AVOIDING HOME
I Was a Teenage Babysitter
And it opened my eyes
The first time I babysat outside my home, I was 11. Okay, I was just 11, but I had plenty of experience: I was second oldest in a family of eight at the time, and eventually nine. It stopped there when my Mom decided she’d had more than enough kids, and it didn’t matter what the Pope said.
I had changed a lot of diapers, before disposables. Back then, diapers were good-sized flannel squares. When poopy, they needed to be rinsed out in the toilet and then thrown in a diaper pail where they accumulated for a good hot water washing with Borax. Clean diapers were folded and stacked, and once pinned onto the baby, they were reinforced with “soakers” — or waterproof pants.
In addition to diapering, I fed and bathed a lot of babies and toddlers.
Unlike LouAnne, who lived up behind us, I didn’t have any romantic feelings about babies. I knew they were a hungry mouth and a dirty diaper and sometimes, it was all you could do to get them to quit crying.
So when Lois, Mom’s friend three houses up the street, called Mom asking for one of us to look after her two, I was available and in Mom’s view, qualified, and so she sent me.
Lois and her husband, Arnold, were school teachers. Their house was perched about fifteen steps up off the street. I climbed the cement stairs, then the wooden porch steps and knocked on the front door.
Lois answered. Her short sandy hair wasn’t so much curly as frizzy. She wore glasses but her hair and her metal frames were not the first things you noticed about her. What overwhelmingly jumped into view were her upper teeth that sort of jutted out. Those and her rather large butt. She wasn’t fat, but she was generously portioned about the lower body and she sort of waddled.
So she wasn’t a looker, but she was kind and cheerful. She led me to the kitchen and went through instructions with me: the simple schedule, snacks for Sandy, five, and Benny, four, and the phone number to call if anything bad happened. She had nice, clear penmanship, like you’d expect from a school teacher.
Arnold was tall and oafish with thinning hair and big kind of buggish eyes and a toothy grin. He looked soft like you’d expect someone who made his living in a classroom to look.
Their house was clean and well organized, very different from ours. And their house had a cool feature that a couple of other houses in the neighborhood had: a big sleeping porch, the full length of the house up on the second story. You could see it from the street and from it, you could see 11 blocks down to the Columbia River, and almost to the mouth of the river where it emptied into the Pacific Ocean.
Usually, I just sat for Lois and Arnold during the daytime, though a few times, they went to a movie and maybe out for Chinese. Never late nights though.
They were a good example of what a couple could be: respectful of each other. They spoke to each other with kindness. And sometimes, they even held hands.
Lois and Arnold were attentive parents who spent time with their kids, and who expected the best from them. They were probably not disappointed. I imagine that Sandy and Benny grew up to be decent, productive people.
Barb and Dan O’Malley had four children: Sean, six, was the oldest, Kelly, five, a girl, was next, then Marky, four. Chrissy, three, was the youngest. Like their parents, the kids all had dark hair and brown eyes, except Chrissy was blonde. And they were all good looking.
Barb was 16 when she married; I don’t remember how much older Dan was. It wasn’t a huge gap, maybe five years. And I don’t think they had to get married. I think Dan was just smitten and he talked Barb’s dad into letting Barb marry him.
It seems that Barb’s parents were pretty well-to-do. Dan and Barb were not from Astoria; they’d moved there not too long before I started babysitting. But her parents visited once that I remember, and they just looked rich: expensive clothes, shoes. Her hair was salon fresh, and what hair he had was nicely cut.
I remember cleaning up the table after they left for the country club. That was my introduction to artichokes, or what was left of them. I had to ask Sean what they were.
Barb and Dan were a handsome couple. She had dark, shoulder-length hair and brown eyes and after four kids, she still had her figure. Not model skinny, but appropriately curvy. A little big in the can, but it just looked cute on her.
Mike was suave and debonair. And a little bit creepy. He also had dark hair, kept in place with Brylcreem — “a little dab will do ya” — brown eyes, fringed generously with long, thick black lashes.
He was ever the gentleman: he always opened the car door for me, which made me feel uncomfortable, so I’d zip out ahead and try to beat him to it. Anticipating my move, he’d jump down off the top of the cement stoop, about four steps high, and onto the sidewalk to win the race to the car door.
They lived in a scary dump of a house but they had nice modern leather furniture and glass-topped end-tables. I think Mike had been successful at one point, and then lost it all. Or maybe they just bought stuff that made them look like they’d been successful. Their rental house definitely had the feeling of starting over after a big fall.
