The Heartbreaking Ways That Life Is NOT Like an Audrey Hepburn Movie

My second language is French. Yes, it’s as useful in my everyday life as you think it is. Unbelievably, I didn’t study it just for the two years required in high school either. I studied it for a solid ten years. Truth.

I chose French because of Audrey Hepburn, obviously. Because of “Sabrina.”

Have you ever seen “Sabrina”? It’s a classic starring Audrey Hepburn, William Holden and Humphrey Bogart. In it, Sabrina is an awkward and gangly daughter of the chauffeur. She is in love with the handsome, rich son of the family whom her father serves. Tragically, she is never noticed by the man she loves; thus, she despairs. Her father sends her off to Paris to learn to cook. She was meant to be a cook in this life — not the romantic interest of a handsome young rich man. Despite her reluctance to go to Paris, the experience transforms her from an awkward teenager into a sophisticated and worldly young lady who can effortlessly catch the attention of the object of her desire. Upon her return home, the shenanigans start, Humphrey Bogart gets involved, and you can probably guess how it ends.

It’s that first five minutes of the film that got me. I was an awkward, ugly, pale, freckled, pimpled, red-headed girl from Nowheresville. I felt unnoticed, unsophisticated, unpretty, and so unconfident. More than anything, I wanted to feel . . .well . . . like Sabrina, I guess. So, I made a declaration that I would someday go to France (thereby shedding my awkward self, and returning with the beautiful, cultured and graceful self that I knew must be in there somewhere).

Foreshadowing: No one tells you that if you feel awkward and unsophisticated in small-town Montana — you are most certainly going to feel even more awkward and more unsophisticated in France.

Regardless, I studied French all four years of high school, and after my senior year, I went to Europe with my dear friend, Teresa. Her father has cousins who live in Zürich, and they most graciously took us in for a week. It’s hard to explain how ridiculous we were, so I’ll leave you with these two images: we sang Edelweiss daily and we took pictures of ourselves opening the wooden shutters of their house again and again. Everything was so delightfully charming and European! We traveled all over Switzerland with her family — Zürich and Bern and Lucerne — then they sent us on a train to the north to tour a chocolate factory (imagine — Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory times a billion), and we met other relatives who lived in the mountains on the most idyllic, cute little European farm, so very different from a barbed-wire-fence-Montana farm. The adorable European cows had bells on their necks, not numbered orange tags in their ears. They were coddled dairy cows, not hormone injected beef cattle. Everything in Switzerland was clean and lovely and perfect. Roses bloomed in every garden, the chocolate was significantly more delicious, and the mayonnaise came in tubes not jars. I loved it. I felt like I was really seeing the world for the first time, and it made me feel . . . so. . . cultured. And thus began an attempt to become a more cultured version of myself . . . my French self . . . like Sabrina.

In college, I jumped into the whirlwind of my single-minded goal: get to France. I took 200 level French classes and spent much of my free time filling out paperwork so that I could study abroad my sophomore year. I didn’t care where I went in France (mistake number one); I didn’t care what courses I would have to take (mistake number two); I took out as many student loans as I could (mistake number three); and I basically listened to no one’s advice (mistake . . . ugh. Four, five, six, seven. . .). But, I didn’t need any advice because as soon as I got to France, I would marry an Italian ski instructor (he was always Italian, now that I think of it) and never come back to Montana because I was going to be too smart and elegant for Montana.

Naturally.

At the time, and remember I was only nineteen, I assumed that all of France was populated with elegant women in chic dresses and men in berets drinking wine in cafés and smoking while having intellectual discussions all day, which, to a certain extent it was. What I couldn’t foresee, however, was that 1) the women in chic dresses wouldn’t be hanging out with the likes of me; 2) only old men wore berets and they were all too happy to hang out with me; 3) people smoking and drinking all day is unpleasant and annoying, and 4) the intellectual discussions were mostly about why American foreign politics was so dreadful, how George W. Bush had managed to get elected (this was 2000 after all), the stupidity of the electoral college, and why America still maintains the death penalty.

Not being particularly civically engaged, I can tell you honestly I had never thought about any of this. I learned about the electoral college the way a lot of us did, I think, when Florida and Al Gore and hanging chads happened. So yes, big intellectual discussions were part of the cultural landscape, but they were directed at me in a very combative way from stinky, drunk, old French men — in French — of which I had an incomplete grasp, so I was a weak target for these attacks. In my French daydreams, it hadn’t occurred to me that I might not be very good at intellectual discussions in bars in French and that it might not be that enjoyable (second hand smoke and alcoholism aside, who actually likes sitting in a café all day? It’s boring!).

