Babysitting –

Through the looking glass: Gram is Scooter-sitting.

           Don’t let these pictures fool you.  I am, at my very best, a reluctant babysitter. There was a time when I was willing to do it for money. Now, you couldn’t pay me enough.  Once upon a time, I got fifty whole cents an hour.  It wasn’t a bad deal: I went home with money, after having spent all evening watching all the TV I wanted without my mother telling me I had to go to bed.  Most of the time, the subject  kids were ready for bed by the time I got there, or even already asleep.  Not bad at all. 

Is this an interesting person??  Oh yeah.

There was this one house where I sat a bunch of times.  The kid was always in bed asleep when I got there, but there were never any cookies in the house.  That’s where I discovered Steve Allen and actually often ended up wanting to go to bed, they’d come home so late.  One night, I heard a mysterious kind of crashing noise in the back of the house.  I figured it was the kid, and I went back there to check, down the long dark hallway.  I opened the kid’s room,  peaked in—and heard not a peep.

The Scoot man prepares to disembowel the bag

           I didn’t think another thing about it till the parents came home and I told them about the noise and said it had probably just been the kid, getting up to go to the bathroom.  They looked at each other—then at me.  “He’s a baby,” they said.  “How could he make a noise?  He doesn’t even walk.”  All those times I’d been there, and I hadn’t even known it was a baby.  I still wonder what the devil made that noise.  Maybe raccoons out back.  Probably that, actually.

Ta-Da.  Gee, am I fascinated?

            And there was this one creepy, big dark house where they had one medium sized boy who kept jumping on me with this crazy look in his eye all evening.  Bad, weird vibes.  The next time those people called me, I told them I’d raised my rates to two bucks an hour.  That was the last time I heard from them—a valuable little life lesson, that.

You can see him thinking.  So little, and thinking – 

            I don’t really remember any of the babysitters that came to take care of us kids when I was little.  I used to hate it when my parents went out on some big date—which was a rare thing, actually.  It wasn’t the babysitter part I hated. It was the way my mother looked when she’d done up her Laura Petrie hair and put on her fancy dress.  She didn’t look beautiful.  She didn’t look like herself.  I liked the dress-down version. My real mama.

            I do remember coolly firing the woman who came to stay with us when Mom and Dad flew out to Dallas to find a new house for the new job.  I was a junior in high school then, and they got this college aged person to stay over.  She was too wacked out for me; so I told her, “We don’t really need you.”  And we didn’t.  I think that was kind of brave of me—our house had been burgled twice – no, three times if you count our own great raccoon casserole mystery.  But I figured we’d be safer alone than with the sitter, thank you very much.

            Talking about all this has me back in New York again.  I could do a whole lot of writing about my group of buddies and sleep-overs, and camp and—and oddly, one of my best friends from back in the day just called me.  Just now, out of the blue.  The lovely and wonderful Caroline Nibley.  About a funeral, of course.  There’s a point when funerals become reunions.  But what odd timing.

            Anyway, I fired the babysitter, and danged if she didn’t go quietly.  And nobody starved.  Lucky her.

And hospitable, really.  He didn’t object to waking up to find just me.

            I was also a day nanny, once.  At Pappenheimer’s house one summer when Mrs. Pappenheimer was writing a math book.  She’d sit outside in the garden, and I’d “play” with the kid—all morning—all afternoon, playing with a toddler.  One kid?  Two?  All I really remember was desperately trying to get hooked on Dark Shadows which was on right at nap time.  I was that dead bored with life.  Oooo – I really hated babysitting.

            Babysitting instead of dating.  Lucky me, really.  Babysitting is SO much safer.  I remember one night, watching Man from Uncle and running into the living room during the commercials to stare at myself in the golden mirror these people had in their front hall—the whole MIA had spent the day at Jones’ Beach, and I was burned cherry red.  It was amazing.  Do I remember the kids I was sitting?  Not a clue.

            In our own house, with our own children, we used to have a babysitter on retainer—every Wednesday night when the kids were little.  Our big night of freedom and grown-up diversion.  We started out with a really great girl, the friend of one of our musical associates.  After her, we had one who cleaned the house up beautifully while we were gone, but she also, we finally learned, tended to  lock herself in our bedroom (why?) and steal money out of my desk (I thought I had a twenty in here????).  And that was the end of that arrangement.

          The next one thought it would be totally fun to make cookies with the kids and left me with a huge, heartbreaking mess every week.  When I told her gently that I didn’t want the oven on while we were gone, she decided to make the cookies, put them on the cookie sheets, then put the cookie sheets down on the burners to cook the cookies.  Oh, and she liked to scare the kids, popping out of dark corners.  Amen to that arrangement.

           The best babysitter we ever had was the last one we ever needed: Shelee.  Shelee Holyoak.  Beautiful.  Kind.  Gifted.  She’d give the kids art lessons while we were gone.  She was Gin’s big sister, really, and took care of the kids for years.  We still love her, wherever she is out in Arkansas or Oklahoma—some unlikely place for a girl with the face of an angel and a gift for making worlds out of paint. (sorry AK and OK – or I should say, lucky you).

A really happy guy, this one.  Opinionated, but just really easy going.  Unless you want him to eat something yucky.  Like just about everything. He’s not really this blue.

            I’d always walk her home after our date.  We were never very late getting home; it only took us a couple of hours to remember each other as people.  Shelee and I walked to her house,  down our dark, quiet street  past houses full of people we knew, talking about life and school and the future and boys and sometimes spiritual things.  So she doesn’t really count as a babysitter.  She was more of a friend, or a cousin.  Paid.  I probably owe her my sanity, now I think about it.  Not that being with my kids wasn’t the greatest thing – but sometimes too much of a good thing makes you tired, and too much of one role can make you forget your other sides.

            She was a much better babysitter than I ever was.

I’m supposed to be chasing him. Instead, I hover with the camera.  Just like his parents.  Well, not really.  You should see how fast L can go on her knees.

            Now, just once in a while, I get to make a big toy mess with the Scoot man.  Or I play car city with Frazz.  The older they get, the more interesting.  Still, that said, sometimes it’s very centering just sitting with a baby against your chest, warm and heavy with waking.

            I don’t want to forget about that side of me, either.

My buddy.  Or – one of my two buddies.  The other one lives TOO FAR AWAY.

            Okay, so now I have a question for you: what is your worst nightmare babysitting story?