I understand, now, what it costs to be a consistent presence for children who are going through instability. Not the money, although that’s real and I’ve documented it. The cost that doesn’t show up in a spreadsheet: the management of your own emotional register so that two kids who are anxious about their parents’ separation don’t have to absorb your anxiety on top of theirs.
I spent six months not being worried at them. I was sometimes worried around my friends, around Priya, in the car by myself. But when Ella asked if I would be her aunt forever, I gave her a clean answer. When Max needed to stay up twenty minutes past his usual time because he was upset about something at school and needed to talk, I stayed up. I did not make them feel like the inconvenience they sometimes were.
I understand now why that kind of invisible work gets called “babysitting” — because the name for visible work is “parent,” and the name for visible work when someone is related is “family,” and there’s no obvious name for someone who does sustained invisible work in a role that doesn’t have a clear title and can be reassigned at any moment.
There’s no good word for what I was. The closest thing I have is: I was there.
Owen called it babysitting. Ella drew it as a connecting line in orange crayon. I’m inclined to trust the six-year-old’s spatial reasoning.
## The Protected Evening
It’s October now. Max and Ella are in their alternating rhythm, which is holding better than I expected, partly because Owen has actually committed to the morning coverage and partly because Brooke is close enough for pickups now that the logistics aren’t dependent on everything going right simultaneously.