I Can Barely Take Care of Myself (6 page)

Babysitting every Saturday night felt like the world’s most boring New Year’s Eve, as I sat there counting down the last hour before little Eli’s bedtime. One night Eli couldn’t sleep. He was talking as if he’d been reading a Nietzsche pop-up book. Right before I was about to turn out the light he asked, “Jen? Is there
a God?”

Me: “Well, what does your mom say about God?”

Eli: “I never asked her. I just thought of it.”

Me: “Why don’t you wait and ask your mom about God in the morning? She has all the answers.”

Eli: “I thought all grown-ups knew. You’re a grown-up!”

If only he knew that even though I was in charge, I was just a kid myself. I hadn’t even had my first real kiss yet. I was wearing an A-cup
bra. Really it was a training bra. There were no cups. It was almost like wearing an Ace bandage around my upper torso. I was so
not
a grown-up.

Eli persisted. “If God can see me, why can’t I see him?” (A Jewish kid wanted a Catholic girl to explain to him why we can’t see God. Oy boy!) Then he started to get hysterical: “I don’t want God watching me sleep!”

I had no idea how to answer Eli.
I didn’t know the first thing about the Jewish God. I knew that Jesus was Jewish and that Moses . . . did some . . . stuff. I’m not even sure of the timeline. I couldn’t remember whether those guys knew each other or whether they just sort of respected each other’s “miracle corners.”

When I was a little older than Eli was then, my mom tucked me in every night and we said that prayer: “If I die
before I wake, I
pray the Lord my soul to take.” That prayer is comforting—if you’re ninety and on a respirator. It doesn’t make much sense for a healthy eight-year-old. Then, after we prayed about this Lord guy coming to take me away in my sleep, my mom would shut the light off and close the door, leaving me to stew in my newly developed neurosis. I couldn’t do the same thing to Eli.

Standing
in Eli’s doorway, looking at his innocent little face, I didn’t have the heart to just turn the light out and ignore him. I wouldn’t have to wait until I had my own kids. This was my moment to make an impact on the youth of America by doing the exact opposite thing that my parents did. I would not tell him that there is a God waiting to take him in his sleep.

While I racked my brain for the best
way to answer his question without really answering his question, Eli, in the manner of children everywhere with too much time on their hands, came up with more questions. Such as, “When am I gonna die?”

I knew I had to protect him and let him remain a kid. Kids need myths, like the tooth fairy, and when they’re older they can handle the truth: that your parents flush your teeth down the toilet
like they’re getting rid of forensic evidence and leave you only twenty-five cents, not accounting for the inflation that’s occurred since they were kids. You’ll have to borrow a dollar from them later anyway in order to afford a Charleston Chew candy bar and they’ll guilt you and say, “That will pull your teeth out.” By the time Eli knew the truth about anything I’d be in college and wouldn’t
have to worry about helping him process it. For tonight, in order to protect him and get myself out of his room and on to the bag of Oreos waiting for me in the Reinhardts’ kitchen, I would
lie my ass off.

“Oh, Eli,” I said. “You will live to be two hundred years old before you die and that is a very, very long time from now.”

I was proud of myself until Eli said, “So, I am going to die?”

I said, “No. No. I mean,
if
you die, you will die at two hundred, but . . . not everybody dies.”

Eli said, “So, some people die and some don’t?”

Um. Yes.

Eli said, “Why did God make my grandpa die?”

Um . . .

Eli asked, “Can I die before I turn two hundred if I’m murdered in my bed?”

I’m glad that I didn’t think to raid the Reinhardts’ medicine cabinet to see whether the missus had any “mother’s
little helper,” because I seriously would have considered crushing some into the orange juice on Eli’s nightstand to help him take his mind off bed-murder.

Fuuuck.
How did this kid know about murder? He’s right. Murder is scary. And it’s real, even in seemingly safe havens like Needham, Massachusetts. Some guy in our town had chopped his wife into tiny pieces in their bathtub just streets away
from where little Eli Reinhardt lived. I was terrified of murder myself and to be honest I didn’t like the idea of the Reinhardts’ glass sliding doors in their living room. Sure, they had locks, but I could just picture the murderer tossing his ax through the thin glass, shattering it, and then walking purposefully toward me with a bloodthirsty gleam in his eye. “But I don’t even really live here!”
I’d scream. As if that would be a good reason why he shouldn’t introduce me to the pointy end of his ax.

