The queues of traffic were the first clues that we’d made a mistake. We were on the last leg of a five-hour journey east, stuck just outside our destination, Annecy, the so-called Venice of the Alps.
Our nine-month-old son, kicking energetically in the back seat, had entered his third week of waking every 45 minutes at night. We’d chosen Annecy for a weekend getaway, hoping for the benefits of mountain air on sleep.
It was my partner who figured out the reason for our holdup, letting slip an uncharacteristic expletive, followed by “it’s the Fête de la Musique”.
La Fête de la Musique is precisely what it sounds like: a weekend where musicians of every imaginable skill and genre, from amateur middle-aged DJs to well-established teenage punk bands, take to the streets to perform for loud crowds in celebration of the summer solstice. In other words, possibly the very worst place to bring a baby in the hope that they will sleep better.
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A not-so whispered altercation passed between Yohann and I in the front of the car. How could a French person not have realised that it was this weekend? How could an Irish person who had even attended a party the previous year not have clocked the date? We continued on to the hotel in silence.
Maybe, Yohann said as we pulled into the parking lot, we should try ça va aller (it’s going to be fine), just for this weekend. He knew what he was saying. Ça va aller became my not-so-complimentary way of referring to what I felt was the self-absorbed, laissez-faire French parenting style.
At home in Ireland, my family rowed in smoothly with the schedule I’d devised for Luca: adjusting meal times, turning off the TV to respect screen time limits, and tiptoeing around in socks during nap time. In stark contrast, my French family made no such concessions. Instead, they liked to chorus ça va aller at me whenever they felt I was allowing my commitment to the schedule to unfairly interfere with my own personal pleasure.
Maybe it’s the Irish way, my mother-in-law had asked me once. I’d got up from the dinner table, leaving my favourite plate of food unfinished, to check on Luca playing in the adjoining livingroom. When he climbed into my arms for a snuggle, I hadn’t returned, despite not having eaten anything myself that day.
She means your self-sacrifice, Yohann explained after. I couldn’t understand that. So what if I missed a stroll in the afternoon sun to sit instead in a darkened room, contact-napping with Luca. And of course, I had given up running in the evenings because it clashed with the bedtime routine. It was normal that I had declined every coffee date with our friends while my baby was a newborn. Wasn’t the whole point of being a mother endless self-sacrifice?
Not in France, it seemed.
My issue with ça-va-aller-parenting had always been that it seemed selfish.
But watching the evening unfold in Annecy, I began to turn that over in my head and wondered if perhaps they had a few things right.
A pram passed us with a pair of tiny feet poking out, the parents stopping to listen to a beautiful jazz performer, apparently unconcerned by the noise. Fathers wore sleeping babies in slings, their wives walking alongside them blissfully, physically unburdened. Toddlers danced erratically to a drummer playing on kitchen utensils. Bedtime was non-existent and everyone was enjoying themselves. Seeing Luca leaning out of the pram to attempt to touch passing dogs, his own bedtime long gone, I even realised that I was having a very good time.
Eventually, Luca grew drowsy in the pram on the walk back to the hotel. Yohann took him into his arms and placed him directly into the cot. I stayed up until midnight, but when he hadn’t woken by then, I too drifted off. And all of us woke up the next morning at 8am. For the first time in his life, Luca had slept through the night.
Though not a full convert to ça-va-aller parenting, I no longer trash it as self-absorbed. There is something to be said for reclaiming life’s little pleasures, even if that pleasure means discarding a sleeping curfew and attending a street party.
My mother-in-law enjoys recounting this story at family reunions, where Luca and I are now active participants. She usually beams at the end and turns to me. Tu vois, she likes to say, ça va aller.
Avril King is from Dunshaughlin, Co Meath. She moved to France in 2019 and lives in Vendée with her partner and son.
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