Laura Anderson Kurk

On Cats, Needles and Babysitting Classes

Posted by Laura on Aug 16, 2011 in Home and Family | 7 comments

(Featured Image: Sakhorn38 at freedigitalphotos.net)

Amelia was encouraged to take a babysitting certification class this summer at our local hospital. It’s a great program, really and truly, and she’s twelve so I guess that bridge is right there waiting to be crossed.

I had a visceral reaction to the idea, though. I mean it made me a little ill to think about, and not because I’m sad Amelia is reaching the stage where babysat turns to babysit. It’s because I have a long and strange relationship with this thing that is Babysitting.

Image: Jonathan Fitch / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In fact, if I examine why bringing my first baby home from the hospital was so scary for me as a new mom, I know it is because of Babysitting, or the lack of it. I’d avoided it so completely as a teen that I didn’t even know how to change a diaper when I had Amelia.

Let’s zoom in for a moment on Laura’s history with the concept:

As a very small child, my brother and I had an occasional babysitter who loved us with all her heart but who had a wee problem with having too many cats. I guess she realized her life as cat woman was becoming cliché and she began to deal with the problem in a socially-unacceptable way. When one of her mama cats had been naughty in the neighborhood and delivered a litter of kittens, our sitter would quickly and decisively relieve the little ones of their heads in her kitchen sink. While my brother and I were there. We didn’t tell our parents because we were afraid of her methods of dealing with insubordination. It’s very Southern Gothic, isn’t it?

This same sitter also sewed constantly and would lose enormous sewing needles in her carpet and forget to tell our barefoot selves. In first grade, I had to let my doctor remove a needle that had gone into my foot and disappeared.

When we were a little older, we had a one-time-only sitter who decided my brother, who never caused trouble, had caused trouble. She pulled herself out of the chair she’d parked in and chased him. I started crying and yelling, “Run, Stan, run!” It was equal parts hilarious and terrifying. Stan, with a slight grin on his face, began to run around our long dining room table and he and I were both amazed that she didn’t know the trick. You can’t catch someone running around a table! All it takes is a quick change in direction to evade capture! That weird game went on until this elderly sitter tuckered out and went back to her chair.

I was asked to babysit exactly twice as a teen. Never invited back to either house. I don’t blame the parents. It’s not that I was negligent or a danger to their children. I just didn’t know what I was doing. I probably looked as baffled as I felt. One child escaped the house while I was there and I chased him down the street while he giggled and the neighbors stared. The one other time I babysat, I’m not sure what I did to get crossed off the list. I probably was so awkward, I made the kids feel awkward.

I was always most impressed with those moms who knew how to handle every situation with their babies. Nothing ruffled their feathers, even constant crying. They were calm and cool-headed, even when their little ones fell on the pavement and scratched their knees to pieces.

I stared at these moms, and more than once they would say, “What?” I’d swallow my heart and say, “How are you so calm?” The usual response was something like: “Oh, I babysat every weekend for ten years. Not much gets to me.”

So back to the certification class and Amelia. I really wrestled with it, knowing I should definitely not repeat my history and let her learn to sit and then actually sit for families. I’d just come to that conclusion when Amelia, the spitting image of me at that age, told me she had “zero interest” in that class and “sub-zero interest” in babysitting. Atta girl. Disaster avoided, for now.

In all truth, learning to care for children is difficult and exhausting but oh so necessary. Those of you who are babysitting now and enjoying it—good for you. I wish I’d had more positive experience before I became a mom. And, yes, I will encourage Amelia to put herself out there and learn the “best practices” of babysitting. Don’t worry.