On Babysitters: My Experience With a Bad Apple

I wasn't born with a pen, or typewriter, or any of that stuff in my hand. It was more like a burden. I was born last in an all-boy family, so I was supposed to be a doll. Trouble was, I was born to two misfits. My father was the last-born son of a suicidal, alcoholic father and a matriarch of perfect saintliness. It's tough being the baby and the black sheep. Trust me - I know. My mother was the orphan of a suicidal, schizophrenic and a criminal. There are many spaces in this family tree that need filling, but let me say that grandparenting was likely the savior of us all.

I was born eighteen months after my brother, who taught me to walk from what they tell me, and taught me how to share by taking the biggest bit of most things. He also taught me the art of winning by cheating. But this isn't really a story about my family, I just thought a background check might be in order to help along the way, and lend to my credibility.

My parents separated when I was still in diapers. I am twenty-seven years old, and they have yet to do a formal divorce. My father being an alcoholic like his father before him, and a gambler, didn't really try to get into a courthouse unless by force, and he damn sure wasn't paying for it. My mother on the other hand, couldn't afford it, and I think still hasn't gotten over the fact that it really is over. Mom can be a bit naïve about the real picture. She's a bit of a headcase herself. Ask anyone who knows her, which is everyone in the small town that we were raised in.

So, I grew up in some pretty shitty digs. We lived in shotgun houses, duplexes, or mobile homes most of the time. Once I remember we were living in an old small RV camper that had a toilet in the shower. Occasionally we'd stay with other people, but rarely. My mom did try to keep us in a place, even if there was no electricity or running water half of the time. You learn a lot of things when you live without utilities, one of them being how to cook Rice-A-Roni on a barbeque grill, and another being how to flush the toilet with a five gallon bucket of water.

My mom worked at bars when I was young, and we had a group of babysitters that were nice enough. One, named Edna who had a small house on the outskirts of town with a garden and a chicken coop, and various animals like rabbits or dogs. Depending on the season, I guess. She also had an old bath tub outside where she farmed earthworms for fishing. The camper we lived in was on her property. Her husband, M.R. (yeah M-R, not mister) was mostly deaf, so you'd have to scream to talk to him, but he was nice, and didn't bother anyone. They hunted. There were deer antlers and fly-strips hung all around the carport where Edna would pick the lice out of my hair for hours at a time.

My brother and I would help Edna with the garden, digging up potatoes, and sometimes we'd feed the chickens, too. Catalpa (pronounced: cuh-tah-buh in the south) hunts were also a specialty of ours.

We were raised outdoorsman by outdoorsmen. My family has property between where I was born and where I grew up that has a pond, and woods, and a car graveyard. I could bait my own hook from a very young age, although I hated doing it, I had to, because I had something to prove being the only girl for fifty years. I could also take the fish off by myself, and that made my Daddy proud on the occasion he was around, of course.

My mother got a job working for the city at some point, and I guess that had better benefits and it made a hell of a lot more money than bartending. I wish I was on terms with her now to go back and ask about it, but I'd rather not; maybe in the next episode.

I said before that there was a "group of babysitters," and there were a few. There was a woman named Irene who was married to a pedophile, who I can no longer recollect his name. Her daughter and granddaughter had a mobile home next to her house, and sometimes her granddaughter Stephanie would sit us as well. Stephanie was a teenage girl with the big eighties hair and heavy metal posters in her room that would freak me out when I was made to take a nap in there. The eyes seemed to follow me around the room. I remember being hungry and not being fed while I was there.

One night when we were staying at Irene's, Stephanie came over while we were asleep and painted my brothers fingernails thinking he was me. My brother was in school, and I was barely out of diapers then. I don't remember too much about it, except Irene's husband liked to stick his hand in my pants when I sat on his lap, and that Irene got cancer and died. They're both dead now, and that makes me happy.

There was an old tree that we used to play on out by the neighbors' pasture, and when the cows would come near, I'd bail. The little boys that used to play outside with us were real assholes. I'm not sure at what age boys realize what having a dick means, but I'm sure it's pretty early on, and no doubt taught to them by their fathers.

There was one more babysitter that I had, who had given her daughter up for adoption, and was pretty hung up about that. She would tell me that eating sugar on my toast would make me a diabetic. (big word to learn before kindergarten, no?) She was cool, she had Legos and cats.

I remember one of her cats scratched my brother's face because he threw it in a puddle, and my brother still has the scar.

None of that was really relevant to my story, as I said before, this isn't really about my family, but it will add to the validity of all of this, I'm sure. Things changed once I started school. We became latch-key kids. I remember coming home to an empty house each day when we got off the bus.

Before kindergarten, I was never really involved in very many social activities with other kids, or at least any healthy ones. Most of the kids we played with were boys, and all of them had dicks, and I think I saw all of them at some point. Yeah, that's the reality. Little boys love showing their dicks. I know I had three different dicks in my mouth before I started kindergarten. You do what you gotta do when you're the baby.

Child Protective Services came out to the house one day after school because someone had called and said we were home alone. I'm not sure if it was the neighbor who was supposed to be watching us, or the pedophile that lived across from them, or if it was the junkie twenty-somethings that lived across from us, but I do remember being lured into this stranger's car with the promise of a Happy Meal. We'd been eating crap that was cooked on a wood burning stove out on the back patio, and I couldn't pass up that opportunity. This was around the time that poor white single mothers who worked couldn't get any assistance from the government, so times were hard, and food was not the greatest.

Mom picked us up from the county office where they hold children like us, and we had to get another sitter.