This post deals mainly with:
- pink sex word
- health
- camera
- iphone
(First of all.
Last night.
Okay.)
Last year I left school for a semester to be a nanny for the baby of very close family friends. I moved in when she was four and a half months old, and fell deeply in love.
There were a lot of experiences I had there that I felt I shouldn’t be having yet. Walking up and down the hills of Oakland in August facilitating Amira’s hours-long naps was blissful. Dangling a stuffed animal from one raised hand throughout diaper changes, to stave off the tiniest whimper of boredom or discomfort, was imperative. Construction men, cellphone talkers, loud-car drivers, and people in noisy high heels during naptime were horrid. Sponging spit-up from the living room carpet was an act of love.
When I left, I was utterly bereft, and for weeks I was dabbing my eyes at least twice a day over the seven-minute home video that Amira’s parents had sympathetically provided for me. It was like Nicorette. (Spending a couple weeks on night duty with my first cousin’s newborns was like much better Nicorette.) And I knew that, but I felt clueless as to what my precise addiction was.
Just as I might have gotten around to figuring it out (or so I like to imagine), my attentions turned elsewhere: to my beloved grandmother, under whose roof I saw out middle school, who had a terrible stroke while traveling in London. I flew to London. Grandmom needed to be spoken slowly with, have her hand held, her arms and legs rubbed down with moisturizing lotion, her paralyzed arm, forever slipping, elevated, her glasses and hearing aids fetched from the empty hotel room. I flew back, eight hours later, the night before my spring semester began, and I was able to keep visiting my grandmother two or three times a week when she arrived by air-hospital to Boston, where she spent six weeks.
When she finally moved back to New Jersey, from whence cometh all grandmothers, I was not happy, not until the summer, when I found myself in China with no other responsibility than to tend to a roomful of babies all day.
I worry that there’s something pathological about being so gratified by nurturing. What if I’m doing it in a weird, codependent, need-to-be-a-“rescuer” kind of way? What if I’m doing it in a creepy projection of wanting to be nurtured myself? What if I’m doing it for attention? Out of egotism? You know, when hours pass and your primary pastime is gently sending little humans to sleep, you have a lot of time to think up reasons why liking it is strange.
My mother mentioned the other day that a lot of of her friends say the little-kid months were their happiest. “Why?,” I asked. She said, “Oh, well caretaking can be very gratifying. It’s hard to find something that competes with that.”
Did I stumble upon it too early? Was I not supposed to know how great this was until I was a mother? Maybe nurturing without any of the grave responsibility and time investment of a primary caretaker would make anyone giddy. Then again, I guess a parent never has to admit she’s addicted, because if she keeps going back for more, that just makes her, well, a good parent.
Thoughts?
–Anna Schnur-Fishman
Source: Nature to Nurture
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