I still had a chance to be a good substitute parent. I told Eli that there was no such thing as murder. I told him it was just a thing he saw on TV but not actually something that was physically possible. People couldn’t kill other people, so he had nothing to worry about.

As a special treat,
I decided to lie on the floor next to Eli’s bed. I told him that I’d lie there until he fell asleep so that if he had any more scary thoughts, I’d be right there. Once Eli was asleep and dreaming of a vengeful God, I snuck out, whipped the blinds shut in the living room, and stuffed my face with Oreos.

I had no idea that kids under the age of five had the capacity to remember things from week
to week. I thought Eli would have forgotten all about murder and dying at age two hundred by the time I saw him seven days later. Nope. Eli wanted me to sleep on his floor
again, and as I lay there he worried out loud that his parents would get murdered. He asked, “If my parents were murdered, would you live here and take care of me?”

How did I go from favorite babysitter to guardian-in-case-of-a-double-homicid
e? I reinstated my lie to Eli. “Eli, no one is getting murdered. I told you. It’s not real.”

Should I tell the Reinhardts about Eli’s obsession with untimely death? I couldn’t tell them that I fell asleep on his floor—that would make me sound like some kind of perv. I felt like I’d fucked this kid up for life. Maybe there’s something parents know that babysitters don’t—like how to properly and
with authority squelch all conversations about stabbings and how to not do what the kid wants just so you can get what
you
want, because eventually that type of negotiation brings everyone down.

A few weeks later Mrs. Reinhardt talked to me woman-to-teenager about the little boy we were raising. She was distraught because Eli kept saying that he wanted to stab people to see whether they would
die. Ever since I told Eli there was no such thing as murder, he had apparently gotten confused and become sort of obsessed with this crime. She said that Eli was mad at God for picking his grandfather to die. She asked me, “Jennifer, why was he thinking about such things? How did these ideas get put in Eli’s head?”

I don’t know, Mrs. Reinhardt. Chalk it up to . . . kids
think
the darndest things?

The Reinhardts eventually stopped calling me. I’m sure that wasn’t Eli’s decision—after all, I was to be his godmother after his parents were found bludgeoned in their beds by the Massachusetts Murderer.

I ATTEMPTED BABYSITTING one more time with the Roberts family. The Robertses also had a four-year-old son; his name was Danny. I actually looked forward to spending time with little Danny. He
didn’t have the dark streak that Eli did.

I never had to worry about getting Danny to go to sleep or
explaining that one day when he was two hundred years old his heart would stop beating, because I only babysat Danny on weekday afternoons. Danny didn’t force his kid-agenda on me. Sure, he made me watch
Mac and Me
(the poor man’s
E.T.
) a few times but he’d often hand me the remote and say, “You
pick.” So I picked. And Danny and I spent many afternoons together watching the video for “Fascination Street” by the Cure on MTV. I had a crush on Robert Smith, the lipsticked lead singer. Danny would tease me and say, “He’s your
boyyyfriend.
”

A few weeks into this gig, I was stuffing my face with ice cream and I lost sight of Danny for a few minutes. He showed up in the kitchen with red lipstick
smeared on his face. He announced, “I like Mommy’s makeup.” I sprang to action and started wiping Revlon no. 2 off Danny’s face. That’s when he announced, “Jennifer, I want to French-kiss boys.”

Well, at least he didn’t want to murder anybody.

Danny’s mom came home and I had to explain to her that Danny didn’t have a rash on his mouth. It was a stain—from this season’s hottest matte lipstick
color.

She was upset that I’d turned my back for a minute, something I guess you can’t do when a little boy with a makeup fetish is running around the house.

As she drove me home she said, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you anyway, Jennifer. You can’t have boys over when you babysit Danny. He can’t stop talking about your boyfriend Robert Smith.”

