My kids’ sitter and I have a pretty good relationship; she lives a block a way, so she’s not just the sitter but a neighbor as well.  After more than 8 years of caring for my kids, she’s a friend too.  (We’ll call her “B” for the purposes of this blog entry – friend “B”)

 

We walk very early in the morning, 5:00 am sharp, before the traffic gets busy in the neighborhood.  Everything and anything is fair game for discussion while we walk – work, the hubbies, kids, politics, you name it.  Sometimes another mother who also lives down the street joins us.  Small world – the other mother’s kids go to the same magnet school, preschool and sitter with my kids, and she’s working at the same company that I recently left.  There’s a fair amount of stuff to talk about between us; we do get a little rowdy.

 

Hey, if you heard female laughter (cackling?) between 5 and 6 am, it’s us, very sorry.  Put your sweats and walking shoes on and come on out and join us.

 

I’m still thinking about our conversation on Thursday morning.  Yeah, who’d think a sweaty, catty early morning conversation with the neighbor/sitter would still give you pause several days later.  But it did, and I’m stewing, worried, and unable to do a thing.  At least I can’t think of anything I can do.  Except pray.

 

B is tired when she appears in front of my house at 5:05 am; she’s a little later than usual, which is odd.  (She’s painfully punctual, which doesn’t mesh well with my tail-dragging at that hour.)  As we walk down the street, she tells me she tried to go to bed earlier last night, like at 10 pm.  Unfortunately she got a “daycare call” at 10:35 pm.  Not good at all.

 

“Daycare calls” are something I’ve become familiar with over 8 years.  Being a licensed day care provider registered with a state agency for child care referrals, B gets calls from several times a week to several times a day from parents looking for day care.  There just aren’t enough child care providers to go around, especially for kids not yet potty trained.  Babes in arms, infants, are the hardest to place.  (I count myself incredibly lucky to have found B, and just around the corner from my house – a double blessing.)  Most of the time B has to turn people away; she can only have a maximum of six children, two each from different state-specified age levels.  Between the other mother from down the street and my family, there have been only one or two slots available for other children over the last handful of years.  Now that our oldest children are in school, there have been more slots and now more calls entertained.

 

But calling at 10:35 in the evening is a bad sign.  I can tell before B elaborates any further that this is a potential problem family.  There always seems to be one taking the last slot, the parent who is divorced and has little education, might have multiple jobs, has kids from more than one mother/father, whose child care is subsidized by the state because they’re in a workfare program.  The kids frequently have “issues”, requiring more attention from the sitter and from other families in the day care.  We always hear how these mandatory workfare programs have turned around the lives of people in them, making them valuable contributors to society.  But we hear about the handful of stellar examples.  Not the majority of cases, the ones who call at 10:35 at night.

 

B says, you know me, no calls before 9am or after 9pm.  People need to sleep, it’s just plain rude to call before or after 9 o’clock if it’s not an emergency.

 

B:  This mother tells me she has to have a sitter TOMORROW.  She wants someone to watch her 15-month-old and her 3 year-old, seven days a week, from 10am to 10pm.  I can’t do that, I need to have a day off, and I don’t have the slots open early in the day.

 

(I’m thinking, oh, this smells, there’s a bigger story.  And I’m right.  I hate it when I’m right about this stuff.  You know, that kind of rightness when your belly starts to flip, you feel a little queasy?  That kind of right.)

 

B:  This mother is young, I can hear it.  She’s working at a Restaurant “X”; she doesn’t know what her hours will be from day to day, and she’s asked all the time to stay late.  Daycare’s probably covered by the state, but we didn’t get that far.

 

(This is not a good thing.  I hate our bias against it.  But a state-subsidized daycare situation means the sitter is paid weeks after care has been provided, parents may fall out of the qualifications and not tell the sitter until too late.  Too late, burned for a couple weeks of childcare the parent can’t pay and won’t be covered by the state.  Forcing the sitter to tell the parent they have to leave the daycare, taking the children who’ve become used to regular meals and a clean, safe place, bonded with other kids and my sitter.  Messy, hurtful, ugly.)

 

B:  Remember that story in the news last week, the daycare that got closed down by the state just last week? 

 

(I nod and hmm-hmm.  It’s VERY bad.  I HATE being this right.) 

