Searching for Mary Poppins

A few weeks ago, I put an ad on Craigslist for a babysitter-slash-housekeeper. Given the current economic climate, I was quite optimistic that I would find tons of highly (and overly) qualified applicants for this position. A friend in Brooklyn recently went through a similar search process and said she received over 100 responses to her ad. One applicant was even willing to teach the children 19th Century French poetry between doing the laundry and making dinner!

After hearing that glowing report, “optimistic” might not be the right term for my state of being. I actually woke up the morning after placing my ad and peered out my window, expecting to find a line of spiffy-looking Victorian ladies in wide-brimmed hats with resumes and umbrellas in hand, winding around the block like in the opening scene of Mary Poppins.

Instead I saw my filthy car in the driveway, sighing under the weight of its own ugliness. The list of things to do had just gotten a little bit longer.

I had been without a babysitter for two months when I finally bit the bullet and started looking for someone new. Truth was, I didn’t even want anyone new. I had stopped working in large part due to my desire to actually be my own children’s babysitter. What a novel idea! And now that my kids were in school all day, wasn’t it possible – indeed probably – that I could accomplish a great deal between the hours of 9-3?

During that time, I figured I could do everything except teach graduate school or see a Broadway matinee. But since I was to begin teaching every Wednesday night during the Spring semester from 3-8 pm, a babysitter was indeed required. Of course I immediately thought of my mom as a free source of support. Unfortunately, my mom tap dances on Wednesday nights – yes, you heard that right, she tap dances – and so, a paid babysitter would have to be found.

My former babysitter was great until one day when she suddenly wasn’t even good. That’s the only way I can explain the rapid decline in Wanda, my family’s long term babysitter. I think the change in her had something to do with skydiving. Yes, you heard that right, I said skydiving. Once Wanda started jumping out of airplanes every weekend – and then falling in love with her instructor for this death-defying activity – things changed. She stopped caring about finishing the laundry, often leaving it for me in the dryer and mentioning on her way out the door, “Oh, Julie, there’s some towels that need to be folded.” I would nod and thank her as she headed off to some concert in the city. Thank her!? Then I would clean up all the toys left out in the playroom, detox my children from three hours of television viewing, and fold towels.

I was on the verge of firing Wanda when she quit. She had decided to move upstate to live with her boyfriend. I had cut her job down to something like 10 hours a week and the minimal amount of work just wasn’t enough for her to live on. So we all went out to dinner to celebrate her departure. My kids cried when Wanda waved goodbye as our car pulled away from her house. They loved her and would miss her. I was feeling lukewarm.

It was only after she left that I noticed things missing. They were odd things, like a pair of designer jeans and some great black workout pants. Brett turned the house upside down one morning to no avail, looking for his new t-shirts and a zippered sweatshirt. He actually missed his train that day obsessing over the vanished items.

“I swear, they were right here! In the laundry room!”

I think I said something really helpful like, “Yes, dear. Whatever you say. The little mice people keep moving your stuff. I get it. Now go to work!”

Later that very day, my friend Kate called to say that while Wanda had worked briefly for her, she noticed a fleece North Face jacket of hers missing. She didn’t want to accuse Wanda, but…had I also noticed anything like that?

Lightbulb!

In retrospect, Wanda’s huge pocketbook didn’t seem like a fashion statement.
I immediately called Brett at work and told him that I knew where all his stuff was.

“Great!” he enthused. “Where?”

“New Paltz!”

In re-telling this story to people, I heard from many who experienced something similar. One friend said that her former babysitter had also stolen small items from the house, mostly of the candles-and-wine variety.

“She sounds like a romantic,” I mused. “Mine was more into the gym and the Great Outdoors.”

“How about this one?” My friend Laura confided. “A while ago, I got this huge cable bill. It was just after we moved into the house and I thought maybe the cable company had miscalculated, or that we had signed up for the wrong plan. But no. The bill was filled with pages of paid porno.”

Yes, you heard that right, she said porno.

Laura went to her husband, trying to approach the subject gently and with understanding. She used phrases like “Honey, there’s something I need to ask you….it’s okay if you feel you need to…I know men have needs….” and the like. After hearing her out, however, Laura’s husband laughed in her face and declared in no uncertain terms that the porno was not ordered -- or viewed -- by him.

Laura became a detective. Like in a game of Clue, she put the pieces together. She called the cable company and traced the bill to a particular cable box in the house, discovering the source and finally determining whodunit.

It was the foreign au pair, with the porn, in the basement.

What was the solution, I wondered? Did she confront her? Yes. “I asked her not to rent ‘movies’ quote/unquote from the television anymore.” Here she paused. “And I also decided that I needed to keep her busier. Much busier.”

Nobody is perfect. But when you let someone into your home and give them charge of your children, they need to be pretty darn close to perfect. To me, there is no job more important in the world than this one.

