Erika and I moved out of the office and into a co-working space in Brooklyn. When it came to the second series, I couldn’t do what I’d promised, and when I explained why, over an excruciating conference call made from the rented boardroom, my producer didn’t buy it. Literally, he didn’t buy it. The podcast was not commissioned again. I understood. I had let him down. We released an extra episode covering the border wall and the executive order, but our second-season order was cut by four, which meant four fewer episodes than we had originally planned. I never got to broadcast Liana’s story. I had let her down too. I couldn’t use the interviews with Vlad and the other young DACA kids. I had let them down as well, just as the country was about to, only in a far more resounding way, by revoking legal status for almost a million of them.
I comforted myself with the idea that perhaps, out in the multiverse, there is another hapless podcaster, one who somehow manages to get it together in time to marry Oscar Isaac so that together they can make an absolutely hilarious show about immigration and it’s a hit and the producer makes his money back and all Americans wake up and begin to treat all immigrants with some measure of humanity and dignity. In the meantime, here in my actual universe, I had to call Liana and explain what had happened. Naturally, I dreaded the call, and feared the worst. I thought she would feel betrayed, and be angry at me for wasting her time, and her son’s time, and for not understanding how important it was to speak up for people who cannot speak up for themselves. Not so. “I understand,” she said. “And I believe that you can find some other way to tell our story, can’t you?” I hadn’t thought of that. Instantly, out tripped a line. “I will try,” I told her before I hung up, but it wasn’t a line, actually. It was a promise I knew I would not let myself break.
Other People’s Children
I DON’T HAVE ANY CHILDREN of my own, at least, none that I know of. This fact, whenever I care to think about it, kind of amazes me. It’s not that I want a child, or planned for one, it’s just that I’m from a country with the consistently highest birth rate in Europe and the actual pet name “Mother Ireland.” Abortion is illegal in Ireland, and when I was a teenager there was a doctor in the town I grew up in who refused teenagers the contraceptive pill on the grounds of his own religious beliefs. I’m one of eight children, born to parents who have fostered over a dozen more children, including three little sweethearts who live with them still. I’m the only one of my group of school friends not to have children; in fact, they have at least two each.
So, I don’t have any children of my own. I do, however, have a number of other peoples’ children who have crawled, toddled, and roller-skated their way into my life. I have all these nieces, four of them, and if I could, I would profile each one of them the way those slavering pop culture writers do with celebrities. You know, “Hazel sits on the patio telling us about her life, her chubby, tanned hands flying through the air as she babbles, before hoisting herself up onto the table and laughing as she sips hot chocolate from a puddle she has spilled just moments before. She’s pretending to be a dog now. It’s not hard to see why everyone is besotted with this toddler.” That is the kind of news I want to hear, but it seems that unless a person is related to me, it’s very difficult to convince them to even spend ten minutes looking at a series of photos of my nieces.
Some of my pregnant or trying-to-get-pregnant friends allow the slideshow, but, come to think if it, they never request it. Usually I have to seize the opportunity that happens the moment after someone shows me a photo of their own children. Uh-huh, I say, looking at the infant for the obligatory twenty seconds, very cute/alert/healthy, and then I absolutely bombard them with photos and videos of my nieces at various stages of their lives. If they are not sufficiently intrigued, and they never are, I make a scene. You people don’t seem to appreciate just how astounding it is that just a couple of years ago these little girls didn’t even exist. And now I have actually THREE two-year-old nieces!
There really should be a TV show, a half-hour comedy drama where I and these baby girls all somehow end up living together in a loft apartment. Not for some tragic reason, like death or abandonment, maybe just because my sisters end up in maximum-security prison or something. Anyway, the working title is Aunt You Glad I’m Not Your Mother? And it would be a gentle, apolitical show where my nieces (played by themselves) would lounge around making tea in tiny kitchens and building castles in a sand pit while I (played by me) panic and try to maintain a romantic life and have a lot of groceries to buy.