The house was old and weathered grey on the outside. No lawn, no flowers. Maybe an old rhododendron or two, but nothing that required any care. It looked like it had been a rental for a long, long time.
Inside, dark. The wallpaper in the hallway was peeling off. Huge flowered wallpaper in the living room. Faded. I know there must have been color there, but I remember it all in black and white.
Upstairs, the kid’s rooms were bare except for the twin beds. Maybe an old dresser. A bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Depressing.
Dan and Barb had fancy bedroom furniture. Black leather headboard. A heavy wooden chest of drawers. Their bed was unmade. Their room was dusty. The whole house was dusty.
I found his stash of Playboys. I had a lot of free time after getting the kids to bed; usually, Dan and Barb didn’t get home until well after Bonanza was over and sometimes not until the Indian came on the television screen, signaling the end of the broadcast day.
Those were creepy hours in that creaky, creepy cold house. Sometimes I was able to fall asleep but if not, I snooped.
They were part of the country club set and they stayed out late.
The kids were nice, well-behaved, good kids. No trouble.
I got the feeling that Barb wasn’t very happy. And she certainly wasn’t generous, with money or with appreciation. For an hour’s worth of babysitting, for four kids, I got the princely sum of 35 cents. Maybe a little more thrown in for doing the dishes, but when the job was coming to an end, she complained saying she always had to rewash the dishes, the veracity of which I doubt. I washed a lot of dishes at home and other places as well and no one ever had to rewash them. But whatever.
Interspersed with the O’Malley job, I did lots of other jobs. The thing was, I didn’t want to be at home. I would take any shit job just so I didn’t have to be at home. And quite a few of those jobs gave me a new appreciation for my home.
When I was 14, I had a summer job. Lee and her three kids lived a couple of neighborhoods from where we lived, probably a mile away. I walked over to their ‘hood.
The house wasn’t bad. As I approached it, I thought it was nicer than ours. But I still remember walking into the house and the overwhelming smell of piss.
I don’t remember meeting Lee. She was probably ironing her uniform, which is all I ever remember her doing when she wasn’t sleeping.
I met the kids, Suzie, six, and Danny, five. Both adorable, if not small for their ages, curly-haired blonds. Suzie was a chatterbox. Danny didn’t talk. At least not in a way that I could understand.
They followed me up the stairs where I found the baby, Missy, in her thoroughly wet crib. I scooped this third blond, curly-haired angel baby out of her bed and though I wanted to hold her close, she was thoroughly wet, so I held her away on the way to the bath.
After Missy was washed from top to bottom, dried, diapered and dressed, I scrubbed the plastic-covered crib mattress, both sides. And I found a clean sheet to put on it. I collected the blankets, sheets, clothes and found the washer downstairs and started a load.
Lee, tall, dark-haired, and slim, was a cocktail waitress who worked in Seaside, a coastal town a few miles from Astoria where we lived. I was there all week, Monday afternoon through Friday night. I only went home on weekends.
In addition to the three younger children, there was a boy of about 12 who I wasn’t responsible for. He came and went, completely unsupervised. He didn’t come around very often. At 12, he was pretty much completely on his own. It’s possible that he stayed with his older sister, who was maybe a couple of years older than me, so 16, who was married and had a baby.
Lee came home in the wee hours and slept. I mean, I think she did. But I’m not sure that she showed up all that often. When she was there, she was getting ready for work. Applying makeup. I don’t remember her having any interaction with her kids.
Lee smoked. A lot. Probably how she stayed slim. She left bean bag ashtrays — remember those? — on the arm of the sofa, and in every other room of the house. They were brimming with stinky butts.
And she left opened packages of Raleigh cigarettes around her house. Some were nearly full, some were mostly empty. But there were usually about ten packs of opened cigarettes around the house at any one time.
I know because I started smoking there.
There wasn’t much to eat: bologna, mustard, white bread, Velveeta “cheese.” Koolaid. The cupboards and refrigerator were nearly empty. I was mystified.
Though there was a lot of upheaval at my home, we always had plenty of food. We cooked and we always had dinner together.
And our house might not have been a model for orderliness or serenity, but we weren’t hungry and the house didn’t smell like piss.
Thanks for reading.
Here’s a great one from
that I no doubt could have benefitted from when my kids were young.