So, faced with the task of finding a new sitter, and feeling a little bit jaded, I opened my email and began to look at the responses from my Craigslist ad. All in all, I received about a dozen. Which, in case you are doing the math, is pretty far off from 100. But several of them seemed promising, and so I began to call.

I left messages for some, and spoke to the roommate of another. After speaking to one really nice-sounding person named Lina, I decided to move our relationship quickly to the next level. I asked her for a reference and she gave me a woman’s number in Westchester. I called and got the reference on the phone.
I told her the purpose of my call.

“Ah, yes!” She began. “Lina. She worked for me for a year.” That’s good, I thought.

“Now, what can I tell you about Lina? Well, she drives.” That’s good too, I thought, though not a necessity. I started taking notes as the woman continued.
“Though she did have two rather serious car accidents with our car while working for us, so maybe you won’t want her to drive for you, on second thought.”

I crossed off the word “driver” from my notes.

“Also, you should not expect her to cook.”

That’s okay, I explained. It’s mostly mac-n-cheese and chicken nuggets around here. No real cooking required.

“Yes, but for example, take those chicken nuggets. Lina only listened to half of the directions. So she would put the food in for 8 minutes, and then forget to turn them around for the other eight minutes. Your kids will have to eat slightly frozen chicken nuggets, you see. But my kids didn’t mind. They just took a deep breath and ate it.”

I started to think that my kids might mind this. It bothered me. Really…who lacks the capacity to successfully defrost chicken nuggets?

As the woman continued in this vein for a good 10 minutes, I wondered if this was a real reference or not. Was it possible that I was I on some sort of reality TV show without my knowing it?

In short, the best this woman could say in support of Lina was that she had a serious lapse in judgment. However, she was really a lovely person, and, were my house on fire, she was petty sure Lina would get the kids out safely. “You should really try her out!” She concluded.

I started my day wishing for Mary Poppins and ended up with something more akin to Amelia Bedeila.

No matter. I peered out the window again. There was a definite change in the wind. I remained hopeful that my perfect babysitter would blow into town tomorrow.

Transportation? Umbrella, perhaps.

A Strong Case of Grandmother Attachment Disorder

I know she’s probably very busy right now, but I’d really like to sit down with the new First Lady and have a little chat about our mothers. In case you haven’t heard, Michelle Obama’s mom, Marian Robinson, just moved into the White House with the first family to help take care of Malia and Sasha.

“There is nothing that makes me rest more, now that I have to work, than to know that my kids are being loved and cared for by someone who's teaching them values and discipline, and giving them a little extra candy every now and then,” Michelle Obama told reporters on the day in early January when the announcement of her mother’s new (albeit, perhaps, temporary) living arrangements became official. Upon hearing this, some journalists went online, on the air, and into print with responses like, good for her. How lucky to have such a dedicated grandmother to escort the Obamas and to support the girls through this rough transition. Other journalists saw this as a way in to a story about boosting the profile of a “forgotten” generation of active, vibrant and often overlooked senior citizens.

Not this journalist. This journalist read between the lines of that comment, and saw the deeper, grittier truth there. This journalist, a mother of two like the First Lady with a grandmother attachment disorder of her own, saw her own world reflected right back at her. What this journalist saw was a classic combination of the eye-roll delivered while voicing the word “candy.” Now, taken out of context, this move is meaningless. But when used in conversation about one’s mother and one’s children in tandem, it becomes a rather significant gesture. You see, what the First Lady said was “sometimes my kids get extra candy from their grandmother.” But what I heard was, “When it comes to my children, sometimes my mother doesn’t listen to me.” Watching her that night on CNN, I knew I had found a true friend in Michelle Obama.

In all fairness, the Obamas have said that when Marian Robinson takes care of the girls at their house, she follows the rules pretty well, giving Malia and Sasha organic snacks and only allowing them one hour of television viewing a day. However, when Ms. Robinson takes the girls to her own house, all bets are off. There is candy a-plenty, movies on the DVD player, and late nights spent hanging out together and playing board games.

Sounding familiar to anyone out there?

A lot of grandparents and their adult children have a similar understanding. When I send my three and six-year-old children to “Nana’s country house,” for example, I know that Cheerios will be swapped out for Fruit Loops and donuts. The rest of the day is a nutritional downward spiral from there, as “chocolate chip” becomes synonymous with “lunch time” and “more noodles” is the code for “dinner.” Under my mother’s skilled hand, the traditional food pyramid is turned on its head and spun like a top until it resembles a double-helix of sugars and complex carbohydrates.

It’s like magic!

But do not misunderstand me: this is not a criticism of my mother, nor of the First Lady’s mother. It is merely a fact of life. Under the guidelines of Grandmother Attachment Disorder, I know full well – as does Michelle Obama -- that there is a price to pay for a little “me” time, and that this price is well worth it.

