What Not To Tell The Nanny

I’m in the process of writing a novel. I hadn’t meant to. I just meant to jot down a few notes for the nanny we hired to care for the children while we’re away, but like Topsy, it just grew.

I’m a little nervous about leaving on such a long trip right now. I wasn’t at first; not until I started writing down a few suggestions for the nanny to follow, only to discover that some things just can’t be communicated by words alone.

I mean, how can you write specific instructions on how to work a washing machine that you’ve lived with intimately for eleven years and still don’t completely understand? You know that when it makes that funny grinding noise you have to push the little doohickey on the bottom panel and give it a sharp bang on top, but would a perfect stranger believe it? Some things come intuitively with long experience and can’t be explained by logic alone.

It’s the same thing with my children, who are even more neurotic than my appliances. If a sweater is put in the second drawer of the dresser instead of the third, they become frantic. A wrinkle in the bedspread is enough to bring on complete hysteria. Merely getting them to bed at night involves participation in a ritual that would try the patience of a head nurse.

It took me three pages just to list the vegetables they won’t eat. Then I started on the things they’re not allowed to do, but after I’d covered several chapters, I realized that a twelve-volume encyclopedia would hardly do justice to the subject. The trouble is, that I can’t think of what to forbid them to do until after they’ve done it, and they, like lightning, never strike twice. I simply haven’t the imaginative powers necessary to anticipate disaster.

For instance, they’ve all been given a list of instructions: “Don’t finger paint in the living room”, and “Don’t eat ice cream bars before breakfast.” But who in her right mind would think to tell them, “Don’t take all the shoe laces out of the shoes and flush them down the toilet”?

That bathroom bowl is the focal point of most of my difficulties. You’d be amazed at the number of ordinary household objects that can be flushed down it. The baby is the worst offender, which makes me a little bitter, since he’s still not toilet trained. I suppose he knows that something is expected of him in that department, and since he can’t or won’t oblige, he feels he must offer a reasonable substitute.

And their gourmet demands at mealtime—I simply can’t go on. I’m going to abandon all thought of leaving instructions for the nanny. There’s no point in building up her prejudices before she’s even in the door. We’ll be gone two weeks—ample time in which to discover their little peccadilloes all by herself.

Motherhood

There’s something about impending motherhood that brings out the beast in most casual observers: if you’re pregnant, they’ll ask you why; if you aren’t they’ll wonder why not. There’s simply no pleasing the average busybody.

When I returned from my honeymoon, everyone sat around waiting for my announcement of prospective parenthoold. When I was expecting my fourth, the situation was completely reversed. (I didn’t have to announce this one; all I did was show my pea-green face in public and salacious rumour did the rest.)

My family and friends were horrified, my neighbours appalled at the news. At parties, people went out of their way to talk about overpopulation and the efficacy of birth control.

Strangely enough, they took the opposite tack with my husband. Female friends began eyeing him speculatively, and every male within jabbing distance took to giving him knowing winks and playful pokes.

The questions directed at mothers-to-be are always profuse, personal and in the worst possible taste. Once charmer came right out and asked me whether the baby was planned. Another coyly asked me the ages of my other children, as though I hadn’t already figured out that in five years I’d be sending the youngest off to kindergarten and the oldest to university the same day. I guess when you have four children, unless they’re quadruplets, you’re bound to have them occupy various levels in the educational system.

As the proud mother of three daughters, I particularly resented constantly being asked if I was hoping for a boy. I never knew how to answer this question, and often wished I had the nerve of my five-year-old, who made no bones about the fact that she’d much prefer a Shetland pony.

Why did I have a fourth child? Callous friends say it was to give me something to do. After all, when her youngest trotted off to kindergarten, every mother I know either went to work or bought a dog. I took the easy way out. I don’t know much about dogs, but I have yet to see a child who didn’t eventually mature enough to grow out of diapers.

Actually, the speculators are all wrong. My husband hit on the real reason for my maternal re-awakening. I heard him tell a friend recently, “My wife will do anything to get material for another story.”

Dress Code

The following is a letter written by an irate mother, namely me, to the principal of my daughter’s high school:

Dear Mr. Smith,

I am writing to inform you that her father and I have been extremely worried for some time about conditions that exist in our daughter’s school.

I can remember, way back in September, when she first told me about her and her friends’ dissatisfaction with conditions at school. She said that for years you’ve made all the boys wear grey slacks and white shirts and ties and the red school sweater with the pink and purple stripes on the sleeve. The girls have to wear tunics, white blouses and sensible black shoes and they all look alike.

She complained about how stifling these dress restrictions were to their psyches, and how repressing they were to their individuality and creativity. I pointed out that I thought proper dress showed a certain amount of respect for the school, and that a neat and tidy appearance helped promote an orderly mind.

