My mother Josie was the fourth of six children. She had two younger brothers, but she never had the opportunity to help with their care. First, her mother (my grandmother Lillian) was not well most of her childhood and she had little patience with supervising a child caring for another child. The family was solidly middle class and hired in home help with cooking, cleaning and child care. The help, as was true of many middle class southern families, was black women, who left their own children at home, to care for the children of white women. Second, my grandmother Lillian died, probably due to complications of childbirth within two days of giving birth to her last child.
The
baby, Thomas, was immediately adopted (officially) by one of my grandfather’s
brothers. He and his wife were childless. Meanwhile my mother, just short of
her eighth birthday when her mother died, was quickly farmed out to live (not
officially adopted) with her aunt Sue whose farm adjoined her fathers.
Aunt Sue already had three children older than Josie. As a result, my mother
never had any experience with babies and small children.
Josie’s
lack of experience with babies and children, left her unprepared for
motherhood. She was absolutely terrified to bring me, her first child home from
the hospital. She spoke of this fear she had several times to me when I reached
adulthood. I’ve also found letters and diaries that she wrote at the time, the
speak of the overwhelming fear of making a mistake that she experienced.
Consequently, Josie decided that I, her daughter would learn about babies and
small children and how to take care of them while I was young. Something that
she told me explicitly when I was middle aged. Oddly enough, however, she did
not do that by expecting me to share in the care-taking of my two younger
brothers.
While
I did not know her reasons at the time, Josie’s approach to teaching me how to
care for babies and children, was to start me in the babysitting business when
I was 10 years old. She essentially began grooming me for motherhood. My first job, completely arranged by my mother, was with
the family next door to us. They had recently moved in and were composed of a
young couple in their early twenties and a baby under 6 months of age. The
couple went out to dinner or a movie, not sure which, and were gone for at most
two hours. I stayed in their home with their baby sleeping in his/her (?)
crib. I remember the awesome sense of
responsibility I felt for this tiny thing in the white crib. But I otherwise
remember very little about it. I don’t remember if I had any trouble, if I had
to call my mother, or if everything went smoothly. I do remember how nice it
felt to be given a crisp dollar bill (fifty cents an hour was my fee).
My
mother arranged a few more jobs for me, taking care of babies, in homes that
were within view and earshot of our house – one of the advantages of growing up
in a new suburb during the baby boom, lots of work for babysitters nearby. By
the time I was 13, however, I was managing my own work. I was a popular
babysitter, mostly for older children (2 to 8) because I liked playing games,
singing songs, and watching kids TV with them. I began to work for families
that lived several miles away (where either my dad or one of the parents would
provide transportation before I got my license). I liked being with children. I
liked the money I earned (officially still fifty cents and hour, but regular
families often added a little extra). But most of all I loved being able to
stay up late on weekends, and watch late night TV and late-night movies. This was not allowed at home. At home we went
to bed at 9, and the TV was never on in the evening.
In High School babysitting was a doorway to adult life, to money of my own, to being up
late, to watching adult shows. While I liked children and enjoyed playing with
them, that was secondary to the pay and independence babysitting afforded me as
a teenager.
Continuing
babysitting was not something that I had thought consciously about when I went
away to college. However, when the directors of my dormitory turned out to be a
young couple with an intelligent and interesting five-year-old, I volunteered
to babysit. The dorm directors also had friends living within walking distance
of the dorm that had small children and would refer me as a babysitter.
One
family (let’s call them Goodfolks) in particular became regulars. Babysitting
for the Goodfolks over the next four years offered me something that was the
opposite of what I had found in babysitting as a teenager. They offered me a
warm and welcoming family life and a respite from the “adulting” of college. I
became part of the Goodfolks family, a bond that continued at least 15 years
after I graduated. I would come back and visit them many times over the years
as a family member rather than an employee.
I
also continued babysitting as a source of extra income in college, and although
I continued to state my fee as 50 cents an hour, the majority of families
simply paid me a flat five or ten dollars per session depending upon the amount
of work involved (more for cooking meals, getting kids off to school etc, less
if I was just watching TV while the kids slept).
Then
one summer I got a job as an au pair. Another student who had worked for a wealthy
family through an agency was asked by the family to find someone to work for
them (they did not want to go through the agency again – I should have taken
that as the red flag it was). She knew I did a lot of babysitting and
recommended me. The family like my phone interview, and they liked my
references. For ten weeks, I got an insiders view of the domestic life of the
corporate elite. I spent most of my time in bucolic Greenwich, Connecticut. An
easy train ride to NYC and art museums, although I only got two chances to go
as my “day and a half” off, wasn't always honored (remember the red flag). The
family also took me with them on vacation to Maine, and I have longed for the
coast of Maine ever since.
Somewhere
along the line, in college spending so much time with young families and their
children drastically changed my own personal views about having children. It
wasn’t that I came to dislike children, quite the contrary. But I came to be
more and more cognizant of how hard it was to raise children in the modern
world, and to balance family and career. I saw this playing out in the families
for whom I worked. I began to question whether or not I wanted children of my
own.
I
made the mistake of bringing this up once with my mother while visiting during
a holiday. That’s when I began to learn about how getting me started in
babysitting had been her plan to groom me for motherhood. Now I was telling her
that my experience made me question whether I wanted motherhood at all.
My
babysitting experiences in graduate school expanded my doubts. In graduate
school, I had a half dozen friends who were divorced, working (or grad student)
mothers. As a friend, I would look after
their daughters (they all had daughters), to give them a break. Sometimes they
paid me, sometimes they just fed me, sometimes I fed them. These weren’t jobs,
they were expressions of solidarity among friends. They were also a telling insight what life as a single female parent was like, and how none of these women had gone into parenting with the expectation of becoming a single parent.
Between
all the years of experience with scores of children between 1 and 10, and multiple
courses in development psychology and family sociology, I became quite the
expert on childhood development and child behavior. I developed the confidence
and knowledge that my mother had hoped for, but I also developed a healthy skepticism
about my ability (and desire) to be a parent. My career seemed more rewarding. Some
times too much knowledge is an impediment.
My
first husband wanted children. His family was large and loving and very
supportive. So we tried. But as fate would have it. I couldn’t get pregnant. The
marriage ended within a couple of years before alternatives such as fertility
treatments or adoption even became something to discuss. Had I gotten pregnant
easily, then I would have become a parent, but I did not. I suspect that I
would not have wanted to put in any extra effort to become a parent, even if
the marriage had lasted. By the time I met my present husband I was already
experiencing menopause, and he was not interested in having children.
Sometimes
I think about my mother who passed away more than a decade ago, never having
any grandchildren. She was so anxious
for grandchildren that she began grooming me at age 10 with babysitting jobs, but
she never did anything to prepare my brothers for parenthood. None of us had children.
