When I picked Ethan up from Nanny McPhee, as we’ve come to refer to her, she handed me our farewell note. After 18 months of watching Ethan daily, our seasoned daycare provider and mother of four – with tween-age children of her own – wrote this before our move to New Jersey:
I didn’t think we were going to make it. He was a challenge, but we made it.
Sterile and hardly worth saving, her note that I kept in Ethan’s baby box reminds me of how I resented her insinuations that Ethan was overindulged and spoiled, and that he was difficult because we gave in to him to easily.
In truth, we were meticulous with a schedule, had read all the baby books, and still couldn’t manage to live peacefully with Ethan, and she reminded me almost daily when I picked him up after work just how long he had cried or how fussy he had been.
It wasn’t until my second child was born that I realized Nanny McPhee, as judgmental as she was, had gotten something right: Ethan was needy, sensitive and impossible to console. To call him a challenging child was an understatement of epic proportions.
When we got our phone number after our move, it included three consecutive 6’s and we would joke that, at least we would remember our phone number, as it matched the mark on our son’s forehead. And whenever my husband or I asked the routine question of each other, “Did anyone call today?” one or the other would quip, “Rosemary called, she wants her baby back.”
Even today, as Ethan approaches his 11th birthday, we laugh in an attempt to make light of a serious and difficult life for our son and our family — and there is no doubt that laughter helps. Continue reading