But she explained to me how, throughout history, whenever a repressive regime wanted to stifle individual liberty, they put everybody into identical uniforms. She told me all about the Cossacks, the Roman Legions, the Storm Troopers and even the Coldstream Guards, and I was impressed with her logic.

She insisted that in order to ensure complete freedom of individuality, so that the creative talents of each and every student can blossom and flower without hindrance, the kids must be allowed to dress as they please at school. In this way, individual liberty will be preserved, and we will have taken another step forward in our painful progress toward freedom for all.

A group of us parents, who agreed with the kids, got together at a Home and School meeting and proposed a resolution to drop the dress code, which passed unanimously. The children were each allowed to dress invidually, exactly as they pleased.

So I ask you, what went wrong? I looked out my kitchen window yesterday at the children going to school, and they were all wearing identical blue jeans frayed at the bottom and torn at the knees, polo shirts ripped under the arms, dirty sneakers and long stringy hair. Not only do all the girls still look exactly alike, but now they even look like all the boys!

Tell me, Mr. Smith, this is progress?

Designer Dilemmas

Unless you’re fifteen years old, weigh 84 pounds and have the profile of a poultry skewer, shopping for clothing nowadays can be a traumatic experience. This is expecially true for someone like me, because I bitterly resent patronizing any store where the salesgirls are better dressed than I am.

I don’t think designers have taken a good look at the female figure since the Boxer Rebellion. Last year they designed clothing for midgets and ten-year-old boys, but not for women—at least not any women I know—the ones with two arms and legs and a reasonable amount of avoirdupois in between. I know someone who didn’t buy a thing all year because she refused to appear in public looking like a pregnant eight-year-old.

Now, fashion’s fickle pendulum has swung completely in the opposite direction. This year they’ve buried legs behind hobbling swathes of skirt which add ten years per ugly inch to your age, and topped it all off with shoes just like the oxfords Grandma wore back in 1902.

Women even have trouble buying maternity clothes. Fifteen years ago, everything was size twenty, black, and designed for forty-year-old women, which the manufacturers obviously felt was the proper age for anyone contemplating such a serious undertaking as having a baby.

Today, they’ve undergone a change of heart. They now apparently feel that no one over fourteen could possibly attract a man long enough to become pregnant in the first place. Therefore all maternity clothes are size five and ten inches above the knee, which is ridiculous, because none of the pregnant women I know could squeeze into anything smaller than an army tent, and then only if it slept six.

Things don’t improve a bit when you give birth. After starving myself into a size ten (well, maybe a twelve, but a small twelve), I still can’t find anything to wear that doesn’t make me look under ten or over sixty years old. The colours are unflattering, the materials are sleazy, the trimmings are grotesque and everything is beaded or fringed.

There’s only one solution. I’m going to drag out all the clothes I bought sixteen years ago on my honeymoon that I’ve been saving for the kids for Hallowe’en. After I lose twenty pounds so I can get into them, I’m going to be the best-dressed woman in town.

Losers

My children are born losers. This is not my assessment of their character – it’s merely a comment on their total inability to hang onto their personal possessions.

That’s why, whenever I buy anything for them, I try to picture how it will look after being left out all night in a snowstorm, or whether it will go with all the other stuff in the lost and found box at school. The last thing I worry about is whether it will suit the kid for whom I bought it, since it’s bound to disappear within twenty-four hours anyway.

I know there are name tapes created to prevent this, and I sew them on everything not actually physically attached to the child. However, no one around here seems to be able to read, and all I succeed in doing is losing the tapes along with everything they’re sewn on.

Some things were made to be lost. Jackets, sweaters, boots and scarves disappear by the truckload. I have the largest collection of mismatched mitts in the country, all bought to go with hats and coats which have now disappeared. If they’d only lose the complete outfit with all its matching accessories at the same time, I could write it off as a tax loss and start all over again.

There’s no use trying to track any of it down. My children have absolutely no idea where they’ve been for the past twenty-four hours, and even if they do finally remember where they left it, they wouldn’t recognize it if someone waved it under their noses. However, it’s never a total loss: I get a lot of exercise running around the neighborhood looking for their things, and I’ve met some very interesting people.

On the other hand, if something is lost somewhere in the house, I have a fighting chance. After all, it’s got to be in one of the rooms, unless the baby’s swallowed it or flushed it down the toilet, in which case I call either the doctor or the plumber, whichever is cheaper.

If it’s in a cupboard or drawer I’m sure to find it, along with a dozen other things I didn’t know I’d lost, like last year’s Christmas cards my husband swore he mailed. The down side is that I get to clean out my cupboards far more frequently than I want to. The trouble is, I can never find anyplace to put all the stuff I cleaned out, which is probably why my cupboards are a joy to behold, while my house is a filthy mess.

