7/1/94
Help!
It takes 28 hours and 12 minutes a day to care for baby triplets, but all the
help in the world isn't enough.
The best decision I could have made when I
became the father of triplets was to ensure that my
wife was their mother. She was the best home help
I've ever had.
Alas, she was not enough. Elizabeth Bryan,
in her epic work ג€Twins, Triplets and More,ג€ writes:
"A study by the Australian Multiple Births Association
showed that it took 197 hours per week just to care
for baby triplets and to do the household chores.
The problem is that there are only 168 hours in a
week." That's 28 hours and 12 minutes a day,
which doesn't leave much time for sleep or Scrabble.
When the lot of them were born, the offers
of assistance poured in. Her mother, my mother, all
of our sisters, all of our friends and Mrs. Nahmani
next door who had never lived next door to newborn
triplets and always wanted to.
They came from far and near, feeding and changing
and cuddling and oohing and aahing and teaching us
what they remembered about what a baby was, tripping
over each other in a mad effort to get everything
done, a constant throng of ecstatic wide-eyed wonderful
women going through second motherhood. That was the
first two weeks.
Then:
"Somebody's crying."
"Well, where is everybody?"
"Somebody's crying and everybody's gone
home and I don't know what to do."
"Call your mother. My mother. They can't
have left us alone, the kids aren't even grown up
yet."
Help.
That's when we found Bracha. A large oily woman
from a neighborhood I would only drive through in
daytime, in a convoy. She said she was Libyan, loved
babies, liked us, would work nights and wouldn't quibble
over what we paid her. We adored her instantly. God,
how lucky we were!
God, how unlucky we were.
What she didn't tell us is that she was a kleptomaniac
with a police record. She proved that we could afford
to pay her more than we did by stealing all of our
cash, and some of my wife's clothes to boot.
Goodbye Bracha. Hello Shirley.
Shirley came to us with impeccable references
-- both Wendy and I knew her. She was a South African
ex-kibbutznik, loved babies, liked us, would work
nights and it didn't bother her that we had no more
cash to steal because she was as honest as a day with
infant triplets is long. Shirley taught us all about
parenting. Shirley was perfect, except for two problems:
we could only have her for 12 weeks, and for 12 weeks
she was not able to stop yakking.
Then the war came: Saddam, Scuds, sirens and
Simon. Simon was one of the few six-foot-tall caterers
from San Francisco with a black belt in karate we'd
ever met who knew how to correctly apply diaper cream
to a tushy. It was high comedy to watch this big muscular
cook tend to our three little scraps as if they were
so many tomatoes arranged on the changing table, each
awaiting her turn to be garnished.
But it was black humor when the sirens wailed
and we had to stuff the squalling babies into oven-like
tents, helpless in our gas-masks while they lay there,
encased in plastic, weeping, wondering what kind of
a world it was beyond Mommy and Daddy and Simon the
Caterer and Nahman Shai.
Goodbye Simon.
"Hello, Rivka?" Rivka, a teenaged
member of the Japanese-Zionist Makuya sect, listened
patiently as my wife e-nun-ci-at-ed our situation.
"Me ... Wendy. We ... have ... trip ... lets.
Three ... babies. You ... want ... to ... work ...
with ... us?"
"Yes." Aha! She understood some English.
"Good. Now. Tell ... me ... a ... bout
... your ... self."
"Well I was born in Los Angeles,"
she said in twangy, breezy Americanese, "and
I really dig kids and I love lasagne and I'm 19. When
can I start?"
About the only thing Japanese about her was
that she couldn't pronounce her name. Livka turned
out to be a free spirit. Livka never came to work
on time, and sometimes didn't come to work at all.
Sayonara Livka.
Hello Miriam and Dvora, a couple of Orthodox
Israeli recruits doing their national service on the
front lines, training our girls to roll over onto
their tummies. They served their country well.
When the IDF withdrew from our little battlefield,
the Church stepped in. By the mercy of some God or
other, Dalia and Regina came to us as a couple of
Mother Teresas. Dalia was Dutch, a Believer in some
Jewish church or Christian synagogue. Regina was Filipina,
a Catholic who spoke Tagalog fluently and English
grudgingly.
Dalia was conscientious, vivacious, devoted,
sensible, loving, fun. She worked days. Regina was
tireless, diligent, loyal, creative, intelligent,
loving. She lived with us, and worked 28 hours and
12 minutes a day.
We had to sell our house to pay their salaries,
but it was worth it.
