A year and a half ago, as we were preparing to leave our three-month-old son with babysitters for the first time, I asked for your advice about how to handle a situation in which your sitters were not hired hands but friends who had volunteered for the job. Although I didn’t get to put your advice to work right away (the baby would not take the bottle, so we had to give away our theater tickets after all), we did eventually steal away for some date nights, and our friends/sitters have been delighted with the small tokens of appreciation we’ve given them in thanks. 

Flash foward to today, when my twenty-month-old son is a pro at being under someone else’s care and we have no trouble calculating how to reimburse for those services because the numbers are right there in the childcare contract we signed. He’s been in daycare for almost three months now and he’s absolutely thriving. He loves the activities and the food and the other kids, and he loves his teacher. I love his teacher too; with her boundless energy and bottomless bag of tricks, she is in many ways the mother I wish I were.     

A few weeks ago, I dropped him off on a Monday morning, and during the usual what-did-you-do-over-the-weekend chitchat with his teacher, I mentioned we’d gone to see Daddy’s band play an afternoon concert in San Francisco. Her face lit up and she asked about the band’s name, what kind of music they played, and when their next gig was. Because she wanted to come see. Well, when you’re in a band playing for tips, it’s always good to fill the room with people you know, so of course I invited her along to the next show, but then I got to thinking: could/should we be including her in other things we do too? 

When my son turns two we’ll almost certainly invite her to his birthday party, but what about inviting her to our grown-up parties as well? Should we add her to the list of friends we’d call to meet us at the farmer’s market on Saturday morning, or at the zoo or the playground (she has a seven-year-old daughter)?     

What do you do? Is your childcare provider also your friend, or is she strictly an employee? Does it make a difference if she’s working out of a center versus running the daycare from her own home? Do you feel the same or differently about school teachers? Is it confusing for kids to spend time with their teachers outside of the school environment? 

You’ve read all the parenting books, you’ve talked to every mother on your street, you’ve surfed mommyblogs until your eyes crossed..and you still don’t know what the heck you’re doing half the time. We talk about parenting by “instinct,” but it’s time we call it like it is: mostly we’re all just parenting by accident, some of them bad, some of them good.
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Last week an email went out on my neighborhood’s listserve asking for mothers interested in forming a babysitting co-op. Two mothers would be in charge of watching everyone’s kids for a few hours one day a week, and then the next week another two mothers would take over the babysitting shift; with a minimum of four people in the group, each mom would get a few hours off every other week to do as she pleased. The woman trying to organize the co-op lives around the corner, has a daughter the same age as my son, and seems like a nice person. Even better, here, finally, was my chance to foist my beloved but wearying child onto a third party and steal some time for myself (even if I waste it on something dumb like much-belated spring cleaning), and without it costing a penny.

Yes, it sounded like a great solution, so then why was I composing a mental list of all the reasons it was a bad idea for us (the baby would get sick; how could I trust these other mothers I didn’t know?; my schedule changes too much and I wouldn’t want to flake out on anyone; what if my son went missing in someone’s house now that he’s mobile and fast enough to get down the hall and stuck under a table, NOT THAT I WOULD KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THAT)?
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