The closer I get to my ideal child-bearing years (those years being between the ages of 45 and 60), the more horrified children make me. Okay. Perhaps it's not the children themselves. I don't think a bunch of towheaded, freaky-eyed kids are going to file out of the cornstalks with the pure intent of... Well, I don't know what they did in that movie, because I'm too frightened by Children of the Corn to actually sit down and watch it—but I know those blondies did something bad to the grown-ups. Something real band.
It's not that. It's... Well... Thirteen years ago I accidentally dropped my six-month-old second cousin onto the corner of a coffee table. I'm pretty sure there's a circle of Hell for that. Rapists. Murderers. Pedophiles. Coffee-table-toddler-droppers.
Oh, the crying and the mouth blood. It was like a horror movie. I know now that mouth blood always appears way worse than it really is, because a gallon of saliva with one drop of blood in it magically appears to be a gallon of blood. But that was something I didn't grasp until I had all of my wisdom teeth removed as a teenager and despite ruining a perfectly good pillow, I didn't die the death of a shriveled-up California Raisin.
I am scared that every time I come within a three-foot radius of a child, I'm going to break the darn thing. Or traumatize them. Or get an angry lady, who seems very capable of beating me up, yelling at me for somehow slighting her child.
Maybe when I have kids of my own, I will be less uneasy. Less uneasy about squishing my child's head underneath an unattached slide, like I might have.. sorta... kinda.. maybe did on my very first day of babysitting way back in the day. I didn't mean to squish her head. How was I to know that playing on disassembled playground equipment would be unsafe for a six year old? I was eleven. I had zero babysitting experience at that point, and very little god-given common sense.
In my defense, I've had quite a few successful babysitting gigs over the years. Gigs where nobody got dropped onto a coffee table or squished under a slide. I also was a lifeguard/art director/camp councilor during my summers of high school. And nobody drowned, suffocated on glitter glue or got eaten by bears on my watch. A couple close calls with the glitter glue and I did have to rescue a Lassie dog that got tangled in a buoy, but overall, I kept my campers relatively safe.
Despite my blossoming babysitting career, I got older and went to college. For some reason, people tend to think college kids aren't as responsible as high school kids. Thus, my babysitting went down the tubes. Perhaps college students' reputations are tarnished by the image of spring break debauchery and the concept of Ramen noodle malnutrition being somehow chic to the college scene. I thought maybe I wasn't getting babysitting jobs because I had been found out as the irresponsible coffee-table-toddler-dropper that I was! So, I stopped looking for gigs. I wrote myself off as “not a kid person” and became increasingly finicky around the ungrown.
Last week, my boss asked if I would please, please, please babysit her eight-year-old twins while she took her twelve-year-old daughter to see Justin Bieber and her husband worked. My boss is one of my closest friends, so I immediately accepted, although, I was nervous.
To my relief, when I got there, the twins were perfectly behaved. I kicked their butts at Twister (because I'm the Twister champion...). They painted my nails blue. We ate sandwiches for dinner. It was awesome. Nobody, myself included, got traumatized. Nobody got hurt. My boss didn't threaten to kill me when she got home. I'd even say I actually had fun. Perhaps children are not so scary after all?
Who am I kidding? Of course they are.
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