Andrea's Adventures in Binkyland

Project Gerido

Get Rid of Donna, that is.

Project Gerido reached its anticlimactic culmination this afternoon. I took the envelope stuffed full of money and praise and went into the living room, Sasha on my hip. "Donna," I said nervously, "I have to talk to you..."

I could see that she knew what was coming. Indeed, she admitted, she had been expecting it. It could just have been her placid nature, but she seemed to feel no anger, no surprise, no regret or sadness. I, on the other hand, held back tears as she put on her coat and Sasha smiled and waved goodbye to her. My poor baby really was fond of Donna, and I hope she does not miss her too much.

So, you may ask yourself, what brought us to this impasse? Was this awkward, bittersweet moment strictly unavoidable?

How It Began

I doubt that there was anything we could have done. For those of you just tuning in, we hired Donna as a stopgap measure in the first place. We had placed Sasha in daycare, and in the month she was there, she and they were so miserable that we amicably ended the relationship after just four weeks.

In that time, Sasha refused to take bottles, wouldn't sleep unless she was held, and would rarely stop crying. She never so much as smiled at the caretakers. Her sleep schedule was ruined, she cried at the sight of a bottle, and she panicked if I let even her grandparents hold her.

Enter Donna. She came into my home three days a week to watch Sasha while I worked. She kept Sasha snuggled and entertained, fed her her solid foods, changed her diapers, and did a bit of picking up and laundry when she found the time. When Sasha was hungry, I could nurse her. When I was lonely for Sasha, I could snuggle her. If I had to travel for business, Sasha would at least be with a familiar person in a familiar environment. It seemed the perfect arrangement.

Of course, it didn't take long for the problems to start popping up. Part of the difficulty was that no one issue was serious enough to warrant a termination, and many of them not even worth speaking to her. But there were so many of these little problems adding up. It was exactly like having a bad roommate.

Laundry

As per Donna's agreement with us, she began doing our laundry. This would have been great, since we have perpetual laundry issues. She disapproved of my lack of sorting laundry by color. She also immediately told me to purchase bleach and Bluette, since my whites were insufficiently white for her. I purchased non-chlorine bleach, and skipped the Bluette because the label did not say what it was, and I was worried about allergic reactions to an unknown substance on the part of both myself and my baby.

Donna seemed put out by this, but commenced with the laundry, anyhow. She would do several loads of laundry in one day, and expect that I could attend to folding and drying the loads remaining in the washer and dryer at the end of the day. If I had the time and wherewithal for that kind of project, I would not have had such a mess of laundry to be done in the first place!

She would leave loads in the washer and not TELL me, so I would discover a mildewed, foul-smelling load in the washer Sunday evening. I would put a pile of clothing to be packed away in the attic in a corner, and find it all washed and needing to be resorted the next day. She put hand-wash and dry-clean items through the wash. She washed my one and only cashmere sweater, which now has a hole in it.

She would forget to clean out the lint trap in the dryer, a sure fire hazard.

I spoke to her about several of these items, and was relieved when we moved Sasha into her own room. Donna would no longer have a reason to go into my room and deal with my laundry, at least.

Food

We did not discuss the matter when we hired her, but Donna ate lunch from what we had around the house. This made me feel obligated to keep a stock of things that Donna ate. She would go through a half-gallon of orange juice in a week. Suddenly, we could not keep supplies of smoked turkey, or bread, or tomatoes. I would buy five pounds of Clementines and see half of them gone within two days.

My husband received a gift basket of various gourmet items, some of which we planned to give to friends. She opened some of these items and ate them! A good friend of mine gave us two small bars of chocolate, two different varieties, brought to us from Spain. She ate one of those, too!

All petty things. Certainly, if you are willing to trust your child's well-being to another person, you should not begrudge that person a nice bit of chocolate or some orange juice. But...still. Somehow the underlying assumption of entitlement bothered me.

Milk (Not the Kind from Cows)

One of my big fears was running out of pumped milk for Sasha. A lactating mother's milk supply very much works on a supply-demand basis, and it's very difficult to pump as much in a day as a baby is likely to drink. As a result, I am quite protective of frozen milk. I can't run to the store to pick more of this stuff up, folks.

