Finding and getting a daycare in this city is, for lack of a better word, challenging. A better word would incorporate the desperation, the creeping deadline of a return to work. It would take into account the sinking futility of watching a daycare worker flip through endless pages of children's names on waiting lists looking for your child's who, after many months, is not on the list after all. A better word would also allude to the protection felt, the motherly instincts challenged, the deep fear that your child will not be cared for, valued, or caught as he tumbles off the slide. A better word would include the push and the pull, the need for and the caution of daycare.
I have watched my ethics slide in a quest for a decent daycare. I have shmoozed with daycare directors. I have been charming and amenable when I didn't necessarily feel charming and amenable. And recently, I slipped into some daycare nepotism.
My neighbour's accountant is also the accountant of a local, 7$ a day daycare. "I'll put in a word," said my neighbour. I didn't say "don't." I didn't say, "that wouldn't be fair." I said, "that'd be nice." I told family, grinningly, that I might jump the eternal daycare queue but I felt a niggling wiggle of fading morality, somewhere out past the fantasies of having A SPOT IN A DAYCARE.
After a few weeks, my neighbour said I could go into the daycare and ask for J-. I was to mention T-, the mutual accountant. This interaction would allow me to leap ahead of several hundred waiting infants and toddlers to the front of the line. "Hallelujah," thought I.
With my sense of ethics nearing the horizon, I set forth to the daycare.
"Is J- here?" I asked the serious woman who answered the bell.
"No," she replied. "What is it about?"
Now, I was caught. What was I to say? The accounting? I am a notoriously slow thinker on my feet.
"Uhm, the waiting list," said I.
"I am in charge of the waiting list," the woman replied and ushered me in.
It seems my son was not on the waiting list (I'd called twice) so he was put on. And that was that.
I came away feeling as if I had got my just deserts. Fair is fair.
Maybe one day, when my son is twenty or so, he'll get a good spot. For now, I am, undeservedly, on the moral high ground.
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i got the call!! "we have a space for your son! he can start on monday (tomorrow!!)" after all this time on tenterhooks of waiting and calling every place under the sun far far down the list, and of course my reaction, just seconds after the YAH! is ackk!!! already???? this week is d-day. daycare day. test out the world that will surround my son. while i am not at work yet and so can still be there and push any of the kids who act like a bully to him (can't do that forever, can i?). and whisk him away at the first feeling of mama instinct telling me to. or cheer if it all works out just fine...
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