Desperately Seeking Family
I didn't want rent money; I wanted to belong.
by Annsley Chapman
September 12, 2007
Most kids begin babysitting around twelve, but I started years earlier, when I was hardly an inch taller than some of my charges. By fourteen, I had earned a pile of money for college. At sixteen, when my parents demanded that I get a real job to prove my maturity to selective schools, I flat-out refused.
"Why is changing diapers so much better than steaming lattes?" my mother demanded after finding the Starbucks application she had brought home crumpled in the trash.
I didn't know what to tell her. The truth was that I lived for the fifteen minutes before the parents left, when they wrote out emergency numbers while their kids climbed up my legs, a time most parents and babysitters find awkward but obligatory, the suburban changing of the guards. I loved standing on the threshold of another family's existence, enmeshed in a domesticity different than the complicated one waiting for me at home. While I stood there, nodding at the list of allergies and bedtimes, it was all I could do to restrain myself from throwing my arms around the mother and father like a waif, begging that they take me in.
Yet despite the years I've logged telling ghost stories and building pillow forts, of recounting the evening's antics with parents at the end of their date night, I never found a family who wanted me as badly as I wanted them. I could only pretend to belong in this living room, with this family, until the mother started rummaging through her purse for cash, and I was again relegated to an employed interloper. The night always concluded with a solitary trip home and a wad of money that — like a father referring to me as "the help" or finding a nanny cam lodged on a child's bookshelf — said I wasn't part of the family after all.
©2007 Annsley Chapman and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Annsley Chapman grew up in Ohio, graduated from the University of Virginia, but is just as rude as any New Yorker. When she's not interning at Nerve, she divides her time between nannying in Manhattan, reading, and wasting money on Ebay. |
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