My husband is no help at all. His idea of looking for something is to open a kitchen cupboard and stand staring into it asking plaintively, “Do we have any salt?” until someone (usually me) takes pity on him and goes to get it for him. At least he’s pretty good about not losing things. I think he feels that he has to stem the outgoing tide, so he’s constantly bringing home coats, hats, rubbers and umbrellas that I’ve never set eyes on in my life. I keep telling him it’s a losing proposition. The children outnumber him four to one and they try harder. He never brings home anything that fits anyone anyway.

Figures

The trouble with my figure is that it’s always been years ahead of its time. For instance, when I was sixteen, I weighed less than a hundred pounds, but did fashion photographers clamor for my services as a model? Of course not. The only one who took any notice of my figure was the school nurse, who told my mother to give me a dose of neo-chemical food three times a day before meals to perk up my appetite.

And now that I’ve gained forty pounds and am convex in more places than are absolutely necessary, what kind of figure is the ideal? You guessed it. Today every female over twelve wants to look like Camille after a long languishing winter in a sanitarium.

Not only was I born at the wrong time, but on the wrong continent! In North America, the female ideal looks like a starving twelve-year-old boy. In the Middle East, fat women are admired so much, their husbands keep them idle, free from stress and stuffed with delicacies, like Christmas geese.

The trouble with having a skinny body is that it’s not much good for breeding anything but germs. Therefore, even though you have to look like a toothpick to catch a husband, if you don’t put on at least twenty pounds immediately after the ceremony, you’ll never have enough strength to cope with that big house and all those kids that marriage inevitably entails.

After all, could Kate Moss clean out the basement, wash the car and bake two apple pies in the morning and still have enough strength left over to play right wing on her son’s hockey team after school? Don’t be ridiculous! Only opera stars and mothers carry the necessary ballast to enable them to hit that high C or work like a deck hand twenty-two hours a day.

The ultimate goal of every woman is to have the silhouette of a string bean. However, she knows full well that if she does gain weight, it must be concentrated entirely in front, between her neck and her waist. Unfortunately, most women find that with every additional birthday and baby, extra pounds start slipping downward, settling around hips and thighs like barnacles on a boat.

Life is so unfair! The next time around, I intend to be born in the sixteenth century, when men liked their women to look as though they had something to rest on besides their laurels.

Auto Apologies

A woman recently came up with an idea that may revolutionize automobile travel. She decided to signal her apologies every time she did something wrong, by blowing kisses to other drivers on the road.

Actually, there are may times in a woman’s driving life when a signal of apology would come in handy—such as when the baby empties your purse out the window in the car order line at the supermarket, causing a traffic tie-up that stretches two honking blocks to the rear.

Not that the baby is the only problem a driving mother has to cope with. After all, you can always give him an ice cream cone in order to get a few minute’s peace and quiet. This may not seem worth it when you get home and realize you have to spend the rest of the day scraping ice cream off the car seats, doors, windows and ceiling, but that is neither here nor there. We all have difficult choices to make.

The real trouble comes when your other three kids refuse to sit beside him because he smears ice cream into their hair. It’s then that you realize that no matter how you try to work out the permutations and combinations of the equation, the only way you are going to be able to transport all four children anywhere at once, is to strap the baby to the roof of the car.

The worst torture for a driver with a carload of kids is the noise. Actually, I don’t really mind driving with the radio on full blast. It helps drown out the constant bickering going on in the back seat. What drives me mad is when two of the kids start giving me important messages from their teachers under the mistaken belief that because I have two ears, I can listen to both of them at the same time.

There are many things you can do to keep your children happily occupied while traveling. Well maybe not happy, or even occupied, but at least distracted enough not to spit on the windows and wipe them clean with their underwear.

You could have the kids count out-of-town license plates or brown cows. Personally, I’ve always liked the game where you spot objects beginning with successive letters of the alphabet. Since there are rarely any xylophones lying around on the highway, I can get several minutes’ peace pretending to watch out for something beginning with the letter ‘X’.

When my husband does the driving, the game we play most often with our children is a lively version of musical chairs. He and I start out in the front with the four kids in the back until they start fighting, whereupon I bring the troublemaker into the front with us. I kept doing this until all six of us are squeezed into the front seat, which is illegal, not to mention uncomfortable, especially when the baby throws up. When they start fighting again, I reverse the process, until everybody’s in the back seat except my husband, who keeps swearing he’ll never take the kids out in the car again until they get married or leave home, whichever comes first.

It’s no wonder I blunder along, making illegal left turns every time someone drips popsicle juice down the back of my neck. Therefore, if you see an hysterical woman with a car full of redheaded kids blowing kisses at you someday soon, don’t be alarmed. It’ll be me, apologizing on behalf of driving mothers all over the world.