The Outrageous Incident

All right, as promised, here is The Outrageous Incident, starring my mother. First, some background -- does everyone remember that we have an au pair from Taiwan? I purposely refrain from writing much about Au Pair Extraordinaire on this blog, out of respect for her privacy. In fact, I haven't written about her in almost a year, since her mother was in a car accident while visiting last summer.

I can't begin to describe how much we've enjoyed having her in our lives, and how much her presence meant to me and the kids, particularly during our first horrible year here.

Our second year, she was no longer officially an au pair -- she was a nurse in her home country, so she started taking English classes full-time, with the goal of eventually passing the exam to be a nurse here. She lived with us rent-free in exchange for babysitting, and since I've been working only part-time, the babysitting was light, and planned around her class schedule.

Au Pair Extraordinaire left to visit her family in Taiwan last month. She said she'd email me with information on her return flight. I drove her to the airport, hugged her goodbye, said we hoped we'd see her soon, and drove away.

Her younger sister is now studying in San Francisco on a summer English program, and a few weeks ago, she called us to say hello, and asked if she could stop by with some presents for the kids from Au Pair Extraordinaire. The sister came by, gave the kids little toys and me some cookies, and then asked to see Au Pair Extraordinaire's room.

"There's a box in the closet she wants me to mail to her, if she doesn't come back," the sister said -- and she said it in front of Daughter, who looked stricken. Au Pair Extraordinaire had never mentioned the possibility of not returning, so of course I hadn't mentioned it to Daughter.

I showed the sister the closet, and indeed, there was a large cardboard box in it.

"Oh. It's too big to carry. I'd better not take it today. I'll ask her what she wants me to do," said the sister.

After she left I took a closer look around Au Pair Extraordinaire's room. I hadn't noticed anything different about it -- her walls were still covered in papers and photographs. But I realized that the papers were mostly drawings my kids had given her, and all of the photos were of our family, not her own. Her family's photos were presumably all in the box in her closet.

So I looked in her drawers -- something I had never done before -- and they were all empty. She had obviously prepared for the possibility that she might not return, although as I said, she hadn't even mentioned this to us.

Now, without revealing too much of her private life, I believe Au Pair Extraordinaire was feeling pressure from her family to return home. Last summer, before she returned to visit her family, she also stripped her room of personal effects and put them all in a box in the closet -- but the difference was that last year, she let us know there was a chance she wouldn't be back.

This time, Au Pair Extraordinaire told me she would try to be back July 17, for her school orientation. But we didn't hear from her at all, and as of today she still hasn't responded to any of my email messages.

Overall, though, I didn't take any of this personally -- I figured her actions had more to do with her own family than with ours. Besides, while we would definitely miss her, it's not as if we rely on her help anymore. It was great to have a cheerful person around to help out, but Little Son is no longer a baby, Big Son is old enough to start babysitting for short stints, and even if I succeed in going back to work full-time, in a few weeks all three kids will be in school all day long.

I had mentioned Au Pair Extraordinaire's uncertain status to my parents, when they asked about her, so they knew the situation.

That was the long background story -- now I will set the stage for The Incident.

I got home from work Wednesday and greeted my parents. I sat down at the kitchen table, and within minutes, my mother said, "Look what I found in Au Pair Extraordinaire's room!"

My mother had decided to stay in the room herself, since it has a bed with a good mattress and a convenient outlet in which she could plug the device she uses for her sleep apnea -- which was fine. The room is empty, anyway.

But she also decided that this gave her the right to....SNOOP in the room. I guess there's no other way to describe what she did. Why did she think it was okay to go through Au Pair Extraordinaire's papers? I suppose she did it for the same reason that she came into my room "just looking for a pen" when I was in high school, and found my birth control pills hidden in a drawer of my bedside table.

So my mother handed me a piece of paper with pencil scribblings on it, that she said she'd found tucked inside one of Au Pair Extraordinaire's school course catalogues. Most of it was in Chinese, with some English fragments at the bottom. In her English classes, Au Pair Extraordinaire was frequently assigned to write essays about issues in her own life, and I assume it was notes for one of those.

Au Pair Extraordinaire appeared to be weighing the pros and cons of staying in America versus returning home to Taiwan. Under the cons of staying in America, she had written,

COLD FAMILY [underlined]

No talk

No connect

No community

[then in smaller letters, she had written this:] I'm a stranger in this family.

It was like a one-two punch -- as I stood there, reeling from the knowledge that a person who lived in our home, ate meals with us, watched TV with us and shared our entire family life for two years found us COLD, my mother said, without the slightest trace of sympathy, "I guess Au Pair Extraordinaire isn't coming back! I guess she didn't like living with you!"

My mother actually seemed a little amused.

Now, my mother A) should not have been snooping, and B) should not have showed me the paper -- or if she had, she C) should have had at least an inkling of how devastating it would be for me to read something like that. But my mother was never, ever one to think about how anything she did or said would make me feel -- why should I expect her to start now?

My first instinctive reaction was to cry. I mean, COLD? I was raised in a cold family, and so was Hub. I am trying to raise my kids in a warm family. I thought I had been succeeding, but someone who lived with us apparently thought otherwise. Moreover, I really, really liked Au Pair Extraordinaire, so I made a real effort to be as nice and warm to her as I possibly good. We all did.

I knew, based on long experience, that if I cried, my mother would say, "Huh? Why are you crying about THIS?" So I did manage to stop myself from crying in front of her.

Upon further reflection over the next few days, I realized Au Pair Extraordinaire might not have meant her words to sound so harsh. She's not a native English speaker -- perhaps she was even exaggerating, just to make her essay easier to write? Also, I went back and found the paper again the next morning, and tried to see if there was any clue as to when she'd written it, but there wasn't -- she could have written it anytime in the last two years. She might have even written it shortly after she arrived, when she was still very homesick for her family back in Taiwan.

So I am no longer so upset about the "COLD" part -- but I am still trying to get over the "insensitive mother snooping" part. In two years, I never snooped through Au Pair Extraordinaire's things. The closest I came was checking to see if her drawers were empty. If they weren't, I would have left them alone.

And, um....if you found something unfavorable written about someone, wouldn't you expect it just might upset them? Just a little? Okay, maybe I'm expecting too much of my mother here. I should know by now what she's like, and not expect her to think and feel the way she just doesn't think and feel.

The silver lining was that after my mother dropped this bombshell within the first few minutes of seeing me, everything else she's said has been easy to shrug off.

Or am I speaking too soon? They don't leave until Sunday. Who knows what else she'll find...?