Last night I was with my boss’ three kids for a couple of hours. It’s been, seriously, probably ten years or more since I babysat. My poor boss has been called out of town unexpectedly and so various friends and co-workers have been staying at her house and taking care of the kids. Some people have been spending the night and doing the heavy lifting of getting dinner and baths and putting to bed, but since I’m not very good at that sort of thing I volunteered for the eight-to-eleven shift and mainly had to deal with toothbrushing and bedtime stories, both of which are things I can handle fairly well.
The kids (I’ll call them Boy, Girl, and Baby) were already in pajamas by the time I got there. Boy was working on a project for school (a two-paragraph report on the Titanic) and Girl was in need of a bedtime story before bed. Baby had just been put down to sleep. I suggested the first couple of chapters of Little House In The Big Woods for the bedtime story, conveniently forgetting that pretty much on the first ten pages there are all sorts of grisly scenes involving wolves at the door (literally) and deer being made into venison and pigs being butchered in vivid detail. This made for an interesting conversation, to say the least.
Girl Why are the deers in the tree?
Chiara Uh, because Pa shot them with his gun.
Girl Why did he shoot them?
Chiara To eat. They ate deer. That’s what they did. They didn’t have QFC and Starbucks and Costco like we do. Pa goes out and shoots animals and they eat them.
Girl [wide-eyed look]
Inside Chiara’s Head Dude, next time I’m reading Ramona Quimby or something.
Later on in the story, it’s Butchering Time.
Girl What’s “butcher?”
Inside Chiara’s Head: Totally, totally reading Ramona Quimby next time.
Chiara That’s what they do to make bacon.
Girl Pigs make bacon?
Chiara Um, no. Bacon…is made out of…um, pigs.
Girl [wide-eyed look]
Chiara [weak smile]
Girl So they take the pig and put him in the oven?
Chiara Well, no. First they kill him and then they cut him up and then…well, see, when we eat bacon it comes from the store. But when they ate bacon, long ago in the olden days…
Girl Do we eat cows?
Chiara Yes, sometimes.
Girl How about horses?
Chiara No, usually we don’t eat horses.
Girl They only make baby horses, right?
Chiara Yes! Right! That is exactly right!
Inside Chiara’s Head Do NOT mention veal right now.
Around this time Boy came upstairs and showed me his report (after quizzing me about how many rivets the Titanic had) and went off to brush his teeth. Girl was ready for bed. I was congratulating myself for my smooth child care skills when Baby woke up and freaked out.
She’s sick right now and is coughing a lot, and she started crying and I ran into her room (where Girl is also sleeping) and tried to pat her while she was still in the crib and put her pacifier back in. She wasn’t having any of that. I picked Baby up and tried to tuck Girl in. Girl was understanding. “I’ll just pull up the blankets myself,” she said, again with the wide eyes. “I’ll just pull them up myself if I get cold.” I still felt bad. Baby was freaking out. Scream, cough, scream, choke, give me heart attack, scream more. Boy was nowhere to be found. The woman taking care of the kids before I got there had told me to give Baby some infant cough medicine if things got hairy. You’re supposed to pull the medicine into a sort of little syringe type thing, like when you have to irrigate your wounds when you get your wisdom teeth out, and then shoot it somehow down the crying baby’s throat. Oh, and also, this baby does NOT want to sit down with you on the couch or anything. Baby wants you to walk her around the living room and jiggle her. Baby is huge and doesn’t know that you’re not very good at weightlifting yet.
Boy emerged from the bathroom for a couple of minutes while I was still attempting to soothe Baby on my lap.
Boy Do you want me to show you how to calm her down because sometimes I can calm her down and she’s not very calm right now.
Chiara Okay, what do you do to help her stop crying?
Inside Chiara’s Head If a nine year old can do it, surely I can do it.
Boy I call it The Monkey Dance.
Chiara Okay, bedtime for you.
Baby was still going strong with the crying and so I figured I wasn’t going to make anything worse by giving her the medicine. I managed not to spray too much of it over the kitchen counters while I was trying to hold her with one arm and slurp up the cough syrup with the other. I also managed to get most of it down her throat as she opened her mouth to alternately wail and cough. She got even more upset, and I looked at the clock only to find that I was supposed to be there for three more hours. My mom has told me that when I was a baby I used to scream and scream every night when the sun went down. I was born in northern Canada, during a time of year wherein the sun goes down fairly early in the evening, leaving plenty of leisure hours for screaming. I silently apologized to my mother retroactively and managed to jiggle a strand of stray Christmas lights in so fetching a manner that Baby became mesmerized and allowed me to put her back in her crib, quietly, so as not to disturb the slumbering Girl, who had indeed pulled up the covers when she got cold.
I went back into the living room and read until my replacement came by. It was pretty quiet except for the intermittent murmurs coming from the baby monitor, which I didn’t see at first so I thought the baby sounds were actually Murderers Coming In The Front Door To Kill Me and Kidnap The Children sounds.
I was exhausted. Three children, three hours, and I was wrecked. Clearly I am not ready to be a doula anytime soon, even if my current finances would allow me. And forget being a mother my ownself. It was humbling. It’s so hard to be a parent. There’s so much to think about and remember and do, every single day. Diapers and Gogurts and book reports and Bionicles and notes home from the teacher and everything else that goes along with being a little kid. And it’s not like it stops there, either…I am always calling my mom to whine and complain and ask for advice on whether knee-length skirts are a good look for me. You’re a parent forever. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do that. I do feel really lucky, though, that I get to sample, in the tiniest and most temporary way, a little bit of what that’s like, even if I’m not so sure about doing it full time myself.