This post is taken from the weekly newsletter “Darons Daronnes” on parenthood, sent every Wednesday at 6 p.m. To receive it, you can register for free here.
My eldest daughter, now 8, has been determined to become a falconer for more than a year – ever since she attended a show at Les Aigles du Léman in Haute-Savoie. What strikes me is the extent to which this career plan, which might seem a bit fantastical, is the object of a rational projection in her. “I don’t need to go to school, do I, to be a falconer?” I don’t even need the baccalaureate? Because I want to work at 20, I don’t want to study until I don’t know how old…”, she said to me one day. Before adding: “Besides, isn’t it too hard of a job? Because I don’t want to work too much. »
My daughter is following the debate on pension reform with interest and perplexity. The age of 64 seems to him canonical enough to finally put an end to the torture of work. Inevitably, she adds what constitutes one of the favorite mantras of our two eldest during family dinners: “In any case, what is certain is that I will never work as much as you. And I will NEVER be a journalist! »
I would point out that my companion and I both exercise this fine profession, and may have a slight tendency to invite work to the said dinner table. We would of course like to think that we are giving our children a fulfilling and exhilarating vision of our profession, but we have to believe that what we are showing them is rather a good dose of stress and wrinkled brows.
Living in a “kerterre”
Brief. We have become counterexamples. So much so that I wonder if my eldest daughter is not in the process of building herself a model of ideal life whose sole principle would be contained in a slogan: “Not like the parents”. So when she left school last week, she told me with feverish enthusiasm about her art class. “The teacher asked us to draw our ideal house. She told us about the “kerterres”. It’s small Norwegian houses [NDLR : bretonnes] that we build ourselves, with lime. There is a main room which can be used as a living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom. And afterwards, we connect it, if we want, to other rooms by a corridor. It’s a colliding habitat [sic] with nature »she concluded confidently. “Me, I want to leave at 16 to live in a “kerterre”. I will settle in the forest, I will create a vegetable garden. I will have hens, but no roosters, otherwise I will have chicks instead of eggs. Rabbits. A cow for milk. And everything will be nearby, I won’t need anything else. »
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