The last time I remember encountering her she had towered over me by two feet, so seeing our former babysitter Theresa at eye-level was a jarring and thrilling experience. She walked into the place where my brother was playing with his band, Still Remains, on Thanksgiving Eve, and it was like we instantly went back forty years. She said we were the worst kids she ever babysat, and I took great pride in that because we worked hard for the title (at least I did, my brother would claim it was all me). A little background on my history with babysitters before we return to our reunion with Theresa:
I took babysitters as a challenge. It was a delicate balance – trying to charm them enough so they wouldn’t rat us out, while making sure we inflicted just enough psychological damage to remain indelibly unforgettable in their minds for the rest of their lives. That’s a tough task for any adult to do, yet I managed to make it happen as a wee itty-bitty one.
For one neighborhood babysitter, we devised a path in our basement rigged with traps and falling debris. After luring her down there, we set her on her not-so-merry way, where she promptly began tripping on strings, and junk began falling in from all sides. As soon as she was entrenched in the mayhem, we shut the lights off and hurried upstairs, leaving her scrambling in the pitch black.
She never babysat for us again.
A long-time family friend was a last-minute desperate choice as a babysitter by my parents, and we knew him quite well. He’d never babysat for us, so he didn’t quite know what we were capable of, though he found out soon enough. We’d known, and been repeatedly warned, that he was terrified of our German shepherd. My parents also strictly told us to make sure that the dog was kept in the garage at all times, and not let in the house under any circumstances. Rookie errors abounded: first of all, don’t supply me with the weakness of a babysitter unless you want it exploited. Second of all, don’t tell me not to let the dog in the house because that’s the first thing I will do as soon as I see the car round the bend of our street.
Within minutes of my parents’ departure, I ‘accidentally’ let our giant German shepherd into the family room, while our babysitter ran for his life into the nearest room with a door – the small guest bathroom – and locked himself in. Truth be told, I don’t recall how long we let him stay in there, but I’m almost certain that eventually we got the dog back in the garage and let him out. Almost certain.
He never babysat for us again.
When another neighbor was coerced into babysitting for us at the last minute, I upped the torture into the mind-game realm. I collected all my allergy pills and vitamins for the day, along with a few Tic-Tacs, put them in the palm of my hand and declared that if she didn’t do what we wanted I was going to take all of these pills. Before giving her a chance to respond, I shoved them into my mouth and gulped it all down with a glass of water.
She never babysat for us again either.
And so when Theresa came along, we didn’t expect her to last beyond the usual one-and-done. In some respect, I was probably testing who could love me in spite of my worst behavior, and so far everyone was failing miserably. (I wish I could say the testing ended there, but alas, I’m still working on things.)
Theresa came with formidable resume, being the oldest of sixteen children. There were things she had already witnessed and handled that I could barely fathom, and for two kids who had largely been left to their own devices, without the competition of younger children, or the social graces learned in such situations, my brother and I probably weren’t that much of a challenge, but still I gave her a run for her money.
She still remembers how I removed an angelfish from our aquarium and let it fall to the floor (hello, serial killer tendencies!) and then tried to blame it on her when my parents got home. Such minor murders aside, Theresa managed to rein us in with discipline and love, getting us to do chores and work without much bother or fuss, and somehow showing us how much easier it would be if we simply behaved, while at the same time illustrating how much fun could be had as well. She was our own Mary Poppins without the up-do or British accent. We grew to respect her, and she became our favorite babysitter, returning many times until we were simply too old for any further watching.
As she stood before me about four decades later, reminiscing about things even I didn’t remember anymore, I felt the profound and enormous shift of time. She was already retired, and already a grandmother. We moved to a quieter area, away from the crowd, and she paused and asked if I was happy. Such a simple question on its surface, but how much it conveyed, especially coming from someone who once knew me so well as a child.
I thought about it before answering, wanting to be sure as much for her as for myself: ‘yes,’ I said. It wasn’t the loud or boisterous ‘yes’ like I thought and expected it to be when I was a kid, imagining the day I’d be an adult and free of all the childhood worries that seemed to plague me so much more than everyone else. It was a quiet and genuine ‘yes’, a soft ‘yes’ that spoke of the loss and heartache that could only make a true sense of happiness possible.
As we shared more war-story remembrances of our babysitting years together, I realized that my brother and I may have had as much of an impact on her memory of that time as she had had on ours. On the eve of Thanksgiving, I felt grateful to re-connect with such a special person who had played such a formative part of my life.