The story lines would be quite mild, the cliff-hangers not too steep, just things like, “Will Sadie find her soother in time for bed?” The art director could build out the sets to look bigger as the girls get taller, so they will always look small and cute. To be frank, a huge and possibly odd part of me wants to bonsai these little girls, to keep them exactly the way they are. They already have a number of brilliant character traits: they are assertive, hilarious, and gentle. They are so intensely vulnerable, small little scraps who cannot fully express themselves, but at the same time they’re crazily determined to thrive, grabbing everything they can reach, relentlessly curious about the world. Their characters are already well developed. Hazel has decided against me. I’m having dinner in her house and she looks at me over the rim of her sippy cup and whispers, “Go. Home.” I ask her, feigning sadness, “Should I go home? Down to Nana’s house?” She nods, watching me carefully. Sadie is a doll come to life, straight out of the 1950s with a head full of curls and a shy little smile. When things get too hectic for her, she pretends to be asleep. Nora has a Filipino accent, because all of her nursery staff in Dubai, where she lives, are from the Philippines. Her games consist mainly of tea parties with her dolls where she urges the dolls to “be careful” in her Filipino accent. I need to see to it that these girls keep their strength up, that they never go quiet, and, when they need to, that they always put up a fight.
I have another niece too, my eldest niece, and she is five. Like any person, she is many things, but chief among them she is competitive and fierce and funny. She strides through her day on long spindly legs, hazel eyes sparking as she invents games and organizes other children, focusing as she clambers and scrapes her tiny self to the top of a twelve-foot climbing frame until she is waving and hooting from the top. To watch her learning how to read and see how determined she is to master writing, and, when she finally manages a word, to hear her telling her mother, “You know, writing’s actually really easy”? Well, it’s enough to blow your heart open.
Therein lies the problem: my heart can’t handle these girls. Typical, really, it’s the most unreliable of all my organs. My stomach can handle anything, believe me. My kidneys give me no trouble, and my brain provides just enough clear spells to get by. It’s my heart that goes out to people, gets full up, skips a beat, stops. It’s my heart that jumps up into my throat and drops down, too far down to carry on without it. To keep my heart intact, I must keep these little girls intact. It’s a selfish kind of love I have for them, I think, one that instinctively knows protecting them from harm protects me from harm. Perhaps that is what’s behind my wish to desert my current life and devote a new one to them. And since the TV show is unlikely because the lame-stream media is too lily-livered to cast three unknown babies as leads in a multimillion-dollar series, and my sisters will more than likely stay out of prison, I have another scenario in mind that would allow me to spend more time with the girls.
I’d like to shadow them daily, in a pantsuit, some kind of unconventional bodyguard, with my thin lips pursed. From day one I’d be there, telling the midwife to take it easy, correcting people who failed to support their little wobbly heads. “Is she the . . . governess?” people would ask. “No, no,” I would laugh, then just as quickly I’d stop laughing and say, “I’m the aunt.” As they grew into toddlers I’d crouch behind them on the swing set, aware of but not actively listening to the current playground gossip. If it’s about o
ne of my nieces, I’d tower over whoever was saying it and ask in a menacing voice, “What was that, Becca?” I’d hover in class, and pinch any children who tried to distract them. The teachers would be fine with my presence, because teachers are almost always aunts too.
My nieces’ teenage years would see an acceleration in my work. I would accompany them to parties, and if they faltered I’d whisper to them how cool they are, how special, how worth knowing. When they had something to say I’d urge them on “louder, again.” I’d tell them absolutely everything they needed to know: how to squeeze blackheads without leaving a scar, that Raymond Carver doesn’t matter as much as Nina Simone, that the sooner they figure out a way to make their words match their thoughts, the better. They would grow used to me always being there, having never known any different. At summer camp, if anyone asked who that brown-haired frowning woman was, the one always at their shoulder, they’d have to think for a second before saying, “Oh. That’s my aunt.”
