Guest post: JenX67 on Madeline

I got her! One of my favorite bloggers, guest-posting here! I tried to get Jen of JenX67 when I went to Paris in May, but her entire house fell sick, so instead a wrote a post in homage of her.  I cannot tell you how much I admire Jen.  She is a very talented writer and beautiful person, can’t you tell by that smile?

She is like my little memory fairy. I struggle with my memory and with 3 out of 4 grandparents with dementia or Alzheimer’s, I sometimes fear for the worst for myself.  The posts where Jennifer talks about things from her childhood or from the childhood’s of Generation X people, never fail to bring forth memories long forgotten.

Today she writes about memories from a very special book which happens to be about a little French girl named Madeline.

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When I was a little girl, I loved to read my older sister’s copy of Madeline, the story of a little French girl who lived in a Catholic boarding school and who had to have her appendix out. The book was taller and thinner than most children’s books, and it had a pink fabric cover. My sister had checked it out of the school library in Houston, and it was never returned. When the family moved back to California the book went with them, and later it followed me through countless moves to Colorado, Texas, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma.

In 2000, I gave my daughter a copy of Madeline for her 3rd birthday, with a promise that someday I would take her to Paris. She is 12 now, and we still haven’t made it, but their is still time for this dream to come true.

I never intended to give my daughter’s French names; it’s just how things worked out. I loved the name Juliet, but the spelling was too tragic, so I chose the French version, Juliette. My married surname is Irish, so when my second daughter was born in 2007, I wanted to give her an Irish name. I have always loved the name Bridget. It was Juliette’s idea to use the French spelling, and so her little sister was named Bridgette.

Madeline captured my imagination like no other book I’d ever read. I simultaneously pitied and envied the little redhead. Clearly, her upbringing was elite, marked by private boarding schools and uniforms; nuns and trips to places far flung from the tumbleweeds and sand dunes of West Texas and the Ozark Mountains. Those places were present in my childhood. Even then I knew I would be an adult before I set eyes on the illustrations of Paris present in the book – the Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Church of the Sacre Couer and Tuileries Gardens, just to name a few.

But, I pitied Madeline. Her parents were absent when she screamed out in the night. It would have been my father answering my call, carrying me down the stairs and to the hospital. And, as much as I wanted to be Madeline, I really did not want to be her at all. I did not want to grow up away from my father. I did not want to be one of 12 little girls in two straight lines, brushing my teeth and going to bed without my sisters and brother and my mother’s bedtime stories of the 12 dancing princesses and Little Red Riding Hood.
I did, however, want to have my appendix out. My tonsils, too, like Cindy Brady.

There was never a question that when I had children, I would go to the ends of the earth to provide them a quality education. When I divorced when my daughter was just a few months passed her first birthday, this resolve grew stronger. As a single mom, I knew that it was even more critical that I seek the unique environment and support available through parochial education. I chose a convent school run by the Carmelite Sisters of St. Therese of the Infant Jesus. From pre-K through 4th grade they helped me raise my daughter Juliette. Their brown habits and dresses were a daily reminder of the sacrificial lives they led and of which Juliette and I were both benefactors.

I remarried when Juliette was five, and today, have two more children. Sullivan will begin Kindergarten at the same convent school in August. These shades of Madeline are still all around us, with eternal optimism that someday, we will see The Opera, The Place Vendome and Notre Dame. And, Juliette, someday, I will take you to Paris.

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Tagged as: French books, Madeline, Paris