forced through a soul heavy with tears; how it took my strength and I gave it all. But until then, I would shoulder the weight—the burden and privilege of being her mom. Yes, I answered my prayers. I’m doing my best.