Ideally, every girl would have an aunt, keeping an eye on things, stepping in when needed. It’s practically impossible to see the actual structures in which our lives are shaped. There are codes and norms that are so codified and so normalized that they create a veil of order that we don’t think about, because we can’t see it. I sense that the order, at this time in the world, is that women are not as valuable as men. We are treated, in a million ways, as beings worth less than men. If I’m wrong about that, great. If not, then I must be an aunt, and there must be many more like me. Our aunt ranks will be made up of women who have somehow managed to wrench off that veil placed so craftily on us as we grew up, obstructing our view of the truth, which is that women are just as valid and important and human as men.
Perhaps it’s impossible to fully pull that veil off, but those of us who have worn it for long enough that it has grown transparent in patches and loose at the ends, allowing glimpses of truth and rushes of oxygen, at least we can step up. We will be an army of women, there to protect these girls and claim back their land. Our recruits will come from all around. Aunts can be mothers too. And, actually, boys can be nieces. You don’t even need to be related to a niece to be her aunt, did you know that? Nieces are everywhere and the aunt ranks are made up of any woman who can guide a girl to safety.
The reasons I don’t actually do this protective work full-time are simple, but painful to accept. Firstly, I haven’t been able to keep me or my sisters and friends safe from this world of ours, from this dangerous order, so I still have much to learn. Secondly, my overwhelming wish for these girls is autonomy. And how can they really achieve that if I am always there, grimacing at every slight, fingers hovering over my throwing stars, ready to defend them? I don’t want anybody to control them, not even me. Independence is a muscle, one that needs to be stretched and challenged and broken down a little in order to get good and strong. I understand that. I won’t cast this creeping shadow of caution over their brightness. I will fight the urge to tell them to slow down. I will absolutely stand guard, but from a distance. I want them to be fearless, so I won’t tell them to be careful.
I do keep up my aunt work part-time. When I first moved to the U.S. and money and opportunities were scarce on the ground, my roommate asked me if I wanted to do a babysitting job she couldn’t make it to. She hadn’t met the family, but the mother of two girls had seen a sign she’d posted in a coffee shop and contacted her, asking for after-school help twice a week. I went to meet the family, high up in a beautiful apartment building overlooking Prospect Park in Brooklyn, where they lived on an entire floor.
The little girls, eight and ten at the time, were funny and inquisitive and clever. They had some questions for me, like how many brothers and sisters do I have, and what word do I use for fart. I told them, seven and buzzer. That seemed to do the trick, and the following week I stood outside their school gates, looking for one head of strawberry blond curls and one chestnut bob among the backpacks and babysitters and stay-at-home dads. We meandered back to their house via a bagel detour, where they showed me a cool game that I think is called “Wave.” You basically sit in the safety of the bagel shop, then you wave, very earnestly, at a stranger through the window. If the stranger waves back, which they often do, looking quite baffled, you win.
That afternoon was the most fun I’d had in weeks, and completely different from the babysitting experiences I’d had as a teenager. Back then, my sisters and I had a cottage industry going on. As each of us turned fourteen, we gradually began to babysit everyone in our neighborhood. Like any good service providers, we did not take it personally if someone specifically asked for me, or Lilly, or Ettie. More often, people would call the house and ask for “one of the girls” and we would argue about who should take the gig. Factors to consider included the number and temperament of the children in question, the number and quality of TV stations available, but mainly, of course, the number and quality, or lack thereof, of the snacks at our disposal. I really liked the Sullivan house because they had cheap, plentiful snack food, like these pickled-onion-flavored chips called Meanies that my mother didn’t allow in our house.
