‘We’re just kind of portable’ — why this U.S. family chose to raise their children part time in France

NICE, France — How far would you go to give your kids the best possible education? For some families, this means taking an extra job to afford private school tuition; for others, it’s quitting a job to homeschool. But for Eric and Rixa Freeze, the quest to give their kids the best education meant moving their family 4,500 miles across the ocean — from Crawfordsville, Indiana, to the southeast coast of France.

Eric Freeze is a native of Canada who grew up speaking French. He has had a long-standing connection with Nice, having served a mission there for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when he was 19. In their 20s, Eric and Rixa, who met while students at Brigham Young University, spent several summers in Nice as part of a study abroad program. The experience was formative for both of them.

As a parent, Freeze, who is a creative writing professor at Wabash College in Indiana, would speak to his two oldest kids in French during mealtimes and story time, but he wanted them to also read and write French. And he believed that the best way for his kids to become fluent was by becoming fully immersed in the life there: with French schools, teachers, friends.

That’s why in 2014, Freeze and his wife poured all their savings into buying a 700-square-foot apartment that used to be a student rental on a narrow street in the middle of the historic and diverse neighborhood of Old Nice. Their dream on Rue Droite — ”straight street” in French — would be funded by Freeze’s half-salary as a tenured professor, and they would split the year between Nice and Indiana so that Freeze could teach during the fall semester.

“We were dirt poor that year,” Freeze, 50, told me when I visited the family in their Nice home in late July.

“The economic realities of our situation also make it so that spending less was imperative and not necessarily a choice,” Freeze wrote in his 2020 memoir “French Dive” about the family’s grand adventure. But living with financial constraints would become part of the education too — learning to “live more with less,” as the French proponents of minimalism called “les décroissants” proclaimed.

This year marks a decade since the family’s first move to France and their adoption of an unusual lifestyle, going back and forth between the U.S. and France. “It’s what has served our family best, but living in between two cultures is definitely not something that’s easy to do,” Freeze told me.

Renovating on a budget

When I met with the Freeze family, it had been a week since the assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump rocked America, but Nice, crowded with tourists from around the world, seemed far from those troubles. On my way from the train station toward the family’s apartment, I walked through the square set up for celebrating the finish of the Tour de France, which, because of the Olympics, would not end in Paris for the first time. As I entered the Old Nice neighborhood, the streets narrowed, and awnings on yellow- and salmon-colored buildings offered shade to overheated tourists. At their building, I pressed a buzzer with “FREEZE” handwritten on it.

Eric Freeze greeted me in the stone stairwell and led me up a few flights of stairs to the guest apartment, which they bought and renovated a few years after the move. It’s right under the two-bedroom apartment the couple bought in 2014 and renovated for about $8,000, which included adding an attic bedroom. (The guest apartment used to be an abandoned office of the Young Communists, a branch of the Communist Party of France, and was the most affordable option they could find at the time to host friends and family.)

Rixa and Eric renovated each home that they’ve lived in together in the U.S. by themselves. But renovating spaces inside a 16th-century building presented new challenges. The guest apartment, for example, had an exposed stone wall they discovered while taking plaster off the walls; sometimes they’d find gaping holes from old chimney conduits. A sage-colored ceiling featured a mix of old and new beams and is now adorned with a golden design Rixa stenciled. The ceilings were so high that they’ve added mezzanines in both apartments to maximize the space.

The year the Freezes first moved to France, their oldest child was 7 and the youngest was 1. Along with the excitement about the French immersion experience and their walkable neighborhood came financial worries. That year, the couple resorted to some serious cost-saving measures: Freeze learned to spearfish, and Rixa made bread. Their furniture came from garage sales, thrift shops and Leboncoin, the French Craigslist. They opted out of having a car (”As Midwesterners living in a small town, we felt trapped by our car,” Freeze wrote in his book). But he later wondered if the no-car decision was rushed. He recounts traveling for three hours with his 5-year-old son Dio on buses to a warehouse outside of Nice to pick up the speargun he bought online, and then getting stranded at dusk on their way back before catching a late bus home.

Over the years, the Freezes have built some financial stability. Rixa, who is 46, is also an academic and runs an international nonprofit she founded, “Breech Without Borders,” that educates obstetricians and midwives on delivering breech babies. “It’s enabled us to have the lifestyle we have now,” Eric Freeze said. Freeze had to negotiate for his half-salary arrangement, and it took time to get everyone at his college on board. His advice to families considering a long-term adventure abroad: “No. 1 thing you need is flexible employment and work that’s not going to hold it against you.”

‘Family becomes your peer group’

After I talked with Rixa and Eric in their guest apartment, we walked upstairs to the family’s apartment, where all four kids were sitting on the couch in the living room eating grapes — a picture of sibling harmony that many parents might envy. The kids, whose ages range from 11 to 17, don’t have individual phones, which is as unusual in France as it is in the U.S., but they share one, depending on who needs it the most.

