The Form My Son Filled Out
Three Years of Mornings
I want to tell you what three years of mornings looked like, because a person says “babysitter” like it is a small thing you do in a chair.
Drew and Brianne both worked in town, him at the parts counter at the implement dealer, her at the insurance office off the square. They left their house at a quarter to seven. That meant I was at their door at six-forty, which meant I was up at five-thirty, which meant Roy was up too, because Roy did not like me driving the county roads in the dark alone and he took me most mornings himself.
Cody was a baby when we started and a little boy of three by that last Christmas. Ella came along and then I had two, a toddler and an infant, which anybody who has done it will tell you is not one plus one. It is one times itself. You cannot set either of them down.
I did the bottles. I did the diapers, the little cloth ones Brianne wanted used because the pediatrician had said something about the baby’s skin. I did the laundry that piled up in their hall because two young people working full time do not have it in them to also fold. I did lunch. I did the nap that Cody fought like it was a personal insult. I read “Goodnight Moon” so many times I can still say it with my eyes shut.
I did not get paid. I want to be honest, because somebody reading this is going to say I should have asked. I never asked. They were my son’s children. You do not bill your own blood for holding a baby. Brianne would sometimes hand me a twenty for the gas, and I took it the first few times, and then I stopped taking it because she started to act like it covered things, and it did not.
Roy said something to me once, in the truck, in the dark. “Phyl,” he said, “you ever think they’d hire a stranger and pay her four hundred a week to do what you do for a casserole dish back?”
“They’re family,” I said.
“I know it,” he said. “I’m just saying the arithmetic.”
Roy was a quiet man and he did not say the arithmetic again. But I heard it. I heard it on the mornings my knees did not want the porch steps. I heard it the day I had the flu and went anyway because Brianne had a closing she could not miss. I heard it, and I told it to hush, because that is what you do when you love people. You tell the arithmetic to hush.