After turning Danny into a future drag queen,
I took a self-imposed leave of absence from the babysitting business. I’d learned that you couldn’t talk to kids about death or show them music videos of men who sing in eyeliner. I possibly had turned one kid into an obsessive-compulsive with the urge to murder, and another kid gay. I’m not equating being a murderer with being gay, but from what I understand, either can be a difficult thing to admit
to your family.

3. Toddlers Without Borders

Sitting on my coffee table are
Vanity Fair
magazines dating back to December 2010 that I haven’t had a chance to read yet. My DVR is full of
Real Time with Bill Maher
episodes from the 2012 election that I’ll get around to watching by the 2016 election, I’m sure. I do not know where all of this “spare time” is that people who have kids always tell me I have.

I’m also
totally ADHD. Yes, it’s a real disease, but I admit that “totally ADHD” is not a real medical term. I have an actual hyperactivity disorder and that’s why when I drink coffee, I get sleepy. I got excited when my doctor gave me a prescription for an ADHD medication that can make you feel jumpy and lose weight. The catch is that you only get jumpy and lose weight if you abuse the medication. When
you take ADHD medication as needed, you just feel even-keeled, and it made my skin break out. I spent a year on these meds with a new temperament and oily skin. It felt freaky, like I was some kind of well-adjusted teenager. I stopped taking it because I’m vain and I’d rather suffer quietly in my head than break out on my forehead. These days I just deal with my ADHD by allowing myself to stare at
walls, pace, lose my keys, and find myself with hours and hours of time that I can’t account for.

People often seem to think that this “spare time” of mine ought to
be filled with trips to the pediatrician, Mommy and Me movies, and annual pumpkin patches. They ask me whether I worry about feeling “unfulfilled” without raising children. When you grow up having a panic disorder, anxiety, and depression
since age nine, it’s pretty easy to be fulfilled at age thirty-eight just by the knowledge that you’re no longer an overmedicated or stressed-out little neurotic. In fact, I’m not only having a second childhood, I feel like I’m finally having a first. The last thing I want to do is bring a kid into all of this fun, leaving me to become the chaperone.

I spent about thirty years of my life being
too afraid to travel and constantly worried that I was going to die in a plane crash (
What if this plane crashes?
or sometimes the odd
What if this plane above me falls out of the sky and onto my head?
). I’d like another thirty years of enjoying how I’m totally
not
afraid anymore, and the only child I have time for is my inner one. (She can’t believe she’s been to Disney World ten times and never
had the guts to ride Space Mountain.)

When I was growing up in the 1980s, adults used to let Practical Steps in Preventing Children from Dying slide a little bit—like not mandating seat belts on school buses. Yet they worried incessantly about nuclear war—a thing that might happen but, unless they were Ronald Reagan or Gorbachev, they had absolutely no control over.

I’d always had a general
sense of well-being and hope for the future until one fateful weeknight in November 1983 when I suddenly didn’t. That was the night that I sat down with my parents at the age of nine and watched the made-for-TV movie
The Day After.
The film portrays a fictional war between NATO forces and the Warsaw Pact that rapidly escalates into a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and the
Soviet Union.

Apparently Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary that the film was “very effective and left me greatly depressed,” and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a “nuclear war.” (Thank you, Wikipedia!)

After I watched the movie, I wrote in my diary as well. My sentiment was slightly different from President Reagan’s. I wrote, “I hope
I kiss a boy and fall in love before the
world ends and that he’s the one I die with in the nuclear war.” I was such a little romantic.

My elementary school teacher, Mrs. Williams, had very strong feelings about her students watching
The Day After.
She sent all of us fourth graders home with a note, strongly urging our parents to forbid us from watching. When I brought the warning letter home my parents were offended that my teacher
had the audacity to tell them how to shield their daughter effectively from a life of post-traumatic stress disorder. I had signed my name on the dotted line, under the promise “I will not watch this movie.” My mom put the letter aside. “Jennifah, where was Mrs. Williams when the boys were throwing snowballs at you after school and calling you a geek? She just told me, ‘Boys will be boys,’ and now
she thinks she can send home notes telling me what to let you watch? Maybe if more kids watched this movie, they wouldn’t be such little shits on the playground.”