Confessions of a Scary Mommy: An Honest and Irreverent Look at Motherhood: The Good, the Bad, and the Scary (15 page)

I’m talking about the babysitter, of course, who is to be guarded with dear life.

Finding a good babysitter is one of the hardest tasks any mother faces. The sitter should be someone who is trustworthy enough to be left with your most precious possessions and still fun enough that the kids are
willing
to be left with her. A perfect babysitter will be capable of entertaining them
and
cleaning up after them. Be a playmate
and
a disciplinarian. Be great company but still available on Saturday nights. It’s an almost impossible feat.

Miraculously, I have managed to find some amazing sitters for my kids. A few have been neighbors, and one I actually discovered in an online ad. They are sitters who bring over art projects and toys they no longer play with and voluntarily drop by birthday parties and dance recitals. They are unfazed by the rowdiness at my house and shuffle us out the door with a “No problem.” They leave the house cleaner than they found it and are worth every penny they are paid. They are my saving grace.

Of course, we’ve had our share of less than desirable sitters,
too. There was the one who forgot to pick up four-year-old Lily at the bus stop not once, but twice, because
General Hospital
was just
that
riveting to her. Another sitter spent her time playing on the Internet, leaving evidence of a less-than-innocent existence for us to find on the computer upon returning home. Yet another one left the freshly cleaned house a complete disaster zone, forgot to walk the dog, and allowed the kids to stay up watching TV until midnight. And then there was the one who seemed perfect online, with glowing references and rave reviews, who fled my house after meeting my kids and was never heard from again.

There is one upside to the bad babysitters, though: they make me feel better about my own parenting skills. When Lily used to take the bus,
I
never once forgot her at the bus stop.
I
always manage to have the kids asleep by
at least
11:00 p.m. and (usually) even remember to walk the dog. Much as I want to run away sometimes, like that sitter who never came back,
I
always manage to come home to my children and parent them in a pretty decent way. The bad sitters make me feel like my kids could have done a lot worse than me.

Unfortunately, the good sitters have the exact opposite effect. One of our good ones always has the kids asleep by the time we come home at 8:30 p.m., a rare occurrence when I’m in charge. Another actually got them to eat broccoli, which is nothing short of a miracle, and last year, our summer babysitter volunteered to take the kids to downtown DC for the day, despite my recommendation that she rethink the plans. Tackling downtown DC with my kids isn’t something I’d wish on anyone and something I avoid at all costs myself, but she was adamant. They took the subway and walked on the National Mall and visited museums, and
I heard they were complete angels the entire time. They never, ever would have been angelic for me. It’s
those
sitters who leave me questioning my own parenting skills. I swear, at fifteen they are better at parenting than I am. It’s downright embarrassing.

Sadly, it’s the least of the ways I’ve embarrassed myself in front of babysitters in the last eight years. When we were new to our neighborhood, a young woman stopped by one night to welcome us to the hood. She brought over her phone number in case we ever needed anything and complimented me on the kids, who were getting ready to take a bath. “Thank you,” I said, trying to keep our dog away from her dog and a naked Evan from running into the street. “Do you have kids of your own?” I asked, trying to make polite conversation. “Um, no?” she stammered. “I’m only . . . fourteen.” As if my hole wasn’t deep enough, I proceeded to inform her that theoretically, she
could
have children if she got started early, but that I wouldn’t recommend it. And then I gave her a modified version of the sex talk. Remarkably, she’s become one of our favorite sitters. And in the daylight, she doesn’t look a day over sixteen.

Back in the days when I babysat every Saturday night—what else was a frizzy-haired girl with bad skin and no boobs supposed to do?—I spent my time rifling through bedroom drawers and devouring pints of ice cream in between calls to friends. Sure, I kept the kids alive, but just barely. Frankly, they just weren’t my priority. What was my priority? Fantasizing about the father of the kids for whom I babysat. He was
dreamy.
So what if he had a slight porn habit? He was going to take me to my prom and, one day after college, we would be married. He just didn’t know it yet.

I cringe when I think about that old saying “What goes around comes around.” Perhaps my sitters have gone digging in my bedside drawer and made a battery-operated discovery. Or three. I wouldn’t be surprised if I turned over the cushions on my couch and found old pizza slices and orange soda stains. And it would serve me right to learn that my sitter made long-distance calls to a boyfriend in Europe.

The sad thing is, even if I found any (or all) of this to be true, I still would guard my babysitters’ phone numbers with my life. They are mine, warts and all, and I’m not sharing. There are some things worth sacrificing a bit of privacy and pizza money for, and a night out with my husband is one of them.

T
here is no such thing as a perfect parent. We all (or most of us) do the very best we can, succeeding at some aspects of parenting and failing miserably at others. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t show and tell my kids just how much I love them. We roll down the windows in the car and sing at the top of our lungs, and unless there’s lightning, I have no problem letting them run around joyously in the rain, splashing in puddles. We do art projects and bake together and have sweet, tender moments throughout the day when I feel like an exceptional mother.

