Myriam

Myriam’s return to law gives the Massé family a route out of the cramped domestic life that has begun to feel like a cell, but it does not resolve the conflict between work and motherhood. Instead, her career is rebuilt through a household arrangement that depends on Louise’s labor and elastic availability. Myriam is at once an ambitious professional, a mother troubled by the costs of ambition, and an employer whose care for Louise coexists with the power to set the terms of their relationship.

Identity and Background

Myriam lives with Paul and their children, Mila and Adam, in the family’s small fifth-floor apartment on Rue d’Hauteville, in Paris’s tenth arrondissement. The apartment is the smallest in the building. After their second child was born, Myriam and Paul divided the salon with a partition; they sleep in a narrow room between the kitchen and a window facing the street. Myriam’s chosen furnishings—secondhand pieces, Berber rugs, and Japanese prints—give the home a distinct character, but cannot enlarge the space in which the family is trying to live.

Before returning to work, Myriam has stayed home with the children. She loves them, yet recognizes that she has felt trapped and diminished by a life organized around their needs. Her distress is not simply a rejection of motherhood: she had refused to believe her children would obstruct her success or freedom, and grieves the discovery that she cannot pursue every part of her life without feeling that another part is being sacrificed. She had clung to an ideal of perfect maternity in which she could meet all her goals without becoming exhausted or resentful. Experience makes that ideal untenable.

Return to Legal Practice

The possibility of returning to law begins with a painful encounter with Pascal. After seeing him, Myriam goes home convinced that he may have mocked the diminished course of her life. Imaginary conversations keep her awake. The next morning, his text asks whether she is considering a return to law and proposes that they discuss it. Myriam leaps around the apartment in joy and kisses Mila, who asks why her mother is laughing. She later wonders whether Pascal sensed her desperation or simply recognized the value of hiring a former student he remembered as exceptionally serious.

Paul’s response is not the affirmation Myriam hopes for. When she tells him about the opportunity, he says he did not know she wanted to work. Their discussion turns bitter: he calls her inconsistent and asks what they will do about the children, while Myriam accuses him of selfishness. His ridicule makes her feel still more enclosed in the apartment. Once they have calmed down, they consider the practical barriers. It is late January, too late to expect a place in a crèche or a childcare center, and they have no connections at the municipal office. Their income would put them in a difficult bracket: too high for emergency assistance, too low for a nanny to be anything but a significant expense. They choose to hire one. Paul calculates that, with overtime, the nanny and Myriam will earn roughly the same amount, adding that the arrangement might make her feel fulfilled. Myriam keeps the exchange’s bitter aftertaste and resents him.

On her first day back, Myriam wakes before dawn, excited, and puts on a new skirt and heels. Louise tells her she looks beautiful and, with Adam in her arms, ushers her out, reassuring her that everything will be fine. At the office, Myriam finds again the concentration she remembers from her student years. She works before eight, alone beneath the small lamp on her desk, and becomes absorbed in her files.

Pascal gives her an office connected to his by a door they often leave open. Within two or three weeks he entrusts her with responsibilities that older colleagues have never received. Over the following months, Myriam handles cases for dozens of clients and accepts every file he offers, seldom complaining when work runs late. Pascal calls her perfect. Her caseload includes minor drug dealers, an exhibitionist, inept robbers, drunk drivers, debt cases, credit-card fraud, and identity theft. She is also expected to find new clients and undertake legal-aid work. Twice a month she goes to the Bobigny courthouse, sometimes waiting in a corridor until nine in the evening. She can be abrupt with bewildered clients, but she works hard to defend them: she rereads police records late into the night, searches for procedural errors, and learns her files by heart. Her effort brings referrals from former clients, and her name circulates among detainees.

Motherhood, Marriage, and Ambition

Myriam’s career does not erase her family life; the two claims remain intertwined in her sense of what she owes and what she wants. She has long resisted describing her children as an anchor pulling her down. Yet she recognizes that motherhood has made her feel she will always be incomplete, doing things badly, or sacrificing one portion of life for another. The pressure is intensified by the ideal she had set herself: to be successful without exhaustion and to avoid both martyrdom and the figure of the indomitable mother.

Her marriage to Paul carries the bodily history of pregnancy and childbirth. At a reception, Myriam experiences a sudden, self-directed desire, but her body with Paul is inseparable from the shared history of pregnancies: the swollen legs he massaged, the blood on the sheets, her vomiting, her labor, and his presence as she gave birth to their children. This memory does not negate her love for him; it shows how intimacy is bound up with the physical and emotional labor of family life. The work she longs to reclaim is therefore not a separate realm that can simply be added to motherhood without affecting it.

Myriam sees an image of effortless family perfection in Emma’s social-media portraits: blond children in a park, a school chosen to foster their gifts, and a husband who appears mostly as the photographer outside the frame. Myriam cannot tell Emma the thought she privately draws from watching Louise with the children: that they will be happy only when they no longer need one another, when everyone can live a life of their own. The thought expresses her desire for freedom, but also the paradox at the heart of the household: its members depend on one another, even as Myriam yearns for a life not governed by that dependence.

