My Adventures In Babysitting

Maybe I should call it “my horror stories in babysitting” but for the ten years that I babysat, I have run into many mishaps but there was one particular disaster tale that I could not have predicted. For the first few years, everything was ok. I mean, I experienced the typical tantrums and hissy fits--nothing a little talk and time-out couldn’t fix. Then my adventures in babysitting turned ugly.

Somewhere in my career I found myself living in Italy and employed by a pasta empire magnate. They had a five year old daughter who need babysitter help on those many nights that they had to be at galas and events. She played an innocent angel when her parents were around but she was, in short, a demon child. 

On the first day, she disobeyed everything I told her. At one point, I had to plead for her to eat and instead she took the plate of spaghetti, slowly walked around to where I was and dropped it all over my lap. It was deliberate and vindictive. For the next couple of months, every time I would try to tell her parents, they wouldn’t listen or believe me. Because they were still paying me an outrageous sum, I figured that I would stay for a little bit more.

Finally, my foreign adventures in babysitting came to an abrupt stop when the girl’s grandmother came to visit. All three of us were in the car with the limousine driver when the girl started to hit me and call me names. Then she said very matter-of-factly that I should have never been born and that she would prefer for me to die. All that pent up frustration somehow manifested itself in my hand as I felt it--almost involuntarily slapping her hard across the face. Her grandmother saw what I did and as her granddaughter was making ungodly noises in the back seat, she made the driver stop immediately. She literally kicked me out onto the street.

Five days later, the girl’s parents slapped a lawsuit against me. Luckily, I won and was rewarded enough money to backpack around Europe for a year. I guess my adventures in babysitting weren’t so bad afterall.  A slight increase in my babysitting wages.