I wonder now at the wisdom of handing over responsibility for your children to a person so young their own mother still controls their snack choices, but I didn’t ask any questions at the time. I was just so pleased to be getting the equivalent of three dollars an hour, and I certainly didn’t have anything else going on during my Saturday nights. We were responsible girls, well used to children, having grown up with a number of younger sisters ourselves, but that doesn’t cancel the fact that I was usually just a few years older than the children I babysat. One time, when I went to one of my regular jobs, the family’s thirteen-year-old cousin was staying for the weekend. I was a year older than her, but I wasn’t sure if she knew that. We sat together watching Friends on television until nine o’clock, when I told her to go to bed and go straight to sleep.
And now, almost twenty years later, I found myself babysitting again. That only struck me as odd the second week of my new job, as I waited outside the girls’ school. My mind began to race. How am I doing this? I had my own TV show in Ireland. I had a book published. Yet here I was, happily waiting to pick up a couple of kids at the school gates. I’d been looking forward to seeing them all day. Was this what I wanted? Or was it just an inevitability I could not run from? I wondered if I was like those badgers that blindly walk the same path as their ancestors, regardless of the danger, regardless of the busy roads built over those paths that will inevitably lead to their annihilation.
I thought about my eldest sister Ettie, working for UNICEF in Jordan, looking after Syrian refugee children; my mother in Ireland, still fostering children after her own have grown; little Nora’s Filipino kindergarten teachers; and these other babysitters standing beside me at the gates, older West Indian women waiting for their little white charges. How much agency did each one of us have, when it came down to it? I had more than most, I’m sure, but here I was, one more woman taking care of children. It was a strange feeling, a mixture of pride at being part of this nurturing collective, sadness that I was reverting to type, and confusion over what was deliberate on my part, and where the invisible line lay. Then Avra appeared, her beautiful little face shining up at me, and Dahlia too, beaming as she thumped me in the side before I got a chance to duck, and we went to get bagels and talk about the world.
The Golden Record
I AM ADDICTED TO INSTAGRAM, specifically Instagram Stories. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please bear with me; for your understanding of what follows, it’s not necessary to share my addiction. In fact, it could well be better if you don’t, for your own sake. Or perhaps not. Shall we see? Stories is a feature on Instagram that successfully mimics Snapchat, where you can post as many videos and photos as you like, with any number of filters, stickers, and text, and it doesn’t show up on your main feed. So, as Instagram says, “You don’t have to worry about o
ver-posting.” A Story lasts twenty-four hours, then it disappears forever.
In August, I visited Ireland for my sister’s wedding. In the run-up to it, my father celebrated his birthday and I was playing a comedy festival in Dublin. Lovely occasions, all: celebrations, family time, and reliving memories of home. Before I left for Dublin, I was extremely excited about making the trip. Not because of homesickness, or a love of work, or even the chance to escape the sticky heat of a New York summer. All I could think about was the content.
I caught myself grinning in bed one night, imagining the quality and quantity of content those occasions would generate. I suddenly felt grotesque, focusing so hard on the material I could glean for social media from what should really be a lovely private vacation. My grin dropped, until a moment later when I successfully brushed my qualms aside by picturing toddlers on bouncy castles. Adorable! I could film them in “rewind” mode, making them look like superheroes with pigtails! And it would be good for showing off my work stuff too, the festival shots. I envisioned the hyped crowds of people waving in sequence as I snapped a photo of them from the stage. I’d look like a stadium performer, the Springsteen of hesitant observational comedy.
All of that would come along and be picked clean and fed to my phone even before the big day itself, and there would definitely be stunning shots from that, I mean, my wedding day, my big day, the day I’d always dreamed of! Excuse me, I beg your pardon, I meant to say my sister’s big day. Either way, there would be tearful speeches, heavenly food and sweet little flower girls. And I was determined that there would be at least one glorious image of me on the wedding day itself, in my wedding dress, as in the floaty pale pink dress I was wearing for the wedding, looking adorable and ephemeral, like a healthy fairy. The dress was actually a little too close to my skin tone for comfort, but I knew I could play with the contrast and filters before I posted it. I knew I could make it all look perfect.
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