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" A large part of the creative process is tolerating the gap between the glorious image you had in your mind and the sad thing you've just made. "
Pamela Druckerman
Sad
Image
Mind
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" Being an immigrant mother can be hard, but being a poor immigrant mother is much harder. You don't generally get to sit in cafes polishing your French by reading 'Le Monde.' "
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" Parisians won't admit that they go to the gym, let alone that they're scared of terrorists. "
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" Discrimination was a problem before terrorism. Now, the bad deeds of a few people have made life worse for millions. "
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" And as a mother of three with a full-time job, podcasts gave me the illusion of having a vibrant social life. I was constantly 'meeting' new people. My favorite hosts started to seem like friends: I could detect small shifts in their moods and tell when they were flirting with guests. "
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" Babies aren't savages. Toddlers understand language long before they can talk. "
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" Unlike the time sink of binge-watching a TV series, podcasts actually made me more efficient. Practically every dull activity - folding laundry, applying makeup - became tolerable when I did it while listening to a country singer describing his hardscrabble childhood, or a novelist defending her open marriage. "
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" Eating among the French certainly affected me. After a few years here, I gave up most of my selective food habits. "
Pamela Druckerman
Eating
Food
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" Usually, I'm so self-absorbed that my companion could be bleeding to death, and I might not notice. "
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" The French don't think everyone should have the same bank balance, but they're offended by extremes of inequality. "
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" I spend much of my free time listening to podcasts of American comedians talking to each other. "
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" French schools follow a national curriculum that includes arduous surveys of French philosophy and literature. Frenchmen then spend the rest of their lives quoting Proust to one another, with hardly anyone else catching the references. "
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Literature
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Rest
" I think kids in France, and certainly in my household, don't necessarily stop interrupting when you tell them, but they gradually become more aware of other people, and that means that you can have the expectation of finishing a conversation. "
Pamela Druckerman
Stop
People
Think
" Get rid of the idea of kids' food. Kids can eat whatever adults can eat. You know, there is one dinner, and everyone has the same thing. "
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Everyone
Dinner
Know
" I had applied to become French - or, rather, Franco-American, as I'm now a dual citizen - partly because I could: I'd lived and paid taxes here for long enough. "
Pamela Druckerman
Citizen
Enough
Long
" What you can say, what French parents say to their kids is, 'You don't have to eat everything, honey, you just have to taste it.' And it's that tasting little by little by little that gets kids more familiar with the food and more comfortable with it and more likely to eat it the next time. "
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Parents
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" While I love walking past those beautifully lit bookstores in my neighborhood, what I mostly buy there are blank notebooks and last-minute presents for children's birthdays. "
Pamela Druckerman
Walking
Past
Birthdays
" There's an American idea that you want to look as young as you can for as long as you can. If you can be mistaken for a teenager from behind into your 50s, then you've won; you've succeeded. "
Pamela Druckerman
Young
You
American
" I don't like rules, because rules, you have to follow. "
Pamela Druckerman
Because
Rules
Like
" I've got letters from all over the world saying what you're describing as American parenting is Chilean middle-class parenting, or it is Finnish middle-class parenting, or it is Slovak middle-class parenting. "
Pamela Druckerman
World
American
Parenting
" In your 40s, you kind of know how things are likely to go, and you're better at saying, 'You know what? That just doesn't suit me...' I remember thinking in my 30s, 'I should go to Burning Man. I could be a Burning Man person.' And in my 40s, I'm like, 'You know what? I'm never going to go to Burning Man.' "
Pamela Druckerman
Remember
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You
" I'm not an early adopter. I'll only start wearing new styles of clothing once they're practically out of date, and I won't move into a neighborhood until it's fully saturated with upscale coffee shops. "
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Clothing
Early
" If you want to know how old you look, just walk into a French cafe. It's like a public referendum on your face. "
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Look
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" When you're the foreigner and your kids are the natives, they realize you're clueless much sooner than they ordinarily would. I'm pretty sure mine skipped the Mommy-is-infallible stage entirely. "
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" Sometimes I just tell my kids, 'Outside of France, I'm considered completely normal.' This worked until we traveled to London. "
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" I guess we're all supposed to get used to living in a more dangerous world. "
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Dangerous
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" Even for natives, French satire is rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Its unspoken punch line is typically that things have gone irrevocably wrong, and the government is to blame. "
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Wrong
Blame
Funny
" Like practically everyone who grew up in Miami, I knew little about its history. We were more worried about mangoes falling on our cars. "
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Miami
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Falling
" When I moved to Europe 12 years ago, my biggest concern was whether I'd ever speak decent French. Practically every American I knew came to visit, many saying they dreamed of living here, too. "
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" Just as dressing well in your forties entails making choices that reflect who you are and not just wearing generic basics, looking good as you get older requires accentuating and enjoying what's specific to you rather than striving for cookie-cutter perfection. "
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" When my mother in Florida mentions that she's off to play golf, I think: Golf? In the age of Trump? "
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Think
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