Living in a 700-square-foot apartment means that if everyone is at home, the family is together at all times — eating, doing homework, reading. Three kids sleep in the attic bedroom on mattresses, including a narrow one that fits in a hallway up there; 17-year-old Zari sleeps in the back bedroom.

Even when they return to their more spacious home in Indiana, the kids tend to congregate together. “I’ll go off to another room, and after a while, all the kids will gradually migrate over to the same space where I am,” Freeze told me. These transitions have created a growing sense of “family solidarity,” he said. “Your family increasingly becomes your peer group — the stable environment that’s going to enable all this transition.”

Over the years, the Freezes honed the choreography and timing of the moves: The kids typically arrive in France in December, a week before the end of the fall semester to have some time to figure out what they missed. They attend the French school during the spring semester and come back to the U.S. at the end of July to begin the fall semester in the American schools.

This gives the family seven months in France and five months in Indiana — just enough time just enough time to clean up “their tangle of a yard” and do the repairs, Rixa said.

The French school system is less accommodating for the arrangement. “The schools don’t do anything to help them catch up,” Rixa said. “They’re like, sink or swim.”

But this approach has made kids more resilient, she told me. “It’s not an upheaval every six months in a classic sense.” And the French rigidity is balanced out with the tendency of the American schools to overcompensate with positive reinforcement, Freeze said. The couple wanted their kids to experience both styles of education.

Soccer as true integration

In Nice, the Freezes’ neighborhood has become an extension of their home. The school, the park and the beach are within a few minutes’ walk from their apartment. “The community was designed for people to be in close proximity with each other,” Freeze said.

Rixa likes the spontaneity of encounters in France that don’t require much planning as is required when they go back to their spread-out neighborhood of single-family homes in Indiana. Once, when stripping paint off a door on their narrow street, passers-by wanted to chat and give her pointers. “One professional painter stopped 10 times, because he wanted to enforce quality control,” Rixa said, laughing.

But the couple attributes their true integration into the local community to soccer. Eric Freeze coaches his kids’ teams at Cavigal, one of the most competitive soccer clubs in southern France. “To many French, it’s this closed, exclusive space,” he said, which is paradoxical, because it’s also an extremely affordable sport in Europe — about 150 euros a year, or $160. Right now it’s one of the biggest challenges in transitioning between the U.S. and France — keeping up their kids’ competitive soccer skills. But they’ve found creative ways to do that, like putting their 11-year-old daughter on a co-ed team with older players.

Their Latter-day Saint congregation in Nice has also been a supportive and tight-knit social group, and one that Freeze has grown close to since his days as a missionary. “It’s the most consistent ward that I had in my life,” he said, adding that it’s customary to socialize after church at “linger-longers.”

Where is home?

Recently, stories about the backlash against tourism in Spain have raised questions about the future of Europe. Europe has been dubbed “the world’s museum” and in 2023 welcomed 709 million international visitors, according to the Financial Times.

In Nice, many local residents leave the city in the summer, leaving it to the crowds of tourists. Even Freeze’s neighbors, who run a popular local restaurant up the street, shut down in August to avoid tourists.

Freeze understands the concerns.

Since Freeze’s days as a missionary, he’s watched Nice transform from a city known for crime, drugs and discotheques to a busy urban area with restaurants and markets. Their neighborhood has become increasingly more populated with families. The National Theatre, he told me, used to be a huge discothèque — essentially a dance club — then it became a garbage depot. “It made it a lot more safe and expensive — our property values really improved,” Freeze told me. “But I don’t want it to become like the Rock of Monaco, where it becomes this Disney-fied facade where people live — it seems like a storybook kind of place.”

I asked Freeze what it’s been like to observe U.S. politics from Europe, especially as the family is about to return to Crawfordsville, a rural area that tends to lean conservative. “It’s really difficult for French people and Europeans in general to understand U.S. politics and why everyone’s so angry with each other,” he said.

While French youth still idealize the U.S., the adults see a starker picture painted by the media. Many French view Donald Trump as buffoonish, Freeze told me, and are perplexed by the ardent support that Trump is enjoying among Republicans. Sometimes, Freeze gets asked by the French: “Are you afraid of going back?”

But after the terror attacks in 2016 in France, Freeze got the same questions from Americans about returning to France. There is a kind of “othering” on both sides, he told me, often founded in exaggerated portrayals of both countries in the media.

Freeze, who has written five books, is at work on a sequel to “French Dive,” which will explore the French terrorist attacks, a story of the French politician and Holocaust survivor Simone Veil, as well as family stories.

The concept of home is not a very straightforward question for the Freezes. Rixa, who’s from the Midwest, told me she feels more at home in Nice than in rural Indiana. Freeze loves the Midwest, but says the life in France is more in line with their core values. Dio, 15, offered: “Home is wherever you are at the moment.”

And sometimes home transcends geography and physical space. “Rootedness is our family,” Rixa said. “We’re just kind of portable.”