Chapter 3 – Twenties

The twenties are the age when you stop dreaming your life and start building it. This chapter tells that decade with honesty: jobs that follow one after another, love that matures, motherhood that transforms, and a house built stone by stone, even when the builder goes bankrupt.  

Eight chapters, a decade of construction

Chapter 3 covers my twenties across eight narrative chapters: new jobs in London and Paris, quality of life in England, New York and the marriage proposal, the wedding in Niort, winter sports, the first pregnancy, the return to France, and the building of my family home.

What strikes the reader is the sheer scope of what gets built in ten years. An international career moving from a tour operator to Club Méditerranée, from a French lingerie company to an American pharmaceutical group. A wedding celebrated across two days between two countries and two cultures. A child born on 8 March 1992. And a house designed on a computer, built with our own hands, seen through to completion despite the builder’s bankruptcy.  

What this chapter is about

The marriage proposal in a small New York restaurant, interrupted four times by the waiter, before he finally manages to get down on one knee. The wedding in Niort stretched over a week, with onion soup served in bed at six in the morning following local tradition, and a strawberry cake as the wedding centrepiece. The three-hour daily commute through Paris with a baby left ten hours at the childminder’s, and the guilt that comes with it. The mini-digger with two punctures to bury the electrical cabling. The fir tree planted in front of the house gifted by my parents. And, inevitably, the first strawberries planted in the kitchen garden.

This chapter also tells the quieter fractures: the tension between professional ambition and family presence, the impossible balance, the doubts of a young mother learning on the job.  

The seven Strawberries of Wisdom

This chapter offers seven Strawberries, among the richest and most referenced in the series:

Daring to Expand: leaving the comfort zone out of a refusal to stay where you no longer grow.

Conscious Love: love as an art to be cultivated, not a feeling that sustains itself. With Erich Fromm and Robert Sternberg on what holds a couple together over time.

Exploring the World, Discovering Myself: travel as an inner mirror, from New York to Djerba. With Montaigne, Proust, Nicolas Bouvier and Édouard Glissant as fellow travellers.

Becoming Responsible for Life: motherhood as a shift in identity, with Dana Raphael on “matrescence” and Françoise Dolto on the child as a person from the womb.

Building Instead of Dreaming: turning plans into concrete action. With Gaston Bachelard on the house as an inner cosmos and Simone Weil on rootedness.

Learning Balance: not holding everything together, but choosing consciously what to let go.

Turning Difficulties into Foundations: the builder’s bankruptcy as a revealer of inner solidity. With Christophe André on acceptance as active clarity.  

What makes this chapter particular

Chapter 3 is the most philosophically rich in the series. The Strawberries draw on great philosophers, without ever losing sight of the concrete: a satin dress that was too stiff, a broken-down mini-digger, a newborn demanding a bottle every three hours.

It is also the chapter of transmission. For the first time, I was no longer the only one who learnt, I became the one who passed things on, to my son, to the English colleagues I trained in French, to the travel agents I coached at Club Med. Something shifted in my relationship with the world.  

Going further

The question this chapter carries beneath every chapter is this: how do you know you are truly building your own life, and not simply an acceptable version of what was expected of you?

The next articles will explore each topics of this chapter in detail, starting with those first years in London where everything accelerated.