Co-op care

When our theologian friends first mentioned the possibility of co-op childcare, I was jazzed: not only would it solve the 'don't quite trust the nanny' problem, but it would come at a price well suited to the academic budget (i.e. free.) The theologians illustrated the idea by describing two professorial couples who had decided that each of the four adults would have full childcare responsibilities one day a week, with the fifth day assigned by random draw. Unless you were really in the doghouse with Father Fate, most weeks you would be able to work 4 out of 5 days, a significant improvement over the 2.5 you could get by pooling resources with your spouse alone.

Of course, no one knows better than I that it is one thing for an idea to pencil mathematically, quite another to be worth a damn in real life. For one reason or another, co-op care has been slow to get off the ground. At first we wanted to see how the nanny care went, and felt that in the scientific spirit of 'one variable at a time', co-op care ought to wait until the nanny routine was well established. And of course 'well-established' is a slippery concept: since there was never a day when the nanny reported two perfectly behaved beaming children who had eaten like vikings, laughed like Friar Tuck, and slept like a couple of periwinkles, co-op care had to wait. Even when it became obvious that the kids had developed a certain robustness to the rigors of joint care, we continued to refer to co-op care as a distant possibility, a "yeah, we really ought to..." sort of endeavor that we would get to the same day we cleaned our sock drawer, sorted our files, and organized the garage.

Why such lethargy, when both the product and the price were so tantalizing? The embarrassing truth was that even though we blithely left our children in the hands of an unknown woman whose services we grudgingly valued at $12 an hour, the prospect of doing what she did scared the shit out of us. Two kids at once? You got to be out of your fucking mind.

Unfortunately, sanity is rapidly becoming a luxury we can't afford, as our bank accounts shrivel and our professional duties ooze like caustic mud into every crack and pore of our daily lives. All four of us are thrashing for survival, bugs in a garden fountain, lulled by the sheen of a shifting responsibility whose true treachery wasn't felt until way too late, when wings were already wet and bodies already heavy. Flight is a distant memory, a dim hope: everything hinges on time. And since we don't have the greenbacks to buy it, co-op care it is.

And yesterday, Oh Lucky Day, was my first turn.

Sweet Henry arrives looking like Babybot with a fuse job, his small saucer eyes a pale, vacant blue, his grin toothless and twisted, his long hair skewed left in some simulation of manic genius. He hits the floor at full crawl, attacking first the router, then the cat, then the glass vase, three forbidden objects in exactly as many minutes. He moves quickly, like a cockroach, only with a weird, high-stepping plop-plop motion, as if he were Private Baby First Class on parade, or some unholy Lipizzaner-turtle cross doing dressage. I watch him with dull disbelief. He manages to suck on the phone cable while shredding a book of Byronic poetry; he moves on to a massive gray hairball for dessert. Suddenly it occurs to me that we're all being duped, that no sweet little human baby could be an agent of such terror, and that therefore this writhing albino blob can only be an alien, sent from planet Zorg to systematically investigate the limits of my home network and my sanity. Just as I am about to warn the others, however, Zorgito abruptly abandons the cable, looks me in the eye, and erupts with a smile whose total length is at least double the size of his body. Relax, he seems to be saying, it's just you and me: how bad can it be?

But he's wrong of course: it's not just he and I, and it can be really bad. For there in the highchair is my own son, whom I have forgotten in the terror of the new arrival. Benjamin seems to have been taken over by aliens too. He is perched high in his leather-backed Director's Chair, grinning like Jack the Pumpkin Killer and waving a smoking plastic spoon. Blended peas can be seen on the floor, the stereo, the coffee pot, everywhere, in fact, but his mouth, which is wide open and broadcasting some static-studded message from the mother ship. They are everywhere. I turn to break the news to the Henry's mom, but already she's disappearing, all I catch is her left hand waving goodbye through the open door, ciao, see you in a few. Too late! To the left is Henry, to the right Zoogle, the one crouched and sprung, the other a sprawling corpulence, one spreading pandemonium from below, the other sprinkling chaos from above: it's the Plodding Terror and the Bibbed Avenger tag teaming Carl the Weary Dad sitting slumped in his breakfast chair. The Visiting Lifeforms erupt in simultaneous cackles, and I feel my skin crawl as the alien presence weaves its nets, draws me in, sucks me into its vortex of inhuman experiment....

Birthday resolution: find a job as a banker so I can afford childcare.