Peter

He was the second youngest of five children, or at least he was, when I started babysitting for his family.

He was a skinny kid, with brown hair. He was only 4 years old and he sometimes got lost in the shuffle of the busy household. His older siblings — the eldest was 11, the others came in two-year increments — led typical wealthy Bostonian lives. Private school (”President Bush went to our school”), piano lessons, Girl Scouts and summer camps. Sometimes I ferried them hither and yon in my 1989 white Ford Tempo, but most of the time I was with Peter, and his baby brother, Nathaniel.

We went for lunches at McDonalds, to movies at Copley Square. We ate pizza afterwards at the food court while he asked me nonsense questions. We went sledding at a park near the four-story brick townhouse that opened up on a garden that made you forget you were in Brookline.

Linda let me drive the minivan sometimes, when she had a volunteer commitment that kept her longer than the school day. One afternoon I let myself into the house with my key and started to stir the soup on the stove, which was the centerpiece of a luncheon she was hosting for the other women on the hospital’s auxiliary organization — her husband was a surgeon there.

“So you must be the angel babysitter,” said one of her friends.

But it’s Peter I think of now. I can’t make out the details anymore, but I remember this: I sat on the sofa in the playroom folding their laundry. Peter was tired; we’d done a craft together earlier. He inched closer and closer until his head was on my knee, and he fell asleep. We sat there, me folding his underwear, and that was how she found us.

She paused at the bottom of the oak stairs. She tilted her head at me and smiled. “He really needs that,” she said. “He really needs that attention.”

That was 17 years ago. Peter, the first little boy to ever steal my heart, is a man now. I wish I could remember more.

***

Yesterday, Liz asked us why we blog. Her essay was, as always, insightful and thought-provoking, and, oddly, it made me think about the little boy who was one of five children for whom I was a nanny my junior and senior years of college. I have a great deal of affection for this child, but I can barely remember him. I spent the greater part of my time with him in 1992-1993, but I can’t retrieve many memories.

I started blogging in 2006, and those first few posts were like a whisper into the wind. I was talking to myself, really, moving writing muscles so creaky that it pained me to do so. What wasn’t painful was reading your blogs, taking solace in your words and then — wonder of wonders! — you started talking to me. You left me comments, I left them for you. We talked. We had community.

We were friends.

My motives, though, were not entirely pure. I wanted to get paid to write again, I wanted to make a living with words. I didn’t know how else to do it after such a long sabbatical. I wanted to be noticed, I wanted to get “discovered” and I waited and waited for that to happen. While I waited, I wrote thousands of words about my children and my life as a mother. Write what you know, my professors had told me.

I listened.

Now I am a working writer. I got my wish, and both directly and indirectly, this blog made that happen for me. One editor read one of my posts and took a chance on me. I was hired for my current freelance gig by a woman whose blog I’d long read and admired greatly. This space gave me the confidence to start my own business, to believe in my abilities.

I don’t need to blog anymore, if you take my original motivation as the basis for what I’ve done here: To get hired by someone who will pay me to write.

So why do I blog?

I blog because 17 years go by in a blink. Because yesterday I was a girl with waist-length hair folding the laundry of a doctor’s wife while her son napped on my knee, and now that is all I can remember of the 14 months I spent with him.

I blog so I can remember today, a crappy day with multiple, ridiculous child-induced injuries. A day when everything went slightly awry. A day when my son and daughter ran to me when a clap of thunder shook the house and I held them tight, relishing the feel of them in my arms.

I blog so I won’t forget.

I don’t ever want to forget.

Tagged as: blogging, daily, meta, motherhood, writing life