babysitting

I got connected to Toms family when they wanted a babysitter for the little boy. The father was in a hurry, looking all over for something he couldn’t find. The mother had left already. The father kneeled on the floor looking back and forth between me and the shoes he was tying.“Tom is a bit slow, he doesn’t quite follow along all the time. But don’t you worry, just make sure he’s comfortable and everything is going to be fine. Tomorrow we’re taking him to see a football match.” When I was alone with Tom, I baked some fish sticks and cooked soup. He told me about his favorite comics and movies. He had action figures, and they were placed all over his food. He didn’t touch the fish sticks but had a lot of fun with Aquaman. He dragged the toy back and forth through the soup as if it was a fish, pulled him out and sucked the soup off. Because it took a while to eat that way, the soup was getting cold, I asked if he wanted it reheated, but he didn’t mind. “Aquaman would get a shock! He is much quicker in cold water!

Don’t you know anything about Aquaman?” “Not enough, apparently.” The swim scooping went on until he couldn’t catch any soup anymore, and we agreed to give Aquaman a little bath with soap. His parents had told me art and music education were extremely important to them. So we spread out some paper rolls on the floor and started drawing together. All he wanted to draw was Aquaman and fishing boats. Makes sense, I figured. They say you are what you eat. I tried to draw something with him, but he really only wanted to work by himself. Parallel play. Fine by me, I thought, and got on my phone. That he didn’t like either, though. He wanted me to watch him drawing. So I started asking questions about the boats and the fishing nets. He had drawn big nets with tons of fish in them and a man, too. This kid really had some grit in him. I asked who that man would be. “That’s Mom’s friend. I don’t like him. Every time Mom goes to him, Daddy is sad. But she goes anyway. She says she just needs more than Daddy does. So I fished him away. And now Mom and Dad can go fishing, whatever they want, and me too, and nobody else gets in the way.

I took him to bed, and we read comics there. After a couple of pages, he stopped reading and stared very concentrated at the page. I asked if I should explain something. I didn’t quite understand the comics myself, and he was just a kid. But he looked at me and asked why some people need more than others. My mind went blank, and I must have stared at him for a minute. I said some things were just sort of strange. Like the joke about the Somalian fisherman who never caught any fish until he started fishing with a machine gun. He looked at me very seriously. I wondered whether that was the artistic education his parents imagined. He asked whether the water didn’t stop the bullets before they got to the fish and I said that’s a good point, water makes everything slow down. So, even with the machine guns, they probably don’t catch much. He asked what they ate when they didn’t catch anything. I didn’t know. He said if he was a fisherman, he would eat machine guns. Then he wanted to sleep. I went downstairs to watch a movie. On the news break, they showed the soccer highlights and the weather forecast. It would be sunny. And everything would be fine.