Caring for My Children by Rebecca Steinitz

Mara was born in Berkeley. I attended prenatal yoga with a cake baker, a clothing designer, and a biologist, all due the same month I was. After class we sat on a bench in the winter sun, drinking Calistoga water and fruit smoothies, and discussing midwives, birth plans, and curtains. When the babies arrived, we morphed into a mother's group and continued the conversation in each other's living rooms, drinking herbal tea, nursing, and changing cloth diapers.

I found my first babysitter at postnatal yoga. One day Meghan showed up with the mother she was working for. She helped look after the babies on their quilt in the middle of the room while we creaked into downward dog and collapsed into Shivasana. At the end of class, the woman she'd come with announced that she was moving and Meghan was looking for a job. I was just starting to think about finding someone to watch Mara for ten hours a week while I got back to my dissertation, and I was thrilled at the possibility that my search might be over before it even began.

I anxiously read up on interview questions for childcare providers in the relevant What to Expect volume, but when I asked Meghan where she was from and she told me she'd grown up on a commune in Tennessee, I knew who was going to be taking care of my baby. "You grew up on The Farm?" I asked. "You know The Farm?" she replied. What natural-childbirth-steeped Berkeley mother didn't know The Farm, home of the legendary Ina May Gaskin, author of the celebrated Spiritual Midwifery? I found her at yoga and she grew up on The Farm? This was definitely my kind of babysitter!

It only got better. Meghan was studying to be a midwife and belonged to an African dance troupe. She cheerfully changed cloth diapers, even helping us figure out a better way to fold them. She didn't mind that Mara had to be walked to sleep, and she was flexible about her hours. She was a stricter vegetarian than I was, not that anything but breast milk passed between Mara's lips, and her primary sartorial principle was batik. I wrote my dissertation in Berkeley cafes while Meghan took Mara to drum circles. I took Mara to watch Meghan dance, and we were all ecstatic.

Six years later, I drive my station wagon every morning through icy small-town-Ohio streets, taking Mara to school and her three-year-old sister to the babysitter before heading to my office at the college where I am now a professor. We drop Eva off first. Liz lives down the street from school, and Mara and I like to walk over together and share some Mommy and big girl morning time. Eva is usually the last to arrive; the other parents have to be at work earlier than I do. I take her into a windowless basement room with big bins of toys and shelves of games, books, art supplies, and videos, lots of videos. The Wiggles are on television, and I help her take off her parka and sit down at the table to draw or have a bowl of Lucky Charms if the other kids are still eating. I let Liz know if she stayed up too late or didn't eat breakfast, give Eva a kiss, and head off.

If you'd asked me, back in my Berkeley days, whether I'd leave my daughter in the care of someone who watched five other children (and sometimes more, on a snow day or when carefully calibrated part-timers end up overlapping), whether any child of mine would ever eat bologna sandwiches (not to mention McDonald's every Thursday), whether I'd someday listen to my own flesh and blood babble on about television shows I'd never even heard of (JoJo? Who on earth is JoJo?), I would have shaken my head, I like to think, with dismay, but more likely with scorn. Now this is my life.

I found Liz in a crisis. After leaving Meghan behind when we moved from Berkeley to Ohio, we lucked into a wonderful nanny. When she moved away, I wheedled my way into the family day care that my colleagues and neighbors hailed as the best in town. There I learned that what everyone else considered the best wasn't necessarily the best for us. The food was nutritious and the activities were educational, but our miscommunications and disagreements gradually escalated until Laura called one Friday afternoon to tell me that she would no longer care for Mara and Eva, starting immediately.

I cried all night, convinced that I had ruined my children's lives with my own inability to just get along. But my husband said this would be the best thing that could have happened, and he was right. Laura and I had fundamentally different ideas about children and mothering, not to mention just about everything else, and she firmly believed I was wrong on all counts. I used to blithely proclaim that you might think it wouldn't work to dislike the person who took care of your children, but it was okay. Really, though, as the torturous grammar of that sentence shows, it wasn't.

The following Monday, we went to interview Liz. I took in the windowless room, the big television, the row of artificially-colored cereals on top of the fridge, and my heart sank. Then I noticed how Liz sat on the floor in the midst of the children playing around her. Eva headed straight for her lap and Mara started chattering away. My kids had honed in immediately on what I couldn't yet see: this was someone who loved children, someone who would play with them and listen to them and care about what they wanted and needed. I hired Meghan because of yoga, The Farm, and a batik tank top. I thought about not hiring Liz because of videos and Kool-Aid. But Meghan and Liz both love kids, and that turned out to be more important than either batik or Kool-Aid.

Do I wish I lived in Berkeley or Brooklyn and had dozens of progressive daycare centers to apply to and agencies full of nannies to interview? Sure. Am I privileged to have the income and flexibility to seek out child care I want, rather than just taking whatever I can afford or is convenient? Definitely. But the limited choices in our small town have focused me on what really matters. I'm under no illusion that Liz takes care of Eva because she loves her. Liz takes care of Eva because that is her job, because caring for other people's children is how she makes her living. She loves her grandson; she takes care of Eva. But as Liz herself often reminds me, she chose this work because she loves it, and that is enough for me.

In summer, when I pick Eva up at the end of the day, everyone is outside in Liz's big backyard. The babies are strapped into swings or perched in walkers on the gazebo, while the older kids kick balls across the grass and climb on the swing set. Eva runs up to me with a big smile, the remains of her popsicle decorating her face. In winter, they are in the basement room where I left them, eating Fritos, watching a video, climbing on Liz. Eva looks up from the car or doll she is playing with and the same big smile appears. I ask Liz about the day: what Eva ate, how she napped, whether she was happy. I bundle Eva back into her parka and boots, she kisses Liz and the babies, and we head home. She is happy. I am satisfied.

While her daughters are at school and childcare, Rebecca Steinitz teaches English at Ohio Wesleyan University and writes articles about nineteenth-century British literature, book reviews for The Women's Review of Books, and essays about the really important stuff.