Essays
by Joy Renee

To paraphrase Shakespeare: �What�s in a name? A job by any other name is still a job.� That may be so, but there are some jobs which have titles which are veritable misnomers. Take babysitting. For the uninitiated the word conjures up visions of sitting in a rocking chair watching TV while the baby sleeps blissfully in his crib. The most strenuous thing they imagine might be involved is tiptoeing down the hall during commercials to peek at the little angel. These people are the ones who believe that babysitters who charge a dollar per hour are stealing their wages. Ha! I shall quickly disabuse them of this crass misconception. The term babysitting is very misleading. In the first place it is not always a baby and in the second place there is very little sitting involved--unless one were to consider sitting on the baby!

A good example of this would be my first babysitting job. I was just eleven. He was just four. His mother, our neighbor, was just stepping across the street to the store. She�d be right back. His name was Thumper--this was the Bambi generation--and all I had to do was watch him to make sure he didn�t run out into the four-lane street, or into the house except to use the bathroom, or wander onto the high-school parking lot adjacent to the backyard.

I took my duty very seriously that day. I watched Thumper ride his trike up and down the driveway, never more than half a dozen paces behind him. I watched him turn summersaults. After showing him how, I watched him stand on his head. And I watched him draw with a purple crayon all over the side of their white stucco house. I was very gullible in those days. I believed everything everybody ever told me. I believed Thumper when he said his Mommy wouldn�t care. Well his Mommy must have had his number because she told him, �Wait til you father gets home!� But she told me, �Wait til I get my purse.� He got a piece of her mind. I got a quarter and a big piece of watermelon. These were the days sitters got fifty cents an hour and watermelon cost two cents a pound. I guess the important thing was that I hadn�t watched him run into the street. Let me point out for the obtuse: I never once sat down!

I was somewhat older and somewhat wiser when I took on a family of four rambunctious kids between the ages of ten years and ten months. In the course of the evening I broke up a viscous fight between the nine and ten year old boys, listened to a quantity of calculating tattle-tales from their five-year-old sister and changed a dirty diaper. At dusk I played an involuntary game of hide-and-seek in chest-high grass with the two brothers while toting the toddler on one hip and tugging along behind me by one hand their reluctant little sister. To top off the evening I supervised four Saturday night baths, listened to three Sunday-school verse recitations, told two bedtime stories, and sang countless lullabies while pacing the floor with the fussy baby held in fast numbing arms. The closest I came to sitting that night was sitting on my temper.

Then there was the night when for the first time I agreed to do double duty--two families at once. The following is a recipe for a very volatile concoction: Shane, a bossy six-year-old boy; his sister Janie, a timid three-year-old; their baby brother Wayne, a relatively placid ten-and-one-half-month-old; Rick a rowdy three-year-old and his eleven-month-old baby brother Curtis.

The instant the door shut behind the four parents that night Curtis began screaming and after a few experimental whimpers, Wayne decided to join him in a duet. While I was trying to comfort them, the other three started a squirt-gun fight in the kitchen. I sent them outside to continue their little war while I cleaned up their first battlefield. I no sooner wiped up the last drop when a commotion at the patio door sent chills up my spine. I was right to be alarmed. The sight that met my eyes was appalling. In the parents bedroom, being held at bay were Shane and his little sister Janie. Their puny water pistols were no match for the big gun wielded by Rick--the garden hose equipped with spray nozzle. Another mess to clean up! The biggest part of which was Rick himself. It was while I was stripping Rick of his soggy clothes that I got to sit down for the one and only time that night--on Rick!

That was just the prelude of the evening. Next came the fixing and serving of soup and sandwiches for six. Then I sent the older three upstairs to watch TV in the den while I bathed the babies and got them ready for bed. When I took the babies upstairs with me to join the others, I freaked out at the sight of the pieces of a giant Lego set strewn from wall to wall. Wayne freaked out at the sight of a four-point deer head mounted on the wall. Wayne�s terror distracted me but nothing would distract Wayne. It was obvious we couldn�t remain in that room. I sent Shane downstairs with his brother while I stayed to help Rick and Janie pick up the Lego.

By this time I was dying for a chance to sit down. I kept myself going with thoughts of bedtime. Then, I plotted, I would curl up on the couch with a book and soft stereo music. But it wasn�t to be.

First there was the supper mess in the kitchen to clean up and the baby paraphernalia in the living room and bathroom to pick up. I finished all of that with a sigh and thought. �Soon?� Only to be confronted with the sight of Rick and Curtis� room where they had all been playing so quietly--I should have been suspicious. The pieces of six puzzles and a huge set of Tinker Toys were stirred into a puddle-shaped blob near the door. The toy box appeared to float like an ark in the sea of assorted toys that surrounded it. The bedding of both bunk beds and the crib, including mattresses, were in a shapeless heap on the floor. There was no sign of the kids. And then I heard giggles emanating from the pile of bedding and disembodied heads popped out through the folds of cloth. �We�re playing tent.� Someone piped and disappeared again. �Bedtime!� I bellowed, picking up a section of orange Hot Wheel track and snapping it over my head like a whip.

With Shane�s help, I wrestled the mattresses back onto the beds and quickly remade them. Then I placed the babies together in the crib and Rick and Janie together on the bottom bunk with the futile instruction: �Be nice while Shane and I put the puzzles together.� I was working on my third puzzle when Janie�s tiny, whispery voice came from behind me. �Joy, Rick�s cutting my hair.� Sure enough, he was! There he sat gripping a pair of red-handled, blunt-bladed children�s scissors in one hand and the inch or so of hair he had cut off the tip of her left braid held aloft like a trophy in the other.

Bedtime had finally arrived. With Wayne in the play pen in the master bedroom, Curtis in his own crib, Rick in the top and Janie in the bottom bunk, and Shane on the front room couch, I thought I was finally free to sit down. And then headlights played across the front room window and there was the sound of a car in the driveway, of three pairs of bare feet racing to the backdoor and a duet of wails coming from the bedrooms. A few minutes later I finally got to sit down--in the car for my ride home.

Now maybe it is understandable why the term babysitting evokes, for me, the image of a person sitting on a baby. It is beyond me how anyone who has children of their own can so grossly under-estimate the value of the service they are buying, for they with their daily experience must be aware of the peculiar demands of quality childcare. The only explanation for this apparently caviler attitude that does not denigrate the parents is that the job title, with its frivolous connotations, has exerted undue influence upon the minds of employer and employee alike, perpetuating the myth that temporary childcare�s main job requirement is experience in operating a rocking chair. So to those who still believe that a dollar an hour is an inflated wage for a sitter, I have only this to say: �Fine, I�ll take the dollar. But I charge by the head as well as by the hour.