I picked Mimi up from school on a Friday afternoon in June. In the pitch-dark dortoir, or nap room, I located my four-year-old among the tiny bodies curled up on miniature bunk beds. She opened her eyes and smiled. It was time for our adventure.
A train and a chauffeured car ride later, Mimi and I were clinking crystal—fresh-pressed OJ and champagne, respectively—in the lobby of Coquillade, an 11th-century Provençal hamlet cum 21st-century resort surrounded by olive groves and rolling vineyards. A cypress-tree-lined path led to our palatial suite outfitted with a Finnish sauna and private terrace overlooking the lush Luberon Valley. The next morning, Mimi nodded off in a bike seat as I peddled us past Julius Caesar-era stone bridges and sun-drenched fields of lavender. When Mimi stirred, we stopped so that she could gather a bouquet as diligent bees buzzed from flower to flower. The air was warm and honey-sweet.
The Provence trip and swanky amenities were perks of my job as a travel journalist, and I readily accepted them for Mimi. She knew that things at home had recently changed, that suddenly maman and papa had separate apartments—but she didn’t grasp why. She didn’t know that we wouldn’t be traveling to New York that summer, to be with my family and her American cousins, as we had every year previously. She had no idea that, per a French judge’s decision, I required my soon-to-be ex-husband’s authorization to travel overseas with her, and that he refused to give it. If divorce tends to be hell, divorce in a foreign country with a child involved is the ninth circle, particularly when your partner plays the one card that will never be in your hand.
What Mimi did know was that she was going to be a florist when she grew up, and if that didn’t pan out, a painter. With all the things that were beyond my control, a weekend in the land of lavender and sunflowers was one thing I could give her.
I didn’t have a passport until college. One study abroad session in Salamanca, where I spent days with Cervantes and nights with cervezas in smoky discotecas, and I was hooked. I returned to Spain to live twice, in Madrid and then Bilbao, and studied abroad in Paris during grad school. It came as a surprise to no one that I ended up marrying a French-Spanish guy, or that after two years in New York, we decided to give his native city, Paris, a try. It was ironic, then, that a Quixotic spirit led me to France and ultimately, I found myself unable to leave. Although I could legally travel to New York, the idea of leaving behind my French-American daughter didn’t sit well. I discovered the bitter flavor of resentment, of feeling simultaneously pushed from the only home I had known in France and trapped in a city that was his, not mine. So began my summer in Paris.