Hiring Louise and the Employer Relationship

The hiring process makes visible the assumptions that shape Myriam’s choices as an employer. Paul prepares interview questions and schedules thirty minutes for each candidate. His criteria exclude undocumented applicants from childcare, while accepting that undocumented people may work as cleaners or painters; he also rejects applicants he considers too old, veiled, or likely to smoke. Myriam, meanwhile, has been unsettled by Emma’s advice that a nanny’s children should be in her home country so that she will be more available. Myriam recognizes that she and her friends would condemn an employer who spoke about them in the same way, but avoids raising the issue with Paul, whom she sees as a pragmatist placing family and career first.

Myriam’s own screening is also shaped by ethnic and religious boundaries. She refuses to hire Malika, a Moroccan candidate with twenty years’ experience, despite Paul’s suggestion that she could speak Arabic to the children. Myriam fears that a shared language and religion would create an intimacy in which the nanny might comment on her life or ask favors. She describes herself as wary of immigrant solidarity. The refusal sits uneasily beside her awareness of discrimination: recognizing an unjust standard in Emma’s advice does not prevent Myriam from imposing her own forms of distance in the hiring process.

Louise’s first meeting with the family feels to Myriam like an obvious choice, almost love at first sight. Myriam repeatedly says that Mila chose Louise. When Louise arrives, Mila has just woken from her nap, upset by Adam’s cries, and hides behind Paul’s legs. Louise takes Adam gently and pretends not to see the girl, asking where the missing princess has gone. Mila laughs as Louise searches for her beneath the table and behind the sofa. The play gives Myriam an immediate picture of Louise’s ease with the children. Louise says that her husband is dead, that her daughter, Stéphanie, is nearly twenty, and that she is highly available. Her references include the Rouvier family, where she had cared for two boys for a long time. When Myriam and Paul call, the former employer calls Louise a second mother to her sons and says the separation was heartbreaking; she had even considered having another child to keep her.

Myriam’s relief at having found a capable nanny develops into a relationship marked by both gratitude and unequal power. She encourages Paul and Myriam to go out, and Myriam listens to her as a wise, caring person. When the couple returns from a party around four in the morning, Louise has fallen asleep on their sofa. Paul quietly covers her with a blanket. She begins sleeping there once or twice a week, without the arrangement ever being discussed openly. Myriam tells herself she will clarify the situation because Paul worries Louise might accuse them of exploitation. Yet she also feels secretly pleased that Louise undertakes household chores Myriam has never asked her to do. When Myriam apologizes for imposing, Louise reassures her that she is there for that purpose.

Myriam tries to soften the imbalance with gifts: inexpensive earrings, an orange cake, and clothes she no longer wears. She hides new purchases in an old cloth bag and waits until Louise has left before unpacking them, trying not to provoke jealousy or hurt. Paul praises her tact. These gestures demonstrate Myriam’s concern for Louise, but they do not replace clear limits on work and time. Louise’s availability continues to expand, while Myriam and Paul benefit from the hours and tasks she absorbs.

Time, Class, and Narrative Significance

The household’s growing professional success is described in the language of organization and overflow. Myriam and Paul’s days become a chain of tasks, obligations, and appointments; they change shoes in taxis and meet people important to their careers. Together they become the employers of a functioning enterprise, with objectives, income, and expenses. Myriam writes lists on napkins, sticky notes, and the final pages of books, then worries about throwing them away because she might lose track of what must be done. The household’s efficiency is real, but so is its reliance on labor that remains easy to overlook.

That reliance appears in the contrast between Myriam’s and Louise’s command of time. Myriam can immerse herself in legal work, build a caseload, and attend career-making meetings because Louise is present for the children and increasingly for domestic tasks. Louise, by contrast, prepares for work before dawn, takes a long journey from Saint-Maur-des-Fossés to the city, and fears that a moment of sleep or delay will leave the family waiting. The scene of Myriam being escorted out for her first day and reassured that all will be well makes the transfer of care seem effortless; the scenes of Louise’s early departure and expanding duties show what that effort costs.

Myriam’s position also belongs to a wider system of domestic labor that sorts women by race, class, migration status, and employment. At the playground and around the neighborhood, nannies form a dispersed workforce whose members know one another’s employers, routines, and origins. They speak Baoulé, Dioula, Arabic, Hindi, Filipino, and Russian around children dressed in similar clothes, their names written on labels to prevent confusion. Some workers are expected to be more punctual, gentle, and clean than others; some stay for years, while others disappear after a few months. Parents praise Louise’s cooking, constant availability, and the trust Myriam places in her, turning her exceptional service into a standard by which other workers may be measured. Myriam’s return to work is therefore both a personal recovery and a transaction structured by unequal access to time: her career advances through another woman’s readiness to be available.