I was mature for my age. Everyone said so. I regularly babysat for quite a few families in our church, including two families that each had six kids, and I took care of a one-year-old down the street two full days a week while her mother worked. Being homeschooled, I was available during the day, so I had a lot of babysitting experience even though I was only twelve.
I felt confident in my ability to handle children, so when my father asked me if I would be willing to babysit for a family with two young children who were patients at his medical clinic, I thought it was a little weird, but I wanted the money, and I didn’t want to disappoint him, so I said yes.
The dad was with the Coast Guard, so they lived in housing on the base. My father drove me out to their house and told me to call him when I was ready to come home. Things seemed pretty normal inside, a bit warm from the midafternoon sun, though I remember thinking that the mother looked really young to have a kid who was five already, plus a two-year-old whose thumb never seemed to leave his mouth. They left me phone numbers, vague instructions about bedtime, and a can of Spaghetti-Os for supper.
It started pretty normally, though I felt the five-year-old girl (Let’s call her Tracy) was a little bratty, pushing the toddler (We’ll call him Adam) around and demanding that we do everything she wanted. As the afternoon dragged on, however, I started to feel uneasy, because a lot of her play was violent, like this toy kills this toy, this Barbie beats up that Barbie, and “bombs are falling on Adam” (as she pelted him with LEGO blocks). I kept trying to redirect her or even interrupt her by opening a book and starting to read, but she always came back to violence.
Around 5 o’clock, she declared that she was hungry and that I had to cook for her now. Inwardly gagging, I dumped the Spaghetti-Os into the pan and started warming it up on a back burner. But Tracy didn’t want them; she wanted fish sticks. I checked the freezer. No fish sticks. She screamed at me. I tried to explain there was nothing I could do, so she punched Adam hard in the shoulder and stomped out of the room.
The kid just took the punch, sucking his thumb, staring at the floor. He creeped me out almost as much as she did, simply because it was like he wasn’t even there.
I kept stirring the Spaghetti-Os, not knowing what else to do. A couple of minutes later, she came back into the kitchen, looking completely pleasant.
“Oh, Spaghetti-Os. Yum!”
She stood near the stove and watched me stir them.
“You should put your hand on the stove, where it’s hot.”
Her expression was still calm and friendly.
“I can’t do that; it would burn me,” I replied
“Do it.”
“No, Tracy, I won’t. It isn’t safe.”
She screamed, “DO IT!” her face rapidly turning red, and lunged toward me.
I turned the burner off and stepped away from the stove, putting my hands behind my back.
“No.” I was shaking, but hoping I sounded firm and calm.
“Fine.” She left the room again, this time sitting down on the couch in the living room, where she could glance back at me from time to time through the doorway.
Still shaking, and a little afraid to turn my back, I checked the Spaghetti-Os and decided lukewarm or not, I was not turning the stove back on. I divided the red mush between two bowls and set them on the little kitchen table. Adam needed help climbing up on the wobbly metal chair and pulled his thumb out long enough to shove in a couple of mouthfuls. I called into the living room that it was ready, but no response and no Tracy appeared. I felt relieved. I tried talking with Adam, but aside from his eyes flicking to the side a few times, he made no sign whatsoever that he knew I was there.
He stopped eating after a minute or two and just sat there, sauce smeared around his mouth and on his hand, because his thumb went immediately back in before he even put down the spoon. I tried to wipe his face with a paper towel, but he flinched away so hard that I gave up. We sat in silence for a long time, both staring at the table, the only sound was the TV in the living room. I had never seen a small child sit so still for so long. I think we were both hoping it would last.
But I could hear the television program coming to its inevitable conclusion.
“I’m bo-ored! What are you even doing?”
Adam’s little body tensed and he leaned toward the wall beside him as she stalked into the room.
“Are you hungry?”
“Yes.” She ignored the bowl of cold Spaghetti-Os and grabbed a box of crackers off the counter and carried it into the living room, opening the box as she walked.
Adam stayed at the table while I covered the uneaten food, put it in the fridge, and tidied up the kitchen. Then I asked him to come upstairs with me so I could change his saggy diaper. Tracy didn’t look up from the TV when we went through the room. Through the big front window, I could see that it was dark outside now, but still uncomfortably warm in the room.
There was no changing table in his room. No crib, either. A crib mattress on the floor, a pile of blankets, and an old towel spread out next to a stack of diapers. I had my back to the door, putting his pants back on, when I felt him tense. Tracy was standing in the doorway.
