Inept Babysitter No. 1

Once upon a time, when I first went on maternity leave in 2000, I had a side job. It was a well-paid side job, one of those cozy corporate gigs that today I daydream about. Once every six weeks, I took content from my former employer and turned it into a newsletter that got mailed to several overcharged subscribers.

In the spring of 2004, the newsletter went to paper-content-delivery heaven, and I wept. But during those four years, I was a stay at home mom with some extra cash in my pocket.

What did I do with that cash, you might ask? Why, I hired a babysitter, of course!

I should say "babysitters," because I went through three before finding The One. These inept women made me question my ability to judge character and conduct due diligence prior to making important life decisions. They made me cry, too.

It was spring of 2002. Ben had just turned 2, John was 5 months old. Brian had been after me for months to hire help because he was sick of my whining and complaining about how I couldn’t get ANYTHING done and these babies were so needy, all day long with their needs! I couldn’t even poop let alone make dinner. Who did he think I was, anyway, a magician?

I had found FlyLady just before John’s birth, so for a while I rallied, becoming a routine-hotspot-27-fling-boogying mom-o-bot. But in April 2002, we got into a car accident that left Brian with a broken vertebrae and me with severe whiplash. When your kids are 22 months and 3 months old, and you can’t lift anything heavier than 8 pounds per doctor’s orders, you don’t have much choice but to hire help. Our poor parents could only take so much.

After getting no responses on the Christian college bulletin boards, I placed an ad in the newspaper. (This was when you could place a classified ad in print for $30. Today, it’s more like $100.)

I interviewed a bunch of people, many of whom thought I would pay them $15+ per hour to care for my babies. Man, I had a good laugh about those people! They seemed to think caring for children was some kind of career, a profession. What a hoot! I learned to screen those nanny-types out in 30 seconds flat, and settled on $10 per hour as my rate.

When I first spoke to "Martha," my ad had run for over a week and I was getting nervous. She worked at my local library (+), was in her 50s with grandchildren (++), had plenty of relevent references (+++) and was willing to work for $11 (-).

Her references checked out. She had frizzy brown hair and big bulbous eyes. I don’t remember the interview, just that I felt relieved yet desperate. She would work two four-hour mornings a week. Her first day of work was my first day of physical therapy for the whiplash.

Every day, there were red flags. If I went out and came home, say, 10 minutes before the end of her shift, she would pack up and leave. Ten minutes early. She wasn’t sure how to get John down for his morning nap while caring for Ben. As she bungled about my house, I thought, "That’s why you earn the big bucks, lady. Figure it out."

One day, as I sat at my computer in the family room, I heard silence in the kitchen and decided to take a peek. There sat 2-year-old Ben, in his high chair, eating apple slices.

Alone.

I checked the clock. She was upstairs putting John to bed and had left my barely 2-year-old son to choke to death in his high chair. Five minutes ticked by. Eight. She came downstairs and went into the bathroom for a few minutes. When she sat next to Ben I popped my head in and told her I don’t leave him alone when he’s eating.

Today I would have fired her on the spot, or at least before her next shift. But I was desperate and didn’t yet trust my instincts.

She started hinting that she wanted to care for my babies at her house. Ha ha ha! That’s a good one! Then one morning, a week or two after she started, my phone rang at 5 am.

Five a.m. was a good 3 hours before her shift and a good 2 ½ hours before I accept anything other than death-related phone calls.

“Hi, Kris? My eye is swollen.”

*Crickets* "Yeah?"

“Yeah. I don’t know what’s going on. It’s really swollen. I won’t be in today.”

“Oooooh kaaaay.”

“I wanted to let you know.”

“Right.”

I fell back into a fitfull sleep, dreaming of bulbous, infected eyes chasing my kids.

The inappriate phone call prompted the "cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs" sound to go off in my head every time Marthat crossed my mind. I’d hired an insane person. And yet I was allowed to procreate.

The next afternoon she called to tell me she had, at the ripe age of 55, discovered a new allergy, to cats. How surprising! What are the odds? All this time on the planet with felines at every turn and just now, this week, she discovers she's allergic to them. So severely allergic that she couldn't possible enter my house again. How frigging convenient!

I tried to bully her into one more shift (did I mention I was desperate?) but to no avail. She was gone, my babies survived her care, and I was back to square one.

My first call was to renew my prescription for painkillers, then to the newspaper to re-run my ad, then to my mother to whine about my plight. After gasping together that we had left Martha alone with my babies to go out to lunch, obviously endangering their very lives, my mom said, "Good riddance to her! She did you a favor."

We had dodged the Martha bullet.

Stay tuned for inept babysitters No. 2 and 3! And tell me, have you ever hired an inept babysitter?