beginnings and weird scenes

today i started my nanny job, and it is such a relief! after doing a few babysitting jobs for a stubborn, slightly spoiled one year old boy, it is nice to be watching a 3 1/2 month old little girl whose needs are basic and much easier to take care of.

in other words, i don’t foresee asking myself, ‘now do i do things his mom’s way, and teach him that what he wants is the most important thing in life, or do i just let him cry himself to sleep, since all his needs are take care of and he’s really just trying to manipulate me when he cries, “NHANNAH!!”????

that did make ignoring him a lot more difficult, the fact that he finally learned my name and he’s got so many nannies and we had such a fun walk looking at the moo-cows and the neigh-neighs and my personal favorite, the “hop-hops”. his dad is a landscaper so he knows the names of every tool and machine, including “backhoe,” and i still don’t know what that is.

i asked my mother about wanting kids. i think she always did, but when she got married, having kids was more of a given. today, more people really think hard about whether they want them and how they are going to take care of them. i’ve thought before that i could take care of a child’s needs, but i’m not sure i could really love him or her..but my mum says it’s different when you have your own kids. so hopefully when/if i bear children, they won’t come out of the womb manipulating me. and i will just love them because of a weird thing that happens to me, where i’m suddenly not as selfish as i was because i have someone else’s most basic needs to care for.

this sounds a bit weird, but it’s one of the reasons i think about adoption. a kid who is being shuffled around in foster care needs so much love, and adopting kids like that really makes a difference, changes the course of their lives. after working at the children’s home as a lifeguard, i realized that even one stable parent, even if it is a surrogate grandma, can make life ‘ok’ for a kid. that one stable person could even be really messed up, and it would still make a difference. but a ton of those kids didn’t have anyone stable.

ok, so on to the weird scene of today. i am recently single, and i have been feeling it. (“feeling it” as in a new awareness of the number 1.) i went to my nanny job today, and sydnie (the little girl) was there with her dad (shawn). he went over all the details of how the daily routine goes, and after her nap, we took her to the biltmore gardens. we were walking her around in the stroller, and the funny thing was, everyone was perceiving me as his wife and her mother. it was as if in the space of three weeks i had been it all, single, dating, and married, and a mother! (hello, hollywood!) it’s ironic that i felt people’s perceptions so acutely, but they meant absolutely nothing!

today was an uphill battle and i’m very ready to rest in a horizontal position. goodnight, dears.