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-homicide? 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
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
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
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
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 (
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
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.
