When I accepted a position as a full-time nanny for this past summer, I had some expectations of what I would get out of it. I thought I would learn how to put car seats in my car, wipe away sniffles and tears, and pretty much get paid to have fun with kids all day. In reality, this job helped me with the search for growth I had been looking to find for quite some time, and I learned valuable life lessons along the way. The four big ones are:
1. Swimsuits aren’t scary.
2. There’s plenty of time in the day.
3. Four-year-old’s shoes don’t fit on 19-year-old feet.
4. I have more power than I think.
Now to explain a little better…
1. Swimsuits aren’t scary.
For the past few years now I have struggled with being insecure about my body, and I especially avoided swimsuits in the summer. Now, I had no intention of working out this problem through my job (I had actually been training for a half-marathon and working with a personal trainer outside of work). I was trying to make my body fit my ideals rather than shifting my ideals to fit my body. My first day on the job, the kids wanted me to bring them to the neighborhood pool. Sounds like a great time, right? No. I was riddled with anxiety about having to wear a swimsuit at this public place. But I had no choice. My inner turmoil was no match for the puppy dog eyes. Throughout the summer, we went to the pool quite a bit and in that time, I started to not even blink about taking my shirt off once we got there; instead, I would jump right in with them. The kids didn’t care if I was toned, had love handles, or if I had missed my run that morning; they just wanted to spend time with me. I never thought little kids would be the ones to teach me to not be embarrassed of my body and to just be me. They never once made a comment about my body or even took a glance. My body changed slightly through the gym, but my mindset had changed immensely through my job.
2. There’s plenty of time in the day.
This is a big one that ultimately means patience. For YEARS I have been trying to work on my patience. If something didn’t load in thirty seconds, I would pretty much say “forget about it” and move on. In high school, I threw myself into yoga and for a while, I thought I was doing well… However, I could only bring myself to go to yoga sculpt, which is an intense, heated, fast-paced workout with weight training and cardio incorporated into yoga sequence. I was incredibly impatient with the slow movements and once we finally got through a sequence… the teacher would say, “Okay, now we are gonna do it again 5 MORE TIMES.” So I gave up on that. But being a nanny forced me to be patient. Kids can’t always spit out the words they’re trying to say, they make messes, they ask a lot of questions, and they dilly-dally. Oh boy, do they dilly-dally. Simply going to the pool was an entire ordeal. They had to get changed, sunscreened, car-seats in the car, towels and toys, lunches made, and water bottles filled. Then, I had to get them into the car and to the actual pool (where it would take a few minutes just to walk up to the gate). As much as I sometimes wanted to just build their dang Lego pieces together the RIGHT way so they could stop struggling, I had to learn to be patient.
3. Four-year-old’s shoes don’t fit on 19-year-old feet.
When a kid was yelling, screaming, or complaining (as all kids do), there were times when I wanted to do it right back. Of course as an adult, I certainly can’t yell at a child for not understanding me or not liking what I have to say. I learned to keep it cool, let things settle, and then talk it through. Sometimes, people need to be angry for a little bit before they can be rational. It taught me to be calm in a situation. If I had expected them to meet me, understand me, and not cry when I told them no, I would be expecting them to take a step in my shoes. At the same time, had I yelled back at them, snapped at them, or gotten frustrated with them, I’d be trying to squeeze my bigger, more mature feet into teeny tiny 4-year-old shoes. There is a moral of my story: Act your age and approach situations with maturity, even when you want to yell out all your frustrations.
4. I have more power than I think.
There’s no underlying phrase here, it’s as simple as that. I used to be timid when it came to standing up for myself. If someone had a problem with me, I would try to change. If someone was mean to me, I would let it happen. If I really didn’t want something to happen but felt trying to stop it would create tension, I would just take the hurt and let it happen. But in the past year, I have become a lot more assertive (especially this summer when it came to 4- and 6-year-olds trying to tell me what was gonna happen and what rules they were going to follow). I realized I cannot let someone treat me like they are the boss of me. Learning to establish my power with children has helped me to establish my power with those my own age as well. I will not be pushed around and forced to change to get out of someone else’s way anymore just to avoid the conflict. These kids learned pretty quickly that they couldn’t get away with funny business on my watch. If you show someone that you won’t take advantage of your own power, that’s exactly how they will treat you.
There were some especially tricky days when I asked, “God, why? Why am I spending my days putting out tantrums and watching Paw Patrol at the crack of dawn?” But there were other, better days. Like when the little boy made me a heart-shaped cookie because “he loved me,” when they both climbed on my back for piggy-back rides, or when they fought over who gets to play with me. Those days, even the tough ones, made me realize I am exactly where I need to be, learning exactly what I need to be.