Our Slipshod Past
Jan 6th, 2009 by ruthpennebaker
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When a president-elect is putting together his new cabinet, I always think of Zoe Baird. She was Bill Clinton’s nominee for attorney general in 1993, one of those unfortunates who went down because of hiring illegal aliens and not paying their social security taxes. After that, a number of other nominees for other positions — most of them women — bit the political dust for similar reasons. Naturally, it was called Nannygate.
I don’t want to defend people who hire illegal aliens and cheat on their taxes, but I do think the whole brouhaha ignored the reality of working couples’ lives. If you and your spouse both work, as my husband and I did, you spend much of your lives patching together makeshift plans for your kids’ care. We were fortunate enough to have excellent daycare for our two children — but that didn’t address what happens when they go to school and need after-school care. Or the holidays that seemed to pop up constantly on school schedules but not on our work schedules. Or the long, hot summers.
We used neighborhood babysitters. Babysitters found through agencies. We advertised, we interviewed, we went quietly and desperately nuts. With this kind of hysteria going on, it wouldn’t be surprising if you ended up with an occasional illegal person. As long as the babysitter wasn’t a serial killer or a drug dealer, who cared about smaller legal niceties, especially when you were panting to get out the door, already late for your job? (Why was it that most of my supervisors didn’t have kids and hadn’t the slightest comprehension for how hard it was to keep body and soul together? Or that women of my era were loath to ever mention how precarious this kind of juggling was? You kept your home life and your office life separate. Kvetching about kids was the surest track to being marginalized at work.)
And occasionally getting out on the weekends — it was a nightmare. I can still remember our desire to go somewhere one night, calling everybody we knew or were willing to meet on short notice. My husband ended up talking to a answering machine owned by a graduate student, trying to force her to pick up the phone. “I know you’re there, Rhonda!” he screamed. “Answer!” Desperation yields bad behavior like that.
It all turned out well for us — and I know we were lucky. These days, when I walk down the street, I realize something else: Half the world is populated by our former babysitters. We run into them all the time, hear from them by email. “Remember me? I was your daughter’s nanny,” a young woman told my husband a couple of years ago. Since we never called anybody a nanny, that was kind of startling, but I’m sure she was right. We vaguely remembered her from one of those summers in the 80s, but her hair color had changed in the meantime.
With this kind of slipshod past, no wonder no one’s been in touch with my husband or me about assuming an important position in the Obama administration. I couldn’t pick out half our old babysitters in a police lineup — much less tell you their citizenship status. I bet that kind of non-answer would go over like gangbusters these days. If they call, I plan to just say no.
(Copyright 2009 by Ruth Pennebaker)
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