Trick or treat?

by JULIET WATERS

The first time I met Ben’s daycare educator, my instinct told me she was an ex-hooker. She wasn’t, but I would have thought this even if she hadn’t been wearing mascara and a leopard-print t-shirt. In Operating Instructions, Anne Lamott’s book about her experience as a single mother, she writes about leaving her month-old son for the first time with a babysitter she was convinced was a prostitute. “By the Golden Gate Bridge,” she writes, “I had her pegged as a crack addict.” It’s been said that motherhood is the second oldest profession. Childcare work must be the third.

Thus, projecting one’s own conflicted guilt onto the person taking care of one’s needs for money must be the oldest mind trick; and mind tricks love to masquerade as instincts. It didn’t help that I was leaving Ben at ground zero for toddlers. This was a brand new daycare, affiliated with an excellent daycare down the street, but still opening its doors for the first time. Echoing through the building was a wailing wall of children convinced they would never see their parents again.

Ben and I had been hanging out for an hour before a young woman introduced herself as his daycare educator. She seemed sweet, but a little clueless. Minutes later a second woman introduced herself. The hooker. Ben was starting to get cranky. So was I. While Dopey and Skanky appealed to an administrator to sort this out, Ben decided it was time to go home, which he communicated by bawling.

Skanky sensed that Ben was getting tired. I knew she was right in her advice to just hand him over and let her put him down to nap, but I still felt like I was being solicited. Against my screaming instincts I gave him to her and fled.
Somehow I’d developed the idea that once Ben was in a good daycare I would feel a tremendous sense of relief and freedom. Instead I felt a tremendous sense of numb horror. Two hours passed before I decided it was time to sneak into the back alley where there was a window into his playroom.

And there he was, less than half a day after being wrenched from his mother’s arms and placed in a chaotic, alien environment, sitting peacefully in the middle of the room, playing with a car.

Two weeks have passed and I no longer call his educator nasty names. I’m deeply ashamed of my past behaviour as I get to know Ginette, a warm, devoted mother of six. She’s just finishing up her certification course. One of her daughters also works at the daycare. Ginette encouraged me to set up a little photo gallery around Ben’s bed with pictures of his family in happier times. She keeps a daily chart where she records Ben’s mood, when he slept, how he interacted with the other kids, what he ate and the quality of his poop. Every day I see mounting evidence that Ben is doing fine, so I don’t have to sneak around back alleys anymore. His mood is almost always excellent, he eats and sleeps regularly, he is affectionate and gentle with the other kids, his poop is a little runny.
Still, every morning, as I leave, he cries as though he’ll never see me again. When I hand him to Ginette, he flings his arms around her neck and buries his heartbreak in her chest. I feel like shit. And I’m increasingly confused about this thing called “maternal instinct.”
But as I catch up on some sleep and regain some control over my life, my instinct is telling me that this is one of the best things to ever happen to either of us. :

Comments? julwat@videotron.ca