It was almost too good to be true. Seven people
in one small frantic apartment, and everyone adoring
each other. I say "almost," because there
was an exception: Regina did not adore me. It was
nothing personal, just that I was a man. She didn't
like men, didn't trust them. When she recounted her
traumatic childhood, we understood why. It explained
why she had run away from home as an orphan and joined
an underground rebel guerrilla militia in the Philippines,
learning how to kill. It also explained why she kept
a kitchen knife under her pillow in case I tried to
attack her. (I didn't.)
Our sweet, gentle Regina!
We might still be seven people in a 48-way
love affair but for a couple of hitches. Dutch Dalia
became a mummy herself, and Regina suddenly became
illegal. The law had permitted us to bring in Regina
as a foreign worker because we were either a diplomat,
disabled or parents of triplets. But when the law
suddenly changed, and we were neither a diplomat nor
disabled, Regina had to leave us. Presumably the government
figured that thousands of new immigrants would find
work if all the Israeli triplet families were forced
to replace their Filipinas.
On the bright side, I got my kitchen knife
back.
We then found Ami, a clinical psychology student
who did sponja for us, and Faigie, who sponged off
us. Faigie was a born-again Jew from the American
Midwest, a passionately-consumed hozeret bג€™tshuva
who found God but was still looking for a husband
when we hired her. She was a fine subject for Ami
to study. Once she found a comfortable sitting position,
she didn't like to leave it. The kids were scuttling
about on their hands and knees now, seeking out dangers
in three different directions. Faigie liked to watch
them. She liked to watch us race after them, this
way and that, snatching them away just in time from
a precipice or our truculent cat, giggling mirthfully
at the great fun we were all having.
Goodbye Faigie.
Then someone suggested we hire an au pair.
It sounded so aristocratic.
Elaine was an Englishwoman with a nice English
manner and a talent for gourmet cooking. If she had
told us, on our first meeting, that she was the au
pair for the Duke of Windsor, I'd have believed her.
Elaine loved to cook. She could cook for hours and
hours. And did. Unfortunately, she didn't know the
first thing about babies, but it didn't bother her
in the least. She had one other shortcoming. She was
born and bred in Bath, but she lived in Television.
She cooked us a grand farewell meal, and we
said goodbye to her in the middle of an episode of
Lives of the Rich and Famous.
Hello Inge. Dutch. Young and beautiful. This
one believed in some asteroidal religion that preached
love for your fellow man. She was so busy loving our
fellow men that she had no energy for television.
Or kids. Inge couldn't cook, but boy, could she eat.
She used to work up a tremendous appetite pub-crawling
until five in the morning. She was very enthusiastic
about the fellow men of our Israeli pubs.
Out!
We consulted the atlas and found a place from
where we had not yet fired a girl. South Molucca.
If you've never heard of South Molucca, it's also
known as the Spice Islands. Titia had an exotic air
about her. It was an exotic air I recognized as marijuana.
She was dozy, she skulked, she never spoke but communicated
on rare occasions by shrugging or grunting.
I pointed out to my wife that we already had a cat
in the house. Mind you, Titia did teach our children
how to apply lipstick and how a lighter works. The
oddest thing about her, though, was that some weeks
after we thought we'd never see her again, she popped
by for a visit, bearing expensive gifts for the triplets.
By this time we realized that a live-in au
pair was a good idea only for people who don't really
need one. We decided to try doing nights ourselves,
and employ some afternoon help.
We hadn't yet had a Messianic Jew, so we got
one. Maureen believed in Jesus, and kept blessing
us, and talked on the phone an awful lot.
Finally, we narrowed our search to our very
own neighborhood, and found two young women of a type
thriving in these parts: a Russian, and an Arab.
Masha was 17 years old, a sweet, shy young
soul who was no match for our precocious three in
the midst of their Terrible Twos. She did, however,
learn a lot of English from them. Samira, a delightful
find from the village across the road, helped around
the house. Samira was studying Hebrew literature and
one day proudly told us that she got an 80 percent
in her Talmud exam. Go figure.
THE HELP we have now has no previous experience,
so we've had to train them ourselves. Actually, we've
been training them for almost three years. Nomi likes
to take in the laundry, Donna puts away the toys,
and Odelia supervises. When the television needs watching,
they do it. They do the shopping (I help them). When
Daddy wants to read the paper in the morning, they
bring it. They even help me read the photos. They
cream their own tushies, they know where the ketchup
goes and sometimes they even remember where the pee-pee
goes. Heck, they're toilet-training each other! They
love cleaning anything and everything, as long as
it involves water.
They do not have any religious beliefs, they
don't do dope, don't have boyfriends and they can't
reach the phone. They speak English, but with an amalgam
of accents you wouldn't believe.
They want to learn to do everything, They want
to help.
The best of it is, we don't have to pay them.
A great big hug is all they need.
