C’est la Vie

I’ve been fascinated of late by Julia_Child’s life. I’ve been looking for female childless role models, who had full lives without children. Did Julia struggle with infertility? I needed to know.

I picked up her autobiography, My_Life_in_France, recently. I admire a woman who is as passionate about food and cooking as much more than I am! I decided against reading the popular Julie&Julia because I read somewhere that Julia_Child did not care for its author Julie_Powell. She thought it was a stunt that some average Jane would try to cook all her recipes in Mastering_the_Art_of _French_Cooking in one year. Magic happens to own a copy of JC’s first famous cookbook. I’m someone who likes to cook, and I’m pretty good at it, but this cookbook totally intimidates me! So I have to agree with JC that I think that Julie_Powell is a fraud, not to mention a total crack pot. I tracked down her recent blog, and frankly, I don’t think she’s worth spending any money on. After she made some money on Julie&Julia and was “saved” by JC (hmmm, just noticed who’s initials Julia_Child shares with), she had an affair because she married her high school sweetheart young and never really had her own life, then when off and learned how to butcher animals, and wrote her second book about it, affair and all (while still married to her husband). While I did watch the movie Julie&Julia (on Netflix_streaming for free), I think Meryl_Streep, who I really like as an actress, blew it on her interpretation of JC. Judge for yourself:

One hundred pages into My Life in France, JC boils down her infertility to one terse paragraph. She starts off by describing a bout with stomach troubles:

“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 pans for a career in gastronomy. Paul – after all his years as a tutor and school teacher – said that he’d already spent enough time with adolescents to last him a lifetime. So it was.”

Hmmm, another woman who has a husband that doesn’t want to adopt. Mind you, JC wrote this when she was 91, fifty some years well past her childbearing prime and after an enormously successful culinary career. She was 49 when her first groundbreaking cookbook was published, and 51 when she started the first ever cooking TV show, “The_French_Chef”. All the reason to love her more, that she found success later in life when most women are mourning the loss of their youth. It would be interesting to know if she was really so laissez-faire about having children when she was younger.

JC was one class act. One thing she says is to never make apologies for your cooking, even if it’s completely awful. Which is why I disagree with Meryl_Streep’s interpretation of JC.* In that video clip above, the real JC does not disparage her mistake of the off omelet flip. She just states the facts, and moves on. Meryl’s JC makes Julia look like a doddering, insecure lady, which JC is the exact opposite!

I feel that JC never made apologies for her childlessness as well. I hope to emulate Julia someday, and enjoy my life sans les enfants without so much drama!

Life didn’t quite turn out for us, in terms of having children, the way I dreamed it would. None of it did. Don’t know if it ever will, but it seems to be completely out of my hands at this point. Magic says, “if it’s meant to be, it will happen.” I keep thinking, “maybe I’m meant to do something else with my life?” What would that be? I’ve already had the career I’ve always wanted. Not that I’m ready to drop-kick that. I still find great meaning to my work in my life. I can’t imagine not ever having a job to go to and being a SAHM.

I already have a very full life. I’ve thought about blogging about some of the things I am very passionate about, like cooking, gardening, and rock climbing. But that’s for another blog and another audience. If I ever decided to blog about these things, I’d probably create a whole ‘nother blog and persona so that I don’t keep identifying with the failure of infertility.

I do want it all. I want the career AND I want the kid. No apologies.

And so it is.

*I found an interview of Meryl_Streep when she was promoting Julie&Julia, and she said she thought of Julia_Child as the Dan_Aykroyd charicature he did in his famous SNL skit, which is how she does come off in the movie! http://www.hulu.com/watch/3523/saturday-night-live-the-french-chef