Secret Nanny Club (4 page)

Look, I know it’s not good for the environment to be
using disposable nappies, but until they come up with a better solution, I’m afraid I’m going to have to keep using them. Gosh, they’re so handy, especially when the baby has only done a little wee and I can whip the nappy off and replace it within seconds, and with only one hand while chatting on the phone at the same time. (Can you imagine a man being able to multi-task like that? Eh, I don’t think so.)

These days I think back in horror to
how I used to fritter money away. You know, when Ireland was supposedly rich and we were all milking it? At least that’s what we were being told? Anyway, in those heady days I had no problem spending a fortune on a pair of ‘must have’ shoes. I once spent a whopping seven hundred euro on a pair of gold peep-toe heels that dug into my heels painfully and almost rendered me a cripple after a night on the tiles. I can’t believe I parted with my hard-earned cash for something that hurt me so much. Okay, they admittedly looked fabulous as they glistened in the sun-drenched shop window, but even after all the money I spent on them, only a handful of women admired them and not one man did. Not even one. Men don’t understand why women spend a fortune on shoes and I’m beginning to side with them on this one now. I mean, think of all the nappies I could have bought for the price of those killer heels! I could have bought a whole mountain of them. And now I don’t think I even like those shoes. They look, dare I say, a little tacky.

They’re just a bit to
o
Big Fat Gyps
y
-type for me now.

So yes, I’m broke.
Completely smashed, actually. The proverbial wolf is at the door. I am struggling to pay the rent on my miserable wages. The middle of the month is definitely the worst when I start wondering whether I can hold out until the end of the month. I get paid a little at the end of every month but it’s hardly enough to survive. I have to say I do really look forward to the Child Benefit on the first Tuesday of every month, and although it’s not much I really don’t know what I’d do without it.

As I told you before, I work as an in-house stylist for
a fashion magazine, which sounds very glamorous but really it isn’t at all. In fact it’s bloody hard work dealing with uppity PR types all the time. I work from home two and a half days a week at the moment and Mum takes Baby John on those days. I really am grateful for the time she does take him because honestly I’d be like a prisoner otherwise. The only thing is that Mum is very busy with her golf and her bridge and her committee meetings (she’s goes to loads of committee meetings!), and although she doesn’t complain too much I can definitely see her becoming a little resentful about becoming a free babysitter. If I push her any more she’s in danger of snapping and I can’t afford to let that happen. If she goes I’ll be lost. Everyone else has already gone. She’s the last one left. So I decided a few days ago that I had no choice but to get an au pair to come and live with us. I cannot afford to pay somebody an hourly wage so the cheapest option is to give somebody board and keep in exchange for baby-sitting and pocket money. The girl can stay in the second bedroom and help me mind John. Then I can do my styling work in peace and also have the odd night out too. I miss going out and I miss not feeling like part of the human race. Of course I know that I will never be a party animal again and that I now have serious responsibilities but I would love even to be able to walk along the seafront in the evening without the pram, just getting my thoughts together.

Later on that day I was in Spar getting a few groceries
when I just happened by the noticeboard. Normally I wouldn’t even bother reading the handwritten notes that people living locally stick up on it, but this time one ad did catch my eye. In nice neat handwriting there was a short note by somebody looking for a job working with either children or elderly people. It had a number and a name on it. I jotted the number down on the back of my

grocery
bill. The following morning I rang the number and asked for Samira. Samira sounded quite serious on the phone. Her English wasn’t great but it wasn’t terrible either. I asked

her
whether she could start pretty much immediately and she said that she could. I gave her directions to my apartment block and she said she knew where it was and that she would be looking forward to meeting myself and John the following afternoon.

