Free What Was Mine by Helen Klein Ross Page A

my way. No one glanced at me, period, which was fine with me. I’d sit by the river in the fresh, wide air absorbing the baby-raising wisdom ofwomen around me, discussing answers to questions that flummoxed me then—what was the best formula, how to find a pediatrician, which were the good preschools and how to get into them?
    Mia was six months old now, she could sit in a sandbox, and I perched on its wooden perimeter watching her play, learning all I needed to know to take care of her, rarely having to say a thing.
    I learned about Mommy and Me classes given in a nearby church basement, and that if you weren’t there to sign up at 7 a.m. on the day classes opened, you’d be shut out. I learned which kind of stroller was easiest to fold, for a bus or cab trip. And what to do for a baby’s cold (humidifier). I learned about childproofing a house (no thumbtacks!) and what shade of poop meant a baby was sick, realizing how little I’d known about life, having been protected from its messiness by spending so much clean time in offices.
    Once, guiding Mia down the chute of a slide, I overheard a woman on a bench behind me confess her guilt about having an affair. “I can’t help myself,” she said, in a voice she didn’t bother to lower. “The second I saw him, it was like I got carried away by a wave.” The listeners nodded, murmuring supportive comments, which surprised me, and made me feel suddenly piqued. Because if I told them of being similarly swept away by besottedness, I doubted they’d make the same allowances for me.

19
cheryl
    S oon after Lucy got Mia, I did something I thought would be a nice surprise for her. I contacted an old school friend at our hometown paper and I got her to put in a baby announcement. When the announcement came out, I clipped it and mailed it to Lucy and got a call from her right away. I thought she was calling to thank me. But instead, she was angry! She shouted at me, accusing me of having overstepped bounds, invading her privacy. I had to pull the receiver away from my ear. I apologized, but couldn’t understand her reaction, how such a small thing could provoke such vitriol in her. I chalked it up to her moving to New York City, where people like keeping their distance, preferring to live as strangers, I guess.

20
lucy
    T he hardest part of going back to work was hiring a sitter. How could I leave Mia? How could I abandon her as she’d been abandoned before? How could I leave her with someone who might whisk her away, beguiled by her as I had been? I had nightmares in which I’d return to a dark, empty apartment echoing with hollowness left in her wake. But I had to go back to work to support us. As the days of my maternity leave dwindled, I made myself look up nanny agencies in the phone book. I called the one with the most trustworthy name. Professional Nannies Institute. I liked the sound of it, the promise of the title, which implied that it dealt only with women for whom taking care of children was a profession. Surely they wouldn’t jeopardize a career by making off with one of their charges. I called, imagining a pipeline direct from London through which Mary Poppins look-alikes would slide into this country. But though the woman who answered the phone had a reassuringly British accent, she told me that few nannies came from England anymore. The institute was a school in name only. The only course it gave was in getting a green card. The fees appalled me. I said I’d call her back and hung up.
    Several mothers in the playground had found sitters by answering ads in the pages of the Irish Echo , a weekly paper in which classifieds were a kind of clearinghouse for babysitting jobs in New York.But the prospects I interviewed were disappointments: a girl from Dublin who came for the interview carrying a big bag of pink candied popcorn—how could Mia acquire good eating habits from her?; a young woman from