Old
When I was a kid we had a German cleaning woman who used to put everyone's shoes on the fireplace. Looking back on it, I'm not sure if she was a German immigrant or simply of German descent, but my father used to refer to her as The Nazi, and somehow I linked her alleged Nazi-ism with the fact that she thought shoes belonged on the fireplace. Like, that's where they put their shoes during the war to keep them warm.
As an adult I now have my own cleaning woman, Jadwiga. She's really lovely and adores both Milo and our cat Oscar, but she has some strange idiosyncrasies that I find myself attributing to the fact that she's a Polish immigrant. Which is to say, when she spread out our big yellow chenille throw across the living room couch and tucked it into the pillows I thought to myself, well, maybe that's what couches look like in Poland. When Steven discovered his pajamas folded up neatly under his pillow I thought, maybe that's where people keep their pajamas in Poland.
Of course the reality is that little of this has to do with nationality or being a recent immigrant, a fact that has become glaringly obvious over the past two months, when our apartment has played host to one mother or another for extended periods of time. (A side effect of having a baby is that suddenly your own parents are way more interested in visiting you than they ever have been before.) After my mother spent a week with us I found a stack of neatly folded paper bags in the kitchen. And I knew instantly that she had put them there because in the kitchens of my childhood we always had a stack of neatly folded paper bags somewhere. My mother likes to save paper bags. I have no idea why.
And after Steven's mother spent a week with us I found a little mound of single-serving packets of salt, pepper, Equal, Sweet 'n Low, soy sauce, mustard and ketchup in one of the kitchen drawers. Clearly my mother-in-law believes that when one is given free condiments in take out orders, one should save them. I pointed the little mound of packets out to Steven one morning and he said, oh yes, his childhood home had always contained a drawer full of condiment packets.
These are things that might have upset me at some other point in my life. In my early twenties I might have felt threatened and wondered if one could actually have a household without stacks of paper bags and piles of condiment packets. Maybe these things were required in order to make a house a home? But now I'm old enough to laugh the bags and condiments off as quaint relics from my childhood and Steven's childhood, old enough to scoop up the packets and the bags and throw them out because for God's sake has neither woman lived in a New York apartment where space is at a premium?
All of which is to say that I usually feel pretty comfortable with running my household the way I see fit; I feel old enough to have opinions on what gets saved and what gets thrown out and together enough to have established my own workaday routine around the house. Which is why it's so weird that I feel I need to perform for the nanny. She started this week. She's 23 and she's here, in our house, 4 1/2 hours out of every day. And normally I would just go about my business, as I do when the cleaning woman is here, and do my work and listen to my music and chat on the phone and do whatever else I generally do. But the other day I found myself attempting to select hipper music to work to, in an attempt to look cooler to the nanny.
Maybe it's that being around a 23-year-old makes me feel unbelievably ancient. Because it's easy to pretend you're just out of your twenties and not really all THAT far out of college until you meet someone who really is in their twenties and is JUST out of college, and you realize that that person is a child and you are decidedly an adult. You understand that that person has things like roommates and probably sleeps on a futon and that to her 10pm is the time you go out, not the time you go to sleep. And all of this leads you to the realization that sometime in the past ten years you went from being a child to being an adult. Sometime in the period of time your job became not just a job but a career, you acquired furniture that did not come from the Salvation Army or your grandmother's old apartment, you got married, you became the kind of person who owns a Kitchen Aid stand mixer, you became a parent.
And I think that I am slightly obsessed with the nanny because while I know what it is to be her - to be 23 and just arrived in a new city and excited and scared and who knows what crazy, fabulous thing might happen today? - I know that she has absolutely no idea what it is to be me. At least, when I was her age I had no idea. So I can't help but wonder what she thinks of me. I wonder if I am as boring to her as my 23-year-old self would have found me. I wonder if she finds us old and dull and typical. I wonder if she thinks, God, does that woman own any music that isn't totally VH1? Or maybe she doesn't think about it at all. Maybe she's just thinking about what she's going to do tonight and how she's going to pay her rent and if that job or that boy or this life is really going to work out. After all, that's probably what I would be thinking, were I still 23.
