明治政経 2007 II

Twenty-five years ago I got ( A ). I had been employed as a three-times-a-week afternoon babysitter for the two-year-old daughter of a prosperous young married woman. She used the free time to run errands or take naps. I had never met the little girl's father, but I had talked to him regularly. At least once a week, usually more often than that, the phone would ring thirty minutes after my arrival, and he would give me a message for his wife: he was working late in the city and would not be home for dinner. I would report these facts often as an afterthought, while the wife was ( B ) in her purse for my pay and she would take the news stoically, heaving a brave little sigh and nodding.

One day I ( C ) up for work, gave the little girl a hug we were fond of each other and then settled the two of us down in the playroom. I made her a castle out of large cardboard blocks, and once she was happily playing inside it, I opened my French textbook and started to read. At no point did it cross my mind that by doing this I was failing in my duties. While the little girl and I were enjoying the peaceful afternoon, the playroom door suddenly ( D ) open, and my boss glared at the scene. Clearly, I had been ambushed. I was sent home, and two hours later I was fired over the telephone. "( X )," she told me perfectly reasonable, but I hadn't known that's what she wanted.

So there I was: an eighteen-year-old college freshman who felt humiliated and angry, deeply hurt by a woman I had admired. When she'd been out running her errands, I would put the girl on my hip and wander through the large rooms of the house and imagine what it would be like to be married, to have a home and a baby of my own. I hadn't taken the job because I needed money. At that time, I received a generous allowance from my parents, which arrived in my campus mailbox each month in the form of a check. I had taken the job because I liked children, and I liked being a ( E ) member of a household. And now I'd been shamed and fired. Two weeks later, the woman's name and phone number reappeared in the binder of babysitting jobs that was kept in the student employment office, and I drew a red line through it with a pen. Over it I wrote, "Bad Family."

In reviewing these facts, I would have to put myself in the category of "behaved badly." Naturally, my boss might have behaved better too. If she had wanted me out of the house, she could have arranged it without my being any the wiser. But I'm old enough now much older than she was when she fired me to realize that the husband's telephone calls, and the ambush, and the outraged firing, were not unrelated events. She was obviously having problems with her husband. Through no fault of my own, and through the essential nature of the job, I had landed myself right in the middle of an unhappy domestic episode.

I'm also old enough now to realize how easy it would be for a suffering person to react just the way she did, and experienced enough to regret not having had that sort of understanding earlier in life, before I chose to write those terrible two words.