“I’m going to kill you tonight, you know.”
I wasn’t allowed to watch horror movies, but I felt pretty sure this was how they went. I tried to laugh it off. “That bored?”
“No, I’m really going to kill you. There’s a big knife in the kitchen drawer. I hate you.” Long pause. “I’m going to go get it.”
She turned and ran down the stairs. Feeling deeply sick to my stomach, I went after her. I don’t know why, but I believed she could do it and I believed I had to protect Adam. I caught her arm in the living room and managed to pull her back enough to get into the doorway to the kitchen before her and block it. Screaming in wordless anger, she started swinging her hands at me, fingers curled like claws, trying to scratch me. I pushed her hands away as fast as I could, but she still kept getting me.
I tried everything. Telling her she needed to calm down, telling her she was just hungry and should let me make something for her, promising fun stuff we could do if she sat back down on the couch, but nothing helped. Screaming and grunting, she started throwing her body at me, trying to push me through the doorway into the kitchen, but I held onto the door frame until she quit and backed away into the living room. She glanced around the room and caught sight of Adam standing several steps up from the bottom.
Tracy looked back at me and smiled. And lunged for the stairs. Adam let out a muffled scream and tried to scramble back up the stairs. I caught her on the bottom step and clamped down on her upper arms, holding her back from Adam.
Her screams became words again, “I’m going to kill you, I’m going to fucking kill you, I’m going to gut you and watch all your blood come out, then I’m going to kill my brother, you’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead!”
She launched herself toward the kitchen so hard that she pulled me off my feet, and we tumbled to the floor in a heap. I lost my hold on one arm, and she twisted around to kick me in the stomach. I threw myself across her body then, desperate to just pin her to the floor, there in the middle of the living room floor, the TV playing some new inane children’s program.
I literally held her down while she screamed and spat and scratched and bit at me for over an hour, until her parents finally came home, while Adam huddled in the landing.
When they walked in, they didn’t seem surprised to find their babysitter sprawled across their small child on the living room floor and their toddler nowhere to be seen. They didn’t even say anything that I could hear. Tracy finally stopped thrashing and screaming, now listening and waiting.
Her father walked over and started to pick her up from the floor, but I didn’t let go until I felt he had a firm hold on her. She immediately started flailing and screaming again as he carried her away upstairs. A door slammed.
“Why didn’t you call the restaurant?” the mother asked me. I could only stare at her in response, my mind somehow simultaneously blank and racing.
“She said she was going to kill me. And Adam.” Silence. “May I please call my dad?”
The mother handed me a twenty, picked up the little boy, and carried him upstairs, leaving me alone in the living room, shaking, still hearing screams and cursing from upstairs. I stood at the front door, staring out the small window above the door knob, until his car pulled up.
He asked me how it went. I sat huddled inside myself in the dark of the car, my aching hands still clenched in my lap.
“She said she was going to kill me. And Adam. She hurt him and she hurt me. She was screaming and screaming and swearing at me.” I blurted. From far away, I felt my body start to shake again.
“Hm. She’s always seemed fine during their counselling appointments with me. I thought you could handle them. I wonder what set her off.”
Counselling appointments. I remember feeling a bitter surge of anger burning my stomach and a dull throbbing in my head. They weren’t just medical patients; they were seeing him because of emotional and behavioural problems in the family (Keep in mind that my father had no qualifications whatsoever for mental health counselling).
I thought I was going to die, Dad, and that’s your fault. The words were on the tip of my tongue, ready to fall out into reality, but nothing. I sat in silence.
What I eventually did say was bad enough.
“I don’t want to babysit for your patients.”
Long pause. “That’s fine. It doesn’t seem like it was a good idea anyway.”
That was the last time that night was ever mentioned.
When we got home, I walked into the house, stopped in the bathroom, and then crawled into bed, still dressed. I lay awake for a long time with an eerie feeling that I had watched this happening to someone else, not myself. I had nightmares for weeks. My mother never asked how it went or acknowledged that I had even been gone from the house for hours.
That was all.
Looking back, I see that there had to be violence in the family and that Tracy was acting out because of it. I’m not honestly sure she would have seriously hurt us, but that night, I was afraid I would die and afraid an innocent little boy would die with me. I was terrified. And no one seemed to care. If there was a problem, it was my fault. That’s what I felt my father was implying. And that was devastating.
Something broke in our relationship because of that night. It was never repaired.