As an adult I now have my own cleaning woman, Jadwiga. She's really lovely and adores both Milo and our cat Oscar, but she has some strange idiosyncrasies that I find myself attributing to the fact that she's a Polish immigrant. Which is to say, when she spread out our big yellow chenille throw across the living room couch and tucked it into the pillows I thought to myself, well, maybe that's what couches look like in Poland. When Steven discovered his pajamas folded up neatly under his pillow I thought, maybe that's where people keep their pajamas in Poland.
Of course the reality is that little of this has to do with nationality or being a recent immigrant, a fact that has become glaringly obvious over the past two months, when our apartment has played host to one mother or another for extended periods of time. (A side effect of having a baby is that suddenly your own parents are way more interested in visiting you than they ever have been before.) After my mother spent a week with us I found a stack of neatly folded paper bags in the kitchen. And I knew instantly that she had put them there because in the kitchens of my childhood we always had a stack of neatly folded paper bags somewhere. My mother likes to save paper bags. I have no idea why.
And after Steven's mother spent a week with us I found a little mound of single-serving packets of salt, pepper, Equal, Sweet 'n Low, soy sauce, mustard and ketchup in one of the kitchen drawers. Clearly my mother-in-law believes that when one is given free condiments in take out orders, one should save them. I pointed the little mound of packets out to Steven one morning and he said, oh yes, his childhood home had always contained a drawer full of condiment packets.
These are things that might have upset me at some other point in my life. In my early twenties I might have felt threatened and wondered if one could actually have a household without stacks of paper bags and piles of condiment packets. Maybe these things were required in order to make a house a home? But now I'm old enough to laugh the bags and condiments off as quaint relics from my childhood and Steven's childhood, old enough to scoop up the packets and the bags and throw them out because for God's sake has neither woman lived in a New York apartment where space is at a premium?
All of which is to say that I usually feel pretty comfortable with running my household the way I see fit; I feel old enough to have opinions on what gets saved and what gets thrown out and together enough to have established my own workaday routine around the house. Which is why it's so weird that I feel I need to perform for the nanny. She started this week. She's 23 and she's here, in our house, 4 1/2 hours out of every day. And normally I would just go about my business, as I do when the cleaning woman is here, and do my work and listen to my music and chat on the phone and do whatever else I generally do. But the other day I found myself attempting to select hipper music to work to, in an attempt to look cooler to the nanny.
Maybe it's that being around a 23-year-old makes me feel unbelievably ancient. Because it's easy to pretend you're just out of your twenties and not really all THAT far out of college until you meet someone who really is in their twenties and is JUST out of college, and you realize that that person is a child and you are decidedly an adult. You understand that that person has things like roommates and probably sleeps on a futon and that to her 10pm is the time you go out, not the time you go to sleep. And all of this leads you to the realization that sometime in the past ten years you went from being a child to being an adult. Sometime in the period of time your job became not just a job but a career, you acquired furniture that did not come from the Salvation Army or your grandmother's old apartment, you got married, you became the kind of person who owns a Kitchen Aid stand mixer, you became a parent.
And I think that I am slightly obsessed with the nanny because while I know what it is to be her - to be 23 and just arrived in a new city and excited and scared and who knows what crazy, fabulous thing might happen today? - I know that she has absolutely no idea what it is to be me. At least, when I was her age I had no idea. So I can't help but wonder what she thinks of me. I wonder if I am as boring to her as my 23-year-old self would have found me. I wonder if she finds us old and dull and typical. I wonder if she thinks, God, does that woman own any music that isn't totally VH1? Or maybe she doesn't think about it at all. Maybe she's just thinking about what she's going to do tonight and how she's going to pay her rent and if that job or that boy or this life is really going to work out. After all, that's probably what I would be thinking, were I still 23.
posted by Hana @ 9:03 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home