We love our mothers, we need our mothers, our children beg for our mothers. Don’t let their cheerful, calm, sweet exterior fool you: these keen seniors know we need them, and, because of this, they have the upper hand. Herein lies the crux of the attachment disorder. Because if my husband and I need someone truly loving and responsible to watch the kids while we go to work, or ever hope to get a weekend away from the children, we have to know that, while we’re not looking, these grandmas are gonna break some of our rules.

We have to know that while they will never ever put our children in harm’s way (except for that one time at Nana’s country house when my son Andrew ate too many donuts and then jumped on the couch and then threw up), they might just choose to ignore most of our advice in favor of their own special brand of care. And, annoying as this sometimes is, we have to agree that there’s something really great about giving up control of our children to the person or people who helped make us who we are.

For me, that means looking the other way as an ever-increasing parade of stuffed animals march into the house behind my daughter every Monday, when Nana is in charge of school pick-up. It also means that, courtesy of Nana, my son has enough Kooky pens to barter his way through the rest of elementary school.

If my mom were on the verge of residing in the White House, she would hire a decorator to turn her living quarters into an intoxicating hybrid of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory and Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium. Entrance to her rooms would not be guarded by secret service, but rather by a portrait hung somewhere between Carter and Ford of an animated Fat Lady, a la Harry Potter. Only those who know the secret password would be allowed inside. (The secret password would be, of course, “candy,” except on alternating Tuesdays when the password changes to “gum.”)

But as The First Lady and I also know, grandmothers provide services that go beyond spoiling our kids. After Andrew was born, my mother moved in with us for a week. I was exhausted and getting used to breast-feeding and incredibly nervous about taking care of this tiny new person. Having my mother there made a huge difference in my sanity and in my growing comfort with becoming a mother. Many friends of mine hire a baby nurse to help them handle the transition to motherhood. But I couldn’t think of anyone more qualified for the job than my very own mother. I mean, really, who better to pass that torch? Who else could possibly ensure that I made the same mistakes from day one?On Andrew’s third night home from the hospital, the three of us put our heads together and made the executive decision that it was time to give the baby his first bath. We outfitted the kitchen sink with the new molded plastic bath seat from Buy, Buy Baby and surrounded ourselves with hypoallergenic houte couture baby bath products, Supima cotton baby washcloths, rubber duckies big and small, and custom-monogrammed infant hoodie towels.

Andrew wailed like a maniac. “Are we doing the right thing?” My husband Brett screamed to my mom over the deafening roar. He and I were trying desperately to keep Andrew’s soapy, writhing, red, and wrinkled seven-pound body from slipping onto the tumbled marble tile beneath us.

“Is he too cold? Is the water temperature okay?” I called out to my mom, to Brett, to any sort of God. “Maybe we shouldn’t be giving him a bath yet?!” I wondered, loudly and with increasing frustration.

“Mom! What do you think?” I cried.

And there she was, camera in hand, aiming the lens at the three freaks by the sink. “I think he’s fine. Smile everybody!”

At the end of that week, my mom moved back to her apartment in the city where my step-father was patiently waiting for her. That day was one of the loneliest days of my life. Brett had gone back to work, and I remember thinking: how the heck am I going to do this? Who put me in charge here? I suddenly had a new job title and a new way of framing myself to the world, and the whole thing, as awesome and exciting as it was, was sincerely overwhelming.

In the days following the announcement about Marian Robinson, I imagined the First Granny packing up her suitcases and some boxes of candy-coated contraband and heading to DC from Chicago. I thought about how she probably wasn’t just doing this to help Sasha and Malia, but her daughter Michelle too. Because no matter how old we are, how accomplished in the world, or how brave, there are times in our lives when we just need our mommies. I would think that becoming First Lady of the United States would certainly qualify.I mean, if you’re speaking to the press about your views on world hunger, your mom is the one who will tell you that you have spinach in your teeth moments before going on camera. When you need to figure out what to wear to a diplomat’s dinner party, you can trust your mom’s brutal honesty to pull you through. And in a leadership position that probably allows very little room for real relationships, you can vent to your mother, worry with your mother, and gossip like hell about all of Washington with your mother.

Overall, you can tell that I’m very much in favor of this new living arrangement for the Obama family. But I do have one serious concern: now that they are all living under the same roof, whose rules…rule? I believe that, like the very government they are running, the Obama household will rely on a system of checks and balances as outlined in the US constitution. The President will serve as the executive branch (natch), his wife will act as the judiciary branch (as all mothers do), and the First Granny will get to have a say in just about everything as the legislative branch of the family.

Maybe I don’t need to talk to The First Lady after all. Malia and Sasha are clearly in good hands. And so is she.