Donna did not quite seem to appreciate these facts. In order to get Sasha accustomed to any sort of bottle at all, for quite a while I was pumping in the morning and letting Donna feed Sasha one bottle every day. Sometime in the first week, I caught Donna offering a second bottle from my freezer stash. I told Donna very firmly that Sasha was not to have more than the one bottle a day if I were home, and that my frozen stores were to be preserved as much as possible.

Donna also had instructions not to feed Sasha when she was expecting me home soon. My reasoning was that Sasha could afford to be hungry an extra half-hour or so much better than the few hours she might be hungry if we were to suddenly run out while I was gone. Donna disregarded me, even to the extent where last week, she gave Sasha a bottle a mere 20 minutes before I got home, even thought she knew when to expect me, because she thought Sasha MIGHT be hungry.

She would put a bottle in the warmer to defrost it or leave it out on the counter, full and unused, for Matt or I to discover later in the evening, far too late to save it. When you are already struggling to get enough milk to even freeze, this sort of waste is heartbreaking.

Sasha

I freely admit that fashion sense is no reason to dismiss an employee. Donna did not seem to have any idea that Sasha's wardrobe was meant to coordinate in any fashion, and so many a sartorial atrocity was committed. Salmon onesie and powder blue pants? Let it go. Navy blue sweatshirt and purple velvet embroidered bellbottoms? Deep breaths, it's not important. But some of the mistakes Donna made in the clothing realm had nothing to do with colors and patterns.

Donna often complained about how cold our house is in the winter, and justly so. We have some serious insulation problems in our floor, and it's been a bitterly cold winter. All the same, she would dress Sasha in short sleeves, or even dresses with nothing covering her legs at all. This was not just once in a while, but almost every day. I packed away all of Sasha's summer outfits under the pretext that she had outgrown them, and still, Donna would consistently dress her in the lightest clothing available. I took to dressing Sasha every morning before Donna could arrive.

But Donna would change Sasha's clothes after lunch, also every day. Personally, I find washing a baby's clothing because it has a spot of carrot on her cuffs to be wasteful. But worse, she would take the nice warm clothing I had dressed Sasha in and, well...you've got it.

For quite a while, she would leave Sasha to nap on the sofa propped up with pillows. She would then go into another room to perform other tasks. She persisted in this after I told her Sasha had fallen off the sofa while I was watching her one day. Uncomfortable with this, I asked Donna to put Sasha down for her naps in her crib. Donna, as usual, looked at me as though I had asked her to make me a lightly toasted tennis shoe for lunch.

She did start putting Sasha to sleep in her crib for naps, but again, with an adult pillow to prop her up. If you have a pulse and have been around a baby in the last ten years, you know some basic things about the dos and don'ts of infant sleeping. One of the biggie no-nos is this: no stuffed animals in the crib, no fluffy blankets, no pillows of any variety. These things are all associated with SIDS and suffocation in children under a year old. This woman is a certified baby nurse, for heaven's sake. How could she not know something like this?

And, as with all of my maternal directives, it didn't last long. Be it no cereal or bananas because Sasha was constipated, or sleeping in her crib, or no baths in the middle of the day, or cutting back on solids because Sasha was not nursing enough - if I didn't issue a new reminder every few days, it wouldn't continue.

Ahh, but she more than once expressed scorn to me about mothers who read a book and from that decide how to raise their children. What could doctors and statisticians possibly know about raising a baby?

She would take Sasha out for walks in weather I found unpleasantly cold. She sometimes did this with Sasha not dressed appropriately. And she would chide me for bringing Sasha out into the snow bundled up heavily, but without a hat! Hoping to prevent this, I would leave Donna without key elements she needed to take the walks, such as the stroller or the house key. When I did not leave a house key with her, she would leave the house unlocked!

