🇫🇷☕ Handing your child to French strangers

We live in one of those walkable neighborhoods that American Twitter dreams about. A community where you have multiple French cheese mongers within a ten minute walk. And your choice of mom-and-pop Italian restaurants. The kind of place where local grandmothers take the time to be sweet to the kids they see walking on the sidewalks. Even the redhead kids like mine.

My kid is cute (I am biased). He resembles a tiny British person, pale and strawberry blonde and a little haughty at times. He is mostly just chatty and expressive. Older Portuguese women stop me when I’m walking with him in the stroller to make faces at him. He loves this. He’s an entertainer.

Sometimes they want to hold him, which is generally fine by me. A few weeks ago my wife and I were at the park with our son before bedtime. A sweet older lady standing near us told us in Portuguese how adorable and happy our child was. She asked to hold him and we said “sure.” It’s a small community. And I’m pretty sure I was faster than her, just in case. He was thrilled to get more attention and I was relieved to give my arms a break.

The other day this kind of neighborhood congeniality really bailed me out.

I was grabbing a coffee early in the morning with my son after we had dropped our dogs off at their dog daycare. My son is, in the words of his pediatrician, “exceptionally active.” I have never seen him be still for more than two seconds. He is a joyful child who is only angry when he is confined in something like a high chair or a loving hug.

The dude wants to go. And that energy is channeled into exactly three things right now: biting stuff, climbing stuff, and stealing stuff. Which he does with the kind of abandon of someone who is not afraid of jail.

The coffee shop we visit is one of those third-wave modern coffee shops. Not the old school Portuguese bakeries that sell you an espresso that you drink while standing at the counter. This one has oat milk and an iPad for ordering. And a tip jar.

We walked in and I began to order at the counter while I held my gremlin child after parking the stroller outside. The place is railcar thin and will not accommodate a stroller. While I was busy selecting the oat milk option, my son managed to get his thieving paws on the glass tip jar.

He is not strong enough to lift the jar, but he is exactly strong enough to drag it off the counter and throw it on the ground. The glass jar crashed into the tile floor and exploded into a thousand pieces, sending Euro coins and shards of glass everywhere. My kid smiled.

I stood there, a squirmy toddler in my arms, embarrassed by the calamity. I couldn’t set him down on the floor in the middle of the shards of glass. I also needed to help clean up. So I figured I could strap him into his stroller outside the shop, keep an eye on him, and collect coins. He could make faces at people walking past. Again, relatively kid-safe neighborhood.

I started to place him into the stroller while apologizing profusely until the French offered their help. In addition to American expats and Russian digital nomads, the coffee shop is a favorite of local French parents. The French lycée and the French-American international school are both within a short walk of the cafe. A group of four to five moms (and exactly one dad) gather there almost every morning. They are regular enough that they have their own table outside.

They are always dressed as chic as you imagine but give off a vibe that they do not really care. One of them smokes cigarettes and makes it look cool as hell. The women are all attractive. None of them wear athleisure.

This is different from the everything about me. I always wear athleisure (and a ball cap from Cheval Blanc St. Tropez, a favorite hotel that happens to be French, but I think this hurts my cause more than it helps). My child is usually just wearing the pajamas he had on when he woke up. I care a lot.

Despite the cultural gulf, when they saw what happened and my attempts to find a place where the world would be safe from my kid, their apparent leader reached her arms out to take my son. As if it was no big deal. She just motioned to me to hand him over.

She told me they would entertain him while I helped clean. I asked if she was sure and she insisted. So I thanked them and pawned my baby off to this group of strangers.

The clean up took a while but every time I glanced over at my son he was beaming and chatting with the whole group. They were passing him around and he was doing his best to make all of them giggle. He was the center of French attention and he was loving it.

Now, every morning when we have time to visit, my son is greeted with a hearty round of “bonjour!” from the French ladies. He smiles - especially at their leader, who is his favorite and the exclusive recipient of his biggest smile.

My son learned an important lesson - if you are cute enough, you can do property crimes and the punishment is to be handed off to a group of charming French women. And I reconfirmed what I’ve known for a while - we are pretty lucky to live here.