True to her word, Samira turned up on my doorstep
the following evening bang on time. Her rather glamorous name turned out to be misleading. She was an earnest-looking girl with small eyes, a big mouth, thin and gaunt with slightly protruding teeth and her long mousey hair scraped back into a ponytail. She was casually dressed in skinny jeans, Uggs, a white T-shirt and a loose grey cardigan. She told me she was eighteen years old, from Bosnia, and that she was working for a family locally in Bray. But the hours didn’t really suit her, she explained, and she was looking to move. She also told me that she was attending English classes nearby but that she kept having to miss them as her boss wouldn’t allow her time off in the afternoons. She seemed perfectly fine and polite and she told me she wasn’t afraid of hard work. She told me that she had looked after plenty of children and young relatives in her home town before she came to Ireland and that she had lots of experience. I asked her if she had a boyfriend and she said that she didn’t. Neither did she smoke or drink. She said she liked to read in the evenings or listen to music on her iPod. She seemed to tick all the boxes, and she was polite if a little distant. I thought I would give her a start and offered her the job. She’s moving in tomorrow. I’m all excited now. It’s as though I’m about to get a ‘Get of Jail’ card. This morning, after I got John up, bathed, fed and dressed and took him for a little walk, I decided to do some de-cluttering because my apartment was kind of messy right now. My wardrobe was still brimming with all my pre-pregnancy skinny clothes, as well as my awful unflattering maternity clothes (some of which were just large-size regular clothes). I was going to take the maternity clothes to one of Bray’s many charity shops but then I thought I might make a bit of money by listing them on eBay. I mean, there’s a baby boom on right now so there must be lots of women looking to buy maternity clothes, right?

Seriously though, everyone seems to be pregnant. At
least all the women shopping in Bray seem to be anyway. I kind of look at them and feel glad it’s not me anymore. I’d say that the recession and the bad weather last winter has probably contributed to the vast number of babies due this year. After all, people need to stay warm and when funds are low and it’s wet and cold outside, staying in becomes the new going out. But I’m honestly glad I’m not pregnant any more. I can’t bear flicking through magazines in waiting rooms and the like because all the expectant celebrity mummies are all blooming. When I was pregnant I just looked like a blooming mess! And it’s not just the celebrities – I mean, have you seen how depressingly gorgeous today’s mummies-to-be in general are? I remember, when I was a young child and lots of my friends’ mummies were expecting, they wore hideous

flowery
smocks that made them look like they were expecting baby elephants. And who could forget the Godawful denim dungarees that should have been banned from the market? They made every pregnant woman look like a fat Farmer Joe! But nowadays it’s glamour all the way to the labour ward. But me, I don’t know why, I found it enormously difficult to find maternity clothes that looked flattering on me. That’s why I ended up buying some ordinary large-size clothes, which looked more appealing than the regular maternity clothes. I think I might have even bought a few man-size tops too. In the end my saving grace was a wine-coloured, velvet Juicy Couture tracksuit which I bought in Nelo maternity shop for a small fortune. But I reckon I didn’t take it off me for the last three months of pregnancy so it was well worth the money.

I remember also buying one black going-out dress to
party in. Nice designer maternity dresses cost so much you wouldn’t want one in every colour! When you buy gorgeous clothes you expect to get years out of them, but you never want to see maternity clothes after you’ve given birth so it doesn’t make sense to splash out on a whole wardrobe. The black dress served me well. I wore it every time I wasn’t wearing the maternity tracksuit. It was fairly nondescript, knee-length with sleeves, but I didn’t exactly wish to draw attention to myself when I was that large so I was happy to hide behind it. I still have it hanging in my wardrobe. Don’t ask me why because I don’t intend having another baby. I had one for

the
experience, I love him more than life itself but now I’m looking forward to reclaiming my life. At least the mornings, anyway.

