hi mums,
i am recent member of this site and have been lurking... i want to ask your opinion about something - long post.
3 years back i au paired for an irish family in london. it was okay for sometime, but had a nightmarish end. i looked after 3 girls (aged 4, 8,11) and i loved them, and we got along very well. however the parents were a different matter. the dad was some highflying corporate type, and he never interacted much with me or the girls. The mom went back to work after a decade, and was quite busy with that - both of them always seemed to be in a hurry, so I pretty much took care of the girls on my own (they were darlings, no tantrums or anything).
now the parents lived in the top floor, while the girls and my room was in the bottom floor. the mom would come down at 8am in a great hurry (i was supposed to take the girls to their school at 8:10) and there would be a big scene, with the youngest clinging on to her. and when the mom came back at 7pm, she would go straight to the top floor. so as you can see, the girls will with me most of the time, and i didn't mind it, in fact i loved to take care of them. the youngest routinely had nightmares, she would cry out at 4am, but they would never come down - and i had to go and comfort her and i routinely spent my money buying her stuff (which mom knew about but never paid me back)
i started au pairing for them in jan and by april i knew that things were not going well. i was ignored while the eldest had a birthday and they all went out for a movie. the mom had stilted conversations with me, and would only communicate with me via email. and there were minor issues too - 2 nights babysitting was included in my weekly duties, but on the weeks there was no babysitting, the mom would ask me to work on a sunday for a few hours, saying that i did not babysit that week for them in the nights, so i can do a few hours in sunday (obviously unpaid). my hours were around 7:30am-9am and 3:30pm till 7pm, but the "dad" would often knock on my door and bring me down and show me a spot in a table and demonstrate that I did not clean it properly.
anyway to cut a long story short, one day in mid-April, the mom knockec my door at 2am. she them took me to the eldest daughter bedroom (she was having a sleepover somewhere) and screamed at me for 30 minutes non stop. she was completely drunk and i can still remember how foul her breath was. i was groggy with sleep and could hardly make sense, but I did remember feeling terror-stricken because I attempted to leave and she bodily pushed me back. Then I got really scared and just stood mum while she accused me of the following things:
- i was a stupid, lazy cow from a third world country who didn't even knew how to keep her room clean......... (i have to be honest here - i am not a very tidy person. i was raised in a 2-room house and it was the first time i had a room for myself, and i did feel a little overwhelmed)
- how dare i treat her children like mine..... (??)
- how dare i act like i was better than her..... (???)
- what a freak i was to just stay indoors during weekends..... (i am an introvert and I had taken a huge loan to do my course in UK. I did yravel around a bit, but no I did not go out every weekend - the winter was brutal - I am from a tropical country - and I preferred to stay warm inside my room and chat on skype with my boyfriend)
- i had no idea to do a childminding job..... (true, I had not been an au pair before, but the family knew this when they hired me. Plus I got NO guidance during the day - mom would never tell me what to cook everyday for dinner and I had no idea of what British people gave for tea to their children - so I had to be creative, go online and cook dinners myself, start from scratch. I did enjoy those times)
- how dare i write in my diary that her youngest daughter had a drawl..... (yes! she read my diary! she said she did it because it happened to be in her youngest daughter's room - the diary is shaped like a heart and her DD3 often played with it - in my defence, english is not my mother tongue, and i only mean drawl in a very endearing way - in my country, it is not a bad word!)
- basically, i was an ugly bitch who took advantage of her home and using it for a free ride ( I do come from a poor country, and it was my first time in the Western world, I had never seen snow, and I didn't have a good fashion sense, so I never knew how to dress attractively. I come from a culture where women dress modestly. and it was my first winter in a western country, so i shopped in charity shops a lot, which did not always make me look my best. I was paid 90 pounds per week for sole care of 3 girls - I am not sure how it was a free ride!)
(Background here - I was a masters graduate who had come to UK to do a part time course. I had valid work visa, and I was hired by this family after they checked my references in UK. They never asked to see a CRB or even my visa. During the interview, they portrayed the perfect family but when I started working for them, I witnessed frequent fights in the home, often before the girls, using 4-letter swear words.)
Anyway, after she paused for a breath, spraying spittle all over me, the husband somehow materialised from nowhere and dragged her upstairs, muttering something. No he didn't even look at me. They just went upstairs, leaving me shaking in the empty room. I dragged myself to my room, spent a sleepless night, packed my bags and entered the breakfast room to find the mom in tears.
She begged me to forgive her, and said she will understand if she wanted to me to leave right away. By now, I had seen her true colors, so I told her I would like to stay till the end of the week to collect my weekly pay (otherwise I would not have got paid). She said certainly and for the remainder of the week, was loveliness personified! Her husband even carried my suitcases down the stairs and dropped me at the airport (I decided to cut my course short because frankly, I had enough of au pairing!)
After I went home, I did a stupid thing -the more I thought about it, the more wretched the whole thing made me feel and one day I couldn't control myself and wrote her a scathing reply to all her accusations (something I was not allowed to do that night) and she replied back "I didn't read your email, I stopped in the first paragraph, Get a life!". LOL. I am hoping she must knew that she betrayed herself by her reply! I really hope she is in this forum (fingers crossed!) and is reading this, ha!
So, all the above is the long background to the query I am going to ask now:
The daughter of this charming couple - now aged 14 - has her own Facebook page and has sent me a friend request. So, what do now? Can I accept the friend request? A part of me really wants to, I haven't really gotten over leaving those girls, I still think about them often... but part of me, is thinking - Somehow, this girl has found me, I did leave relatively abruptly, I have no idea what her mother has said about me to her, after I sent her the email. What if she asks me why I left so abruptly... should I tell her what her mother did to me? Or should I just ignore her and move on?
Hoping to hear all your opinions...
SHBI