 

B:  Yeah, her kids were in that day care.  I can’t take them, I don’t have enough slots for both, and I can’t cover those kinds of hours. 

 

She’s starting to repeat herself, justifying her pronouncement to this parent.  We commiserate, more tsk-tsk-it’s-a-shame between us.  And I know we feel the same, and I know what really made her lose sleep.

 

These children have been in a daycare that was raided and shut down.  A gun was found under a bed where a child had been sleeping, and residents in the home were allegedly selling crack.  A neighbor interviewed on TV said, well, there were a lot of people coming and going, but we didn’t suspect anything like this. 

 

Of course, a day care operator, licensed by the state, is likely to have people coming and going all the time.  Most should have children in tow, I would think.  Maybe that’s what tipped off the police, I don’t know, maybe a parent turned them in.  I didn’t pay attention to the whole story at the time because it wasn’t something that affected me.  It was part of another world.

 

B and I drift off to another topic.  We can’t talk about all the other stuff hanging in the air in front of us, we have to brush it away like a fog or cobwebs.  But it’s still there and it hurts.

 

Were one of these same two children sleeping above the gun that was found?  Would the young woman have to stay home and risk her job and state support because she had no care?  Or would she do as some other mother did recently, leave her preschool kids in the car because she had no day care?  Where will they go now that they can’t go to B’s house?  B’s is a light year away from where they were, the kind of place these children need desperately.  A stable place with a competent care provider, amongst kids who have higher expectations of life than guns under the bed and crack sellers in the kitchen; a place where they can be children, cared for, cleaned, fed, napped, hugged, draw big Crayola smiling suns in water-color blue skies.

 

This crackhouse-cum-daycare was across town, in an area that’s fallen to blight in the last handful of years.  It was once a nice city everybody-knows-your-name neighborhood, in walking distance from a fruit market and family-owned grocery.  I used to stop occasionally during my commutes home at those stores, had dates at the tiny diner next door to the grocery.  And now?  The area is a shambles.  There’s no way I would ever go back to those stores; a young woman was kidnapped several years ago from the parking lot near those stores, tortured and raped, murdered and left nude outside of town.  I can’t imagine the desperation that would drive a mother to leave her children every day in that neighborhood.

 

It’s not the first time this stuff has touched our otherwise-safe-suburban-middle-class-white-collar life.  A few years ago another family came to the daycare when there were slots open; the kids were exactly the same age as mine, 3 and 5 years old.  The young (VERY young) father had taken custody of them after a messy divorce; the equally young mother had been a drug abuser, photos taken of her kids going in and out of the house next door where a known-child abuser/pornographer/drug dealer lived.  This kind of stuff happened during the day when the father was at work and the mother was either at home or at the house next door.  (This young family lived only blocks away from the crackhouse-daycare.)  The family only stayed in the daycare for a year, going in and out of the state daycare subsidy during that time.   The father got a new girlfriend, moved farther away from town; the mother moved to Detroit, to live with a new older rich sugar daddy.  The kids?  We believe they’re still with their father, and hopefully living in a more stable place; we don’t know as our paths never cross any more.  The names cross our lips once in a while, but it’s not a good memory; they’ve slipped away, as if to another world.

 

Selfishly I want to limit my cares to my own children, wondering what memories they will have as they get older of their daycare playmates.  We talk often about these people, drifting in and out of daycare as they drift from circumstance to circumstance in their lives.  My oldest has reached a point where she can understand the entire situation, asking a lot less whys about this and that surrounding these other families that come and go.  I wish I could protect my kids from having to deal with this until they’re older, but there it is, real life, unfolding in front of us.

 

And there it is: I can’t limit my cares to my own – we’re part of a much bigger whole.  These other people on the fringe have had a profound impact on us, punctuating our equilibrium; they’re not out there somewhere else, they’re really right here in our world.  I can’t help worrying about where those little ones are, what will happen to them until-if ever their parents get stable lives.  And what will happen to them as they become adults – will they find themselves in the same straits, or better?  Will they ever get a chance to get off the treadmill their parents found themselves on?

 

I wish I had a solution, wish I could think of something to do.  Dear God, I pray, help them. 

 

If you know me well, you know that’s an act of near finality, when I’m left with nothing else to do.  Like praying for the dead, the ones beyond this world who still are part of our world.

 

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