Hanging out with the international students at my school offered a different set of challenges that I’m not even sure how I survived. Like when the Spaniards would laugh conspiratorially and want me to drink some sort of crazy drink they had lit on fire, which, of course, nineteen-year-old me did. And while cooking spaghetti with them, what I thought was an unusual enthusiasm for oregano turns out wasn’t actually oregano. Nineteen year old me thought, oh well, I got to eat. In hindsight, the problem could just be Spaniards.

Despite these unanticipated challenges, living in France finally fulfilled a dream: my Audrey Hepburn dream. Let’s stop here and take a quick vote: how many of you think that I became more sophisticated, beautiful and cosmopolitan after my ten months in France?

Exactly.

The reality is that I had gained 30 lbs. (or 2 stone. Stones? Hmm.) because I ate croissants slathered in Nutella and dipped in hot chocolate every morning for breakfast. Because, France. I ate pasta for nine out of ten meals because I was a student, and that was the only option if I didn’t want to eat at the dining hall. My university dining hall served the same meal every night, which was some kind of mystery meat with potatoes and peas. (I did learn how to eat with the fork upside down like Europeans do — and believe you me, eating peas that way is a bitch, but I’m still proud of the fact that I can do it. Snobby, right?)

“Excuse me, sir, what kind of meat is that?” I’d ask. (But in terrible French. So, more like “Mister, but the meat what a animal is from it?”)

“Aren’t you the American?”

“Yes, am I.”

“Beef.”

“Is a beef it? It not look or smell the beef like it.”

“It’s beef.”

I would then get my French friend Céline to ask, and he would tell her that it was rabbit. After a month or so of rabbit, I started to cook for myself. But there’s not a lot one can cook with only two portable burners on a table and fifteen girls on a dorm floor who are tired of eating rabbit. Hence, pasta. We made a lot of pasta.

In addition, I stopped exercising because French women apparently don’t exercise in public? I still wonder about this. Exercise must happen. But where? And how? I had been a runner in high school, and I thought it was normal to go running outside. But it wasn’t normal, and it created a stir. Meaning, I was verbally harassed every time I went running. There was also that time I was hit by a car while running, so call me a quitter if you must, but I quit. I was already dealing with a lot of stress; I didn’t need North African construction workers leering at me, or mild injuries sustained from Peugeots. (Barely made a scratch honestly. Those cars are basically grocery carts, and I was pretty solid at that point).

Interestingly, I refused to get my haircut because I was afraid of French stylists. Apparently, I didn’t realize that anything would’ve been better than what I had going on. My whole life I had had long luxurious hair, and when I graduated from high school I felt the overwhelming need to cut it all off. I was hoping for a chic pixie cut (like Audrey!), but I ended up with an early-90s lesbian semi-mullet. By the time I got to France, it had grown into a shaggy, muppet-like mess of competing layers, but for some crazy reason I thought a French stylist could make it worse. Trust me, it couldn’t have gotten worse.

My clothes were also problematic as I was trying to transition away from the 90s Montana high school uniform of boot cut jeans and baggy sweatshirts with tennis shoes, but I had no idea of where to go from there. I was aware that jean jackets were a necessity, but I never wore anything other than jeans, so the Canadian tuxedo was here to stay. With tennis shoes, obvs. My fashion sense was not helped by the French either, which surprised me. I assumed it would be like one of those movies where the nice people in the store want to give you a makeover and then when you take off your glasses you’re suddenly hot. That’s like the plot of most movies in the 90s. But no! I’d walk into a French clothing store and they’d look me up and down and say: “Go to England. Maybe you can find something your size.” And I would shuffle shamefully out of the store, and say, “Thank you.”

Thank you!

I did take the Eurostar to England a couple of times and had lovely shopping experiences. So thank you England for not shaming me. And thank you Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Vine et al. for not being invented yet. Not a day goes by that I’m not grateful for having gone through my awkward phase(s) pre-social media. Pictures of that time of my life do exist, but they are buried in boxes and suffering the effects of age and improper storage as we speak. Thankfully.

I didn’t become more sophisticated. I just realized how much I had to learn about myself, the world, and where I belonged in it.

So, there you have it. I had to learn the hard way that life is not like an Audrey Hepburn movie. It wasn’t until my own sense of self worth finally asserted itself and took up some real estate in my brain that I finally felt noticed, and this came as a result of living all these painful, funny, frightening, sweet, unexpected moments that I lived — not the movie moments I had dreamed. But by the end of it though, I had two languages to express myself: two sets of vocabulary, two times the number of verbs, two whole baskets of swear words, and a whole lot of stories tell.

I think Audrey would approve.