But hats off to those who do manage to look perfect
during pregnancy. I envy them. There was nothing elegant about my pregnancy. I carried a plastic bag around with me to get sick into and during the snow I wore an extra-large fake fur coat that made me look like a moving mountain. Oh my God, I was a disgrace! Okay, moving on . . . after taking photos of my clothes laid out on the bare wooden floor of my bedroom, I listed the items carefully and hoped that I made the clothes sound at least slightly attractive and not at all as hideous

as
they really were. Then Samira arrived in the afternoon to live with us and the first thing she did was remove all the bedding from her bed. I was mildly insulted as I had spent the day before ironing it all for her. But she said she had a phobia about sleeping in bed linen that somebody else had once used and that she would prefer to sleep in a sleeping bag

on
top of the bed. I thought that it was a bit odd. I mean, what would she do in a hotel? But I decided not to make a major fuss about it. It was no big deal. Once she had finished unpacking, I made her a toasted sandwich and some tea, and I asked her to tell me a bit about her old job and her duties. Samira made a face. “I didn’t like the family one bit.

They were hard work.” She sighed heavily. “The father
was a stay-at-home dad who would boss me around all day. He would never get dressed and would be in his dressing gown all day barking orders at me.”

“Like what kind of orders?” I asked, intrigued.

“Well, for example, every morning I would have to
hoover and dust the entire house,” she began, “and then I dunno, I might be expected to wash the walls. Or clean the toilets.”

“Clean the toilets?” I was astonished. Some people
had an awful cheek! “But an au pair is supposed to be like a family friend and treated as such.”

“I thought that too but this family treated me more
like a slave than a friend. They would order me to deep clean the oven, or maybe clean the carpets, polish the silver or do some digging in the garden.” I let out a long whistle. “Goodness me, that’s unbelievable. Seriously, I just think it’s shocking that he expected he could get away with that,” I said, scandalised.

“That’s slave labour if you ask me!”

“I agree. Au pairs often find themselves open to abuse from their employers because they are vulnerable, being so far away from home.”

I shook my head. Samira’s story made me feel sad. “If
he was a stay-at-home dad then why couldn’t he do the heavy work himself?”

Samira shrugged. “I think he thought those tasks
were beneath him. Men, huh?” She scrunched up her face.

“Well, I should certainly hope that not all men are like
that. I mean, I couldn’t imagine my own father behaving like that when he was still alive. He was a true gentleman.”

“And what about the father of your child?
What’s he like?”

I opened my mouth to say something but I couldn’t
find the right answer. To be honest, I was a bit affronted by the question. I mean, I didn’t think I was going to be interrogated by the new au pair. My love life was absolutely none of her business and I thought she was being a bit too familiar. “He’s fine,” I said with a hunt of coolness, making it clear that discussions concerning Clive were not going to be on the cards. “Hey, why don’t you put on your coat, Samira?” I asked, quite obviously changing the subject. “It seems to have stopped raining now and I’d love you to take little John for a walk as he hasn’t had any fresh air at all today.”

She got her coat and buttoned it up to her neck. Then
she put John in his little raincoat and put him in the pram. He smiled up at her innocently and my heart melted a little bit. I didn’t want to share him with Samira or indeed, anybody, but I couldn’t think of any other option for the near future besides having a live-in au pair.

Although I was lonely these days being a single mum,
I knew that it was not a good idea to become too friendly with Samira. If you became too friendly with your au pair they wouldn’t respect you as much. I didn’t want to encourage her to pry into my personal life. I wondered if there was some way of introducing her to other foreign au pairs so that she could have people of her own age to hang out with in the evenings. The last thing I needed was for Samira to stay home every night and be under my feet. I need a little bit of breathing space for me and the apartment was rather small. Maybe I could join one of those mummy-and-baby forums and see if any other mums were thinking along the same lines as me.

The next day I logged into one of those mummy sites.
When I was pregnant I would visit them a lot, trying to get pregnancy tips about diet, hospitals etc. When your own friends are not pregnant they don’t want to chat about pregnancy-related stuff so it was nice to have this sort of online support communities at my fingertips. But then once the baby came along, I kind of lost interest. Anyway I didn’t even really have the time now for internet surfing. But I went into one of the sites and searched for an au pair community. I met a lady called Sheelagh who lived in the Bray area and had just started a French au pair. She was dying for her to meet new friends, and she invited myself, Samira and John over to her house the following afternoon for tea.