Better

We have had some drama lately with our au pair. The basic story is that she's underage and left an open bottle of alcohol in the mudroom next to the car keys (the car keys which she had been using to drive our car). Deep sigh here, because just writing this down it feels so obvious that this is the the type of violation that should not be tolerated for one minute. But then, there are considerations for us that lessen her crime in our eyes: 1) we haven't had a lot of problems with her being irresponsible otherwise, 2) she's almost 20, 3) she's from a country where it is legal to drink at age 18; 4) we, ourselves, do not feel so strongly about 21 being some magically appropriate drinking age - ie, we think the US law is sort of nonsense.

On the other hand, we're talking about an open alcohol bottle that was 95% likely in the car of an underage person driving our car. And she is given responsibility to take care of our children and as much as she claims to be "completely responsible" for the outcomes of her own actions... how can she be? That's one of those fallacies of her youthfulness - she thinks she CAN be responsible for any outcomes, but really, life isn't like that, especially if something horrible like an accident with injuries (or worse) were to result from her actions.

SO, really, how do we feel about THAT? Not good. She's has refused to talk to us about it, and really, the refusal to talk about it was the most upsetting part (for me). We finally called in the area director to act as mediator.

Things have been seriously going downhill since then, we seem unable to get on the same page. One week it's our fault ("our" meaning the parents), the next week the problem is the kids. The week after that, she's just feeling sad/sick for reasons not related to us. This week she told us she wants to rematch with another family. I tried to talk her out of it, because I really feel like there's some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy going on, and if she would just commit. But what do I know? I'm also not going to make her stay with us if she's so miserable.

And this, I do believe, will conclude our experiment in hosting au pairs. Such as shame, because I do feel that the right au pair can be so great. But obviously, there's a lot of flakiness out there among young adults. Our current-almost-gone au pair tells me that she is so nervous about finding a new family that she is waking up at night and throwing up.

Sheesh. We must be a pretty horrible host family for her to endure such a situation. I'm annoyed - we ARE inconvenienced by her leaving, but we ARE NOT desperate for her to stay. We are all making an effort to be NOT vindictive and as helpful as possible to her in this transition period. But I'm not going to lie, I'm doing a bit of wound-licking and eye rolling behind closed doors.

In the end, I don't have anything to prove here. And the most important thing is that people are healthy and happy and safe. My working full-time definitely took some toll on the kids; now that I'm working from home with a more flexible schedule, I'm going to spend more time with the kids. Which is good. Better than an au pair.