Two for One
Not long ago, I got an e-mail from a reader who knew I had used babysitters from Nashville’s prestigious and incredibly expensive Vanderbilt University. She remembered her own Vandy sitters with great fondness.
“They were lovely women with expensive cars, haircuts and purses,” she wrote.
I had to laugh because that was my experience as well. When a Vanderbilt girl shows up to watch your children, you have to wonder… well… why on earth she’s there. I mean, from the looks of things, they all had far more money than I did.
Thinking about all this, I remembered that I had been dying to write about my Vanderbilt Babysitting Experience all year long, but couldn’t. Now though? The Vanderbilt girls are home for summer break! And so I spill the beans in this week’s newspaper edition of Suburban Turmoil.
The full text of the column is below.
Life Lessons from a Vanderbilt Babysitter
I watched from my dining room window as she pulled up in a Lexus SUV, grabbed a Louis Vuitton from the passenger seat and strode confidently toward my front door.
She was blonde, tanned and toned, with impossibly long legs that ended in a pair of hideous (and therefore expensive) fur-trimmed boots. Anxiously, I glanced around my house, noticing, as if for the first time, the peeling paint on the baseboards and the floors that desperately needed refinishing.
The doorbell rang. I threw a worried glance at myself in the hall mirror and went to answer it.
“Hi, I’m Lindsay,” I said, extending my hand and smiling as warmly as I could. The children came running to see our guest.
“Kids,” I said, “This is Meghan. She’s going to watch you for a few hours.”
My daughter gazed at her in reverent wonder. My son giggled with wolf-like glee. It was their first Vanderbilt babysitter, and as I looked at my children’s shining faces, I realized with dismay that my days of fishing from the Trevecca Nazarene Career Center pool were totally and irrevocably over.
The path I took to landing a platinum-edition Nashville sitter was predictably paved in dollar bills. A couple of years ago, I signed up for a $100-per-person party that introduced the “right” sorts of moms to a bevy of Vanderbilt girls who were willing to watch children. I attended in order to write a column about it, and not surprisingly, I stuck out at that party like a suburban soccer mom who’d taken a wrong turn and ended up at the Belle Meade Country Club.
The mothers there bragged of 3,500-square-foot homes, outdoor heated pools and posh private preschools. All I had to offer was a Playstation 2 and a pantry full of Cheetos. I went home with a binder full of names and phone numbers and an inferiority complex, swearing to myself that hell would freeze over before I used it.
But that’s exactly what must have happened, because when my workload picked up six months ago, I found myself in desperate need of a regular weekday sitter. In desperation, I turned with trembling fingers to The Binder. Within 24 hours, I had a response.
Meghan was the first of a long parade of Vandy blondes who came to watch my kids twice a week. During the weeks when she was vacationing on the Turks & Caicos Islands or visiting her boyfriend in Manhattan, she was thoughtful enough to send a sorority sister to take her place. After a while, I had trouble telling them apart, and so did my children.
“Are you Kayley?” my daughter asked one girl with confusion when she showed up. “Or Maria?”
“I’m Kristen,” the girl laughed, “but Kayley and I are co-chairs of Fashion for a Cause, and Maria roomed with me freshman year! Hey! Wanna practice some French words? I brought a bunch of picture books for us to read together!”
Yes, while I’d like to say these immaculately-dressed trust fund babies were too concerned about getting poop on their French manicures to change my son’s sodden diapers and too consumed by the text messages popping up on their Blackberries to read along with my 5-year-old, the truth was that the Vandy girls were some of the best sitters we’ve ever had.
They sang songs, dressed as princesses, drew treasure maps, read endless piles of books aloud, and even miraculously convinced both my children to eat their lunches. I wanted to hate them and their designer bags. But I couldn’t.
I also couldn’t figure out why they were agreeing to come to my house in the first place. I speculated sometimes that they were driving out to my subdivision as amateur anthropologists, determined to learn how the other half lived. I imagined them reading a full report to their classmates, standing before a frowning professor in a bow tie, who’d thoughtfully stroke his beard as they read.
“The subject has a freezer full of ground beef, and often uses it to make dinner,” they’d say. “She has no help with housework, no nanny and her husband does the yard work himself.”
The students would gasp and whisper among themselves.
“And you say this family unit resides in a place called Bell View?” the professor would ask in disbelief. The sitter would nod earnestly.
“I have pictures on my iPhone to prove it,” she’d say.
Oh, I don’t want to be too harsh. My Vandy sitters were young women with necklaces, earrings and hearts of gold. They taught me that there may well be more to a Vanderbilt coed than her surgically-altered nose.
Besides, I’m sure most of these girls will one day be moms themselves, tootling around town in their Volvo Crossover SUVs. Perhaps they’ll pass a public school on the way to hot yoga one day and see a frazzled looking mom heading inside. Their gaze will rest for a moment on her bowed shoulders, and they’ll smile sadly at the reminder of poor Mrs. Ferrier and her pathetic, middle class life.
