I understand how to be a disgruntled employee; it's the "employer" role that feels uncomfortable.
I've hired a ninth grader to hang out with my younger child. Just for a bit. Being a ninth grader, she arrives late ("I'm sorry I'm, like, delayed"), and she seems mystified by a calendar that she herself has devised ("So tomorrow it's like I'm arriving at 8? Instead of 9?") ....Her personal crises--which are not quite cosmic, in nature--seem to spill, and spill, out of her mouth; she believes she has an audience on tenterhooks, because she is a kid.
"My brother gets home from camp this weekend....I am NOT looking forward to THAT...."
"Yeah, A--- is moving away for a year. Which sucks because, during Covid, we spent almost every day together...."
A part of me dies when my protege asks, "What is your policy on television?" Because I don't want to formulate a policy. I want to write a check and just disappear--until a wordless hand-off, right before lunch.
But I hear my daughter's squeals of delight; I see the "tent" she has constructed, with cushions, in the basement. She says that her new sitter is her "best friend."
I try not to be an old, crusty asshole--one day at a time.
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