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Standards of Care
By Liza Mundy
Sunday, April 4, 1999; Page W04
IT SOMETIMES OCCURS TO ME that I would not make a good nanny. The other day, for example, while puttering in the kitchen, I turned to see that my 9-month-old had found his way to the cat food plate on the floor and, naturally, plunged his face into it. Dragging him away, I marveled at how much Nine Lives tuna a baby can eat and how quickly; noted in passing how interestingly catlike his breath now smelled; and wondered, not for the first time, how long I'd last if it were my job to care for the child of a stranger. Weeks? Days? Hours?
For me, thankfully, this question is largely hypothetical. But for plenty of people -- obviously enough -- it's not. It's not hypothetical for my own beloved babysitter, Esperanza Gilbert, who left her native Ecuador, and her parents, when she was 19, worked as a nanny while earning her papers, and is now married, with a house, a minivan and kids of her own. It's not hypothetical for Mariem Diallo, the Guinean woman who baby-sits for my single-mom neighbor Liz. For them, the question is real, and so are the consequences. And so it was that on another recent day, Mariem was at our house with Liz's kids, whom she was watching around the clock while Liz was away on a business trip to China. "I get up to check on them three times a night," she confided, nestling into the couch and laughing at herself. "Just to make sure they're there."
This, I thought, is the kind of child-care story you never hear. As it happened, Mariem's fears had been provoked by an incident that occurred on Kent Island, Md., last May, where a woman providing day care in her home put two 5-month-old boys to sleep on a bed, left a folded blanket at the edge to keep the babies from falling off, went downstairs to make some cupcakes and failed to check the babies for more than an hour. It was time enough for the boys to become entangled in the blanket and somehow suffocate. That is the kind of child-care story we hear. Stories like the Louise Woodward case, where a British au pair stood trial in the shaking death of a baby. Stories, I should point out, like the one I wrote about two years ago, when my own babysitter at the time left my daughter alone in the house to go on an emergency errand. Whenever something frightening happens, columnists like me hasten to columnize about the anxieties of absentee parents; wire services follow the tragedy daily; and there is a hue and cry over the need for better regulation of the day-care profession. All of which may be important, all of which may be right, except that in our grief and trauma, it seems to me, we unfairly tend to see sickening cases of babysitter negligence as emblematic of what all babysitters do, in a way that we do not when we read sickening stories of parents who neglect or even abuse their kids. When a woman holds onto her carjacked car because her baby is inside -- as a Chevy Chase woman did in early March -- that, we tell ourselves, is Everyparent; when a babysitter puts two children in an unsafe sleeping position and fails to check them, that, we fear, is Everynanny. Neither assumption is true. Or maybe one is. I think it may be fair to say that most parents would cling to that car as long as our fingers were attached to our hands, but I'd hazard that many child-care providers would, as well.
What you never hear in the news, because of course we don't seem to think them newsworthy, are the quiet conversations of babysitters who, like parents, are deeply unnerved by what can happen when kids are cared for by babysitters. Women who take their jobs seriously and love the kids they care for and understand how tragedy can happen in a split second and who would never, in a million years, leave two 5-month-olds unattended on a bed.
Women who are -- and this is my main point -- more careful, sometimes, than parents. Because what we really never hear are the truly private conversations of babysitters like Espy and Mariem, who, I suspect, allow themselves from time to time to comment on the shortcomings of Liz and me, absent-minded moms who (speaking for myself here) sometimes let our children eat cat food or send them to play in snow with, say, a denim fishing cap for a hat. "She still hasn't taken the baby to the doctor!" is what I imagine them saying, or, "She never uses a monitor when he naps!" It was, in fact, Espy who made me locate the baby monitor I had indeed never used; Espy who always remembers to latch the stair gate;
Espy, moreover, mother of two daughters, who knew to get my daughter a Cinderella dress for Christmas and a toy stroller for her birthday; Espy who understands so perfectly the gifts that will make a 3-year-old girl joyous.
I'm not defending people who hire babysitters to care for their kids. I'm defending the babysitters. I'm saying that it's babysitters, or at least some babysitters, who can teach parents about being careful: "Ever since you told me about Mariem," Liz said not long after she got back, "I find myself getting up three times a night. Just to be sure they're there."
Liza Mundy's e-mail address is mundyl@washpost.com.
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
HOW SAD. NEED JASTO SAY MORE?
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