I had forgotten about kids

by Kate Wells

This past Tuesday was part of the One World Festival The Mary Baker Eddy Library is holding this summer. Basically, 300 kids ages 3 through 12 are bused in from summer programs in and around Boston, and everybody tries to avoid injury as they rush the crafts table and indoor fountain for three hours. I loved it.

My office was generous enough to let me take the morning to volunteer over there, and I was impressed by the Library’s finesse with the whole thing. They filled up that big beautiful space with arts & crafts, body paint, children’s theatre and book giveaways. Picture Dr.Elaine Follis, President of The Mary Baker Eddy Library, painting butterflies on 300 faces. There was a professional puppeteer who did everything from Aesop’s fables to Massachusetts geography lessons. (I’m not sure how that worked exactly. I think the tail of the lion puppet was supposed to be Cape Cod, or something. It was…interesting and certainly inventive. (You’ve got to admire the ambition of a forty-something guy with seven puppets and an electric guitar.) There were new books for each kid on their way out, too.

In high school I always chose baby-sitting over scooping ice cream or waiting tables. For one thing, customers don’t take Disney-princess movie breaks. That’s an advantage to childcare that cannot be overstated. And I always genuinely liked being with kids.

The summer I was seventeen I worked as a nanny for two families with three kids under the age of five. Last summer I was a counselor at a gorgeous overnight camp up in Maine, where I taught swim classes and lived in a cabin with nine 13-year-old girls for two months. Each time I’ve cared for kids, I’ve fallen kind of in love with them—whether it was four-year-old Ben who’d hold my hand on the way to the park, or three-year-old Jacquelyn who only ate cheerios, or 13-year-old Abby who made me laugh and read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix fourteen times in one summer.

But at the end of each of those jobs I was pretty wrecked. It can be intensive, that kind of work, all day and every day. (When I tell my parents this, they just laugh. And laugh.) Plus, I felt like I had to get started the mountains of everything else I wanted to do. So this was going to be the first of many summers spent doing “grown up” work—and, obviously, it’s miles away from the pace and the temperament of childcare.

Now there are department meetings instead of Popsicle breaks; long-term projects instead of Power Rangers; time management sessions instead of playground diplomacy. And I like this work. I like the satisfaction of a problem routed or a project completed, the grand-scale of Phil Davis’s PBS segments (Phil’s job is Manager, Committees on Publication) and the urgency of new legislation. I get a dorky rush from afternoons at Sentinel Radio, stumbling happily through an interview. And Protools editing, frustrating as it is, is a brand-new love in itself. I still can’t get over the freedom of walking out the door at the end of the day and leaving work behind, physically and mentally. It’s such a simple, revelatory concept.

There’s so much that’s opened up because of this summer. This place is a gold mine of contacts and opportunities. With a little effort and some direction, you can find someone who’s already done exactly what you want to do, from the Peace Corps in Niger to religion reporting for The Christian Science Monitor. And I feel like I’m doing good stuff, slogging through paperwork and legal research so that things are a little bit easier for the attorneys and committees. It’s not glamorous and sometimes the hours feel long, but it’s good work. Plus, the other interns (in the rare moments we actually see each other) are dedicated and passionate and funny, all the “youth of the movement” clichés come to life.

But that morning in The Mary Baker Eddy Library, I fell a little bit in love again as I helped Jasmine, age 5, make a bookmark out of Styrofoam cut-outs….

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Stress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.