One day after work, I went over as my friend was leaving, and there was no food.įriend: “I don’t get paid until tomorrow. The kids were old enough to take care of themselves but not old enough to know what to do in an emergency. In the little free time I had, I slept at a friend’s house to be there with her three kids while she went to work. I was working at a grocery chain and going to school. This happened a few years ago when I was a babysitter.
She showed him how to find the “inappropriate” jokes in Shakespeare’s plays. I grounded my son because he wasn’t participating in English class.
When I tried to block naughty websites, my son worked out how to bypass my nanny filter. (And then they both spoiled the whole thing for me.) When I had to take back my promise to take them both to the movies because I was stuck working multiple shifts in a row, she took him to watch the latest Marvel movie without me. When there was a heatwave, I said my son wasn’t allowed to play outside because he’d already gotten heatstroke twice. When my son was struggling with his reading, I said he wasn’t allowed to watch Pokémon until he read at least two books on weekends.
When my son was a toddler, he had an intolerance for dairy, and therefore wasn’t allowed ice cream.
While normally having a default babysitter is a blessing, it would be better if she didn’t remember my own behaviour as a young twenty-something and wasn’t egged on by her dad seeking revenge for when I was her babysitter. Because of the large age difference between me and my brother, my niece is significantly older than my own son.