31. Learn the Price of Assimilation (€85)

The yellow Petite Bateau raincoat, or: how not to do parenting.

One of the questions they might ask you during your in-person interview for French citizenship is: how have you have integrated yourself into French culture and society? I think about this question any time I happen to do something that rings particularly French to me, like eat a burger with a fork or say "tak tak tak" as I fill out online forms.

Except none of those things really count towards citizenship because if they did, I'd be racking up the assimilation points for what we recently did in regards to my daughter's back-to-school wardrobe: we got the French raincoat.

Is this yellow Petite Bateau raincoat an emblem of modern day French childhood? I can't really say since I'm neither a French parent nor French child. All I know is that on cloudy mornings, my residential neighborhood is suddenly swarming with these €85 rain jackets among the under 7 years old set.

Because I am a soft millennial parent, I think about all the ways I didn't fit in as a child and ill advisedly try to make it easier for my own kids. When I was younger, that meant I wanted a Tamagotchi and for my family to drive an Eddie Bauer Edition Ford Explorer (why??). Now when I attempt to do this for my kids, I try to imagine what a typical French kid in the 15eme must want.

So we got the raincoat, probably more for ourselves than for our kid, who, at 4 years old, doesn't really care about where her raincoat comes from, as long as it has enough pockets to hold all the twigs and dirt she stuffs in there. But she proudly wore the new jacket on the first cloudy day of school. And then promptly lost it.

When I went to school the next day to dig through the lost and found pile of discarded coats and jackets, it was like an elephant's graveyard of abandoned Petite Bateau outerwear. It also didn't help that there were at least three other kids in her class with the exact same raincoat.

When three days went by with no sign of the jacket, I gathered my courage and wrote a message in my best French to the class WhatsApp parents group, asking if anyone had accidentally taken the jacket, while also acknowledging that it was like asking a group of Target employees if they'd seen a red polo shirt.

The next day we miraculously got the jacket back, but we knew we had to protect it against future mishaps, so we stuck an AirTag to its collar. That way, I can look at my phone and track the exact whereabouts of this €85 raincoat at all times. 

If I do ever get to the stage of an in-person interview for French citizenship, I will not bring up my kid's Petite Bateau raincoat as an example of me integrating my family into French culture. But maybe I will show them my phone and the Airtag tracker, showing them that my expensive ass raincoat kid is enrolled in a French public school, benefiting from a French education, on her way to becoming another discarded jacket in the lost and found an enlightened French citizen.