And then there are the other moments that showcase my weaknesses. More than once, I’ve been horrified to think that a neighbor most likely heard just how loudly I yelled at the kids as they were walking the dog by our house. I don’t change the kids’ sheets often enough and I’ve been known to accidentally make them bleed while cutting their nails. But perhaps my biggest parenting flaw of all is my laziness.

For the last several years, the kids haven’t been ready for bed anywhere near seven o’clock, but I am
more
than ready to be finished with them by then. The day has been long, the night has been longer, and I am done. Stick a fork in me, done. Unfortunately, my charming children are not. All three are night owls and not ready to call it a day until well past nine most nights. The solution? They need to entertain themselves. I want
nothing
to do with them.

Every night, after dinner and their baths, the kids retreat upstairs to play together and remain up there, alone, for hours. They know I’m not going to entertain them and it’s either sleep or play, and they always choose play. Hours of playing house and grocery store and airport and vacation and vet before they are
tired enough for bed. Hours of making forts and lining up their animals as patients and arranging dolls as restaurant patrons. They play and play and play endlessly while I get to watch TV, talk with my husband, or work on the computer.
Ignore them
.

The silver lining in all this is that my kids, unlike so many I know, are content just being left alone to explore by themselves. Imaginary play requires nothing from us, the parents, and it’s
almost
like having them asleep for the night at seven thirty. Or close. For them, it’s really fostered their sibling relationship and they do consider one another their best friends.

This relaxed sleep routine goes back to when they were infants. I simply hated to hear the kids cry, especially when they were so easily comforted by nothing other than my touch, so we often slept together. They all napped on the couch, cuddled up to me as I wrote, or fell asleep in the car if we were out running errands. It was just so much easier than having to bring them upstairs, rock them to sleep, and deal with their incessant crying.

There was no strict bedtime, either. When they seemed tired, we’d put them to bed, but it wasn’t solely because the clock struck seven. Now, I’m not endorsing my way of doing things—I do think there is something to be said for getting kids into a tight routine. I’m completely envious of my friends whose children are all asleep by seven thirty and who know, with absolute certainty, that they will be the next night as well. But my way isn’t completely without benefits. The upside of
not
maintaining a routine is more flexible children. Mine don’t get bent out of shape sleeping on vacation or dealing with circumstances outside of the ordinary. They sleep when they’re tired, on their own time. It works for us.

Back when Lily was a newborn, I would make all of the day’s bottles in bulk, lining them up in neat little rows on the top shelf of the fridge first thing in the morning. I figured as long as I couldn’t have the convenience and ease of simply whipping out a boob, I may as well make things as easy for myself as humanly possible. Sensible, right? I certainly thought so.

It never even dawned on me to heat those premade bottles, until my mother-in-law noted that I was feeding my precious warm-blooded little angel ice-cold milk. “That can’t be comfortable in the middle of winter,” she volunteered. “
I
wouldn’t want to drink freezing milk at three in the morning!” Much as I didn’t appreciate the unsolicited input, I had to admit it wasn’t an
entirely
off-base observation. They
were
pretty cold and it
was
the middle of winter. But Lily took them just fine and my pediatrician said it didn’t matter if they were warmed up or not. Why make her picky about something when she didn’t know the difference, anyway? She was eating and gaining weight and I wasn’t going to change a thing. So there.

Looking back at those early days, I remember that her face
did
seem to jolt wide awake when I fed her, and it mustn’t have been all too comfortable on her little belly, but it did save me a few precious hours in the middle of the night. As far as I know, she’s not still holding the cold bottles against me.

I don’t think I scarred her by using cold wipes when I changed her diaper, either. The bulky wipe warmer I received as a shower gift was promptly exchanged for diapers, which I simply couldn’t keep well stocked. Of all the unnecessary parenting steps, wipe warmers may indeed take the cake. I never understood why a mother would possibly want her child to get used to a nice toasty wipe-down—what happens when you’re
out at the grocery store or in the car or on an airplane? Wipes can’t always be brought to a dreamy eighty degrees if you ever plan on leaving the house. Better to just get the baby accustomed to the chilly wipe right from the start. Plus, the less comfortable it is, perhaps the more willing she will be to get potty trained in a few years.

Speaking of diapers and ease, my kids got changed anywhere and everywhere. I’m always amused by parents who schlep around fancy portable changing stations or own designer changing tables lined with terry cloth. Kind of silly, no? It
is
shit we’re talking about, after all. I plopped my kids right on the kitchen floor or the ottoman or wherever was convenient and that’s where we did our business. It was far easier than having to march upstairs a hundred times a day, and an old towel was just as effective as some overpriced gingham cover thing. And fancy diaper disposal systems? Pfft. I refused to buy expensive refill bags when I could just use the ones I already had from the grocery store. It would be like flushing the toilet with Perrier.