And then there's the nasty T-word: television. Donna would turn the TV on and let it be on all day - that's all right, I like some background noise myself. But she would encourage Sasha to watch the entire Playhouse Disney morning lineup, and then Donna herself would watch gameshows all afternoon. That level of television exposure in such a small child just isn't appropriate. But once it started, I had no idea where or how to put my foot down.

Lack of Respect
Finally, I suppose one of the biggest problems I had was an underlying feeling that Donna did not respect us, our property, or our parenting ideas.

She would chide me for doing or not doing things for Sasha. Sometimes she was right, but the attitude expressed still made me uneasy. Yes, we do need to have the electrical sockets in Sasha's room fixed with cover plates, but we hadn't done it yet because of a lack of time and money - and we never let Sasha play alone in her room, anyhow.

"You need to put a baby gate so she can't get into the kitchen," Donna said. But Donna was there the day I painstakingly rearranged the kitchen to be baby-safe - I want Sasha to explore the kitchen and feel safe there!

"You need to put heavy drapes in Sasha's room to block the sunlight." But I want Sasha to be able to sleep in less than total darkness.

"You need to get this kind of baby video." But I don't want her to watch that much television.

"You need to vacuum every day, so Sasha does not eat things off the floor." Donna was horrified at my insistence that Sasha be allowed to mouth things on the floor. To build her immune system? So far as Donna was concerned, it may as well have been to build her ESP, it was foolishness one and the same.

At the same time, Donna would look at me as though I had asked her to dance naked with me in a pagan ritual whenever I made what I thought was a reasonable maternal request. These requests typically covered Sasha's diet - but each request to feed her specific things, at specific times, or in specific quantities were met with the same sort of guarded skepticism.

Donna would wash her hands when she came in every morning. She would simultaneously flush the toilet, for reasons unknown to me. She would always leave the water from the sink dripping, and sometimes running openly.

She would never close the container of baby wipes, so they could dry out.

She made free with our computer equipment, going so far as to ask me to install the new version of MSN Messenger for her so that she could keep up with her friends. I got the same look of mild shock and disbelief as always when I told her that I was unhappy she was using Outlook on my brand-new laptop, because it is a honeypot for viruses.

She would use the toaster oven, and not remove the items on top of it. I spoke to her about this on more than one instance, to no avail. Untold numbers of bananas and vine-ripened tomatoes met their untimely fate due to being cooked on the top of our toaster oven.

She would put my expensive Wusthof knives in the dishwasher. She would load other things in there willy-nilly, so that I had to rearrange them later. She would load dirty dishes into a clean dishwasher. She would unload the dishwasher, putting everything away in a wrong place - even things that were still dirty!

I would spend the morning cleaning my kitchen until it sparkled, and then she would make her lunch, leaving crumbs on my clean counter and a dirty knife in my shiny sink. Indeed, she only picked up after her own lunch perhaps half the time.

When she fed Sasha her lunch, she would drip babyfood on the floor or high chair and not wipe it up when she was done.

She would never unplug the bottle warmer, which has no off switch, despite constant reminders. At best, the heating element could have gone dry and burned out, but at worst, she could have burned my house down.

She left the front door open, but the glass screen locked, on one of the coldest days we can recall, and yes, the baby in short sleeves.

At one point, she mentioned that she had meant to ask me to pick up money orders for her, for her sons. Pardon me? I hardly have time to run my OWN errands, much less someone else's!

In Summation

I tried very hard to be a good employer to Donna, and the best I ever had to show for it from her was a faint sense of amusement. I would ask if there was anything she wanted at the grocery. I sometimes paid her a little extra. If I had a free afternoon looming, I would let her go home early, but not cut her pay. We gave her Christmas week off, paid fully. She reacted to all of these things with the same sort of detached calm as she did the news that we were letting her go. I realize that you should do these things for the sake of being a good human being, but it would have been nice to get a "Hey, thanks, you're a good person," from her.

Well, good luck, Donna. You helped us out of a really difficult spot in Sasha's life, and for that I am more grateful than I can say. But man, I really wish you hadn't eaten that chocolate bar.

Posted by andrea at February 18, 2003 05:07 PM