Anything that she’s learnt about sex hasn’t come from her father or I. I bite down into the pillows to keep quiet when we make love. I would love to be loud and I was up until the birth of our daughter, but the last thing I want is for her to hear us and coming running to see if Mummy and Daddy are okay.
I had thought, long before meeting my husband and even longer before our daughter’s birth, that I would tell my children as soon as they were ready to understand about the bad things in life. Perverts, kidnapping, drugs, alcohol and not taking lollies from strangers were some of the many things I had intended to talk about. My interest would not be to scare them; it would be to make them aware that not all things and people are necessarily good and there are some things you need to be careful of. This would, I believed, in turn make my children intelligent people.
That’s not to say that my daughter isn’t intelligent. I think she’s exceptionally bright. But every time I sit down to talk to her about such things I open my mouth and the words don’t come out. She asks me if Mummy’s okay and I tell her that Mummy’s fine, that Mummy loves her very much and hug her.
It was my wedding anniversary last weekend. My husband had planned this beautiful getaway at a bed and breakfast but with our parents overseas, we needed a babysitter for our daughter. My husband knew the teenaged son of a man he worked with and said he would be very capable. I begged and I pleaded and eventually we got a lovely babysitter by the name of Kelly.
I don’t have anything against male babysitters. It’s just that I wish that I had been an ordinary, naïve child and that I wish that I didn’t know what sex was by the time I had my only male babysitter.
I would’ve been a couple of years older than my daughter when Jonathan babysat for me. Jonathan would’ve been around nineteen years old and lived across the street from friends of my parents’. My parents had been stuck for a babysitter for me one night and my mother told these particular friends. These particular friends had two boys a little younger than me and found Jonathan to be a terrific babysitter.
So it was arranged that Jonathan would baby-sit me that night.
I’ve always trusted my gut instinct. I have failed it plenty of times but it has never failed me. When Jonathan walked through my front door, all brown hair and blue eyes and a slightly crooked smile, I sat in my chair in front of the television and didn’t move.
My mother gave me a kiss on the head, told me to have my bath after the television show and then go to bed.
At first, Jonathan wasn’t too bad. I don’t remember how it happened but somehow we wound up into a silly pillow fight. He was laughing and I was giggling and not very concerned about knocking something priceless over when I was finally corned on my back, him leaning over me and a pillow between my stomach and his groin. Our smiles had disappeared.
My gut instinct told me to get the hell away from him.
The phone went and he was off me in a shot, answering the phone. I walked down the hall past him to my bedroom. He asked where I was going and I said to take a bath. He asked if I wanted to watch the rest of the television show first and I said no.
I hadn’t learnt to run the bath water to the right temperature yet so I had to wait for Jonathan to do it. He asked me if I needed help getting undressed. I said no. He asked me if I needed help in the bath.
I said no, walked into the bathroom, closed the door and for the first time, used the lock.
After my bath I dressed myself and declined opportunities for being tucked-in and bedtime stories. I went straight to bed, turned off the light and lay in bed, waiting for what I hoped would be nothing.
Jonathan yelled out good-night and I silently replied good-bye.
My stuffed animals sat along the edge of my door, blocking out the light. They kept guard.
It’s the little things in life.
My parents asked me the next day how I liked Jonathan. I said I didn’t want him babysitting again.
They didn’t ask why and from then on, it was back to female babysitters.
I have a six-year-old daughter. My husband and my daughter enjoy playing a game, in which she pretends he’s scaring her.
This game is usually played by my husband chasing her through the house with a butcher’s knife. She giggles and laughs and pretends to be afraid.
My father used to chase me through our house when I was her age, pretending to scare me with a butcher’s knife. I found it funny, then.