Glad It Didn't Leave Scars

Before I was a mom, I was a babysitter. You'd think that years of babysitting would have taught me to avoid the children route, especially when you consider some of the experiences I had while tending to other people's offspring.

(And you know what? I'm actually glad that I wasn't permanently damaged by those babysitting experiences because I actually really like my kids. They're so much better than other people's.)

The following is a story of the worst babysitting job I ever had. It is a re-post of a story I told on my personal blog a year ago, with a few touch-ups. Feel free to skip it if you've read it already. If not, you are not allowed to skip, but must keep reading. Sorry.

(Here is where you should imagine fuzzy, wavy lines transporting you back in time to a period of my very enthralling history.)

I was about 13 years old when I would frequently babysit for some friends of my parents, Trent and Sheryl. They had two very well behaved children; Miles was around four or five years old, and I believe Amanda was two.

Trent was in dental school at the time, so to help out with finances his family lived above a mortuary. If a call came during the night to retrieve a body, he would go and collect it. I'm not sure if he got paid to do this, or if their rent was free as long as they performed their corpse taxi duties, but can you imagine a more exciting job? I can't.

Anyway, they lived there above the morgue as though it were a perfectly normal thing to do, and hosted some killer Halloween parties, because that would be the main perk of such accommodations, don't you think?

Sheryl did take me downstairs once to show me a body that was being kept in "the fridge". I have always had a kind of morbid fascination with cemeteries and morgues, and at the same time a paralyzing fear of dead people, so that was a bit of a wicked treat for me.

One afternoon I was babysitting Miles and Amanda, and I knew it would be quite late before Trent and Sheryl came home, so I had settled in to play games, watch movies and do whatever else the kiddos required for entertainment.

Around four-thirty in the afternoon I was playing Hi-Ho Cherry-O with my charges and was interrupted by the sound of a door opening at the bottom of the stairs that led to the morgue. I froze, stiff as one of the poor souls in the basement. My pulse was racing as I listened intently for the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs, or moaning escaping the lips of someone who was presumed dead but awoke, all the contrary, in cold storage and was seeking aid.

Eventually I decided that I would not be able to breathe until I made sure that we were not about to be joined by a reanimated being. I approached the ominous door which separated the living and the dead, and reached out for the knob. I waited there for a while to make sure I really was prepared to die; I wasn't, but I was left with no choice but to turn the knob, because I was turning blue in the face from lack of oxygen. I opened the door a crack and peeked down to the bottom landing. There was no one there. There was, however, I neat stack of mail sitting on the third step.

Good grief, people! If ever you live upstairs from a pit-stop for the dead, you may want to warn your babysitter that the postman might open the door that serves as barrier between embalming fluid and peach scented potpourri. Otherwise, your sitter might have a heart attack and join the folks downstairs, and then who's looking after your kids, huh?

Quickly recovering from that episode, I then cooked and fed the kids Spaghettios for dinner, got them bathed, and read them a story before bed. Then it was lights out for them, and I did the dishes and then plopped on the couch to watch TV and fall asleep.

At one-thirty in the morning, I awoke to the sound of retching coming from the kids' bedroom. I was up and in there quicker than lightening, and poor Miles, who was notorious for his over-active gag reflex, was in the process of throwing up all those Spaghettios he had eaten for dinner.

Now here's another tip for all you parents and babysitters out there: If you have a child who is prone to throwing up, do not let him sleep on the top bunk. Miles had leaned over the edge of his bed before ejecting his dinner, and poor, sweet Amanda was crying on the bottom bunk, completely covered in circle-shaped pasta vomit. I have been a mother for nine years now, and I have yet to encounter a mess that rivals the middle of the night vomit-fest that Miles treated me to.

But what they say is true - it's easier to clean up all kinds of bodily fluids if they come from your own flesh and blood. Still - after that night I think it a wonder that I agreed to have children at all.


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