I submitted this to the Post but it never ran...may as well dust it off and use it here.

Babysitters. Nannies. Childcare providers. Or, if you’re lucky, grandma. Whatever term any of us chooses to use, one thing is certain: without them, the issue of work/family balance would be dead in the water. An understanding boss, the ability to telecommute, a flexible schedule—for most of us, no matter how ideal an arrangement we have, we are, at least to some degree, dependant on some form of childcare if we’re going to be able to be working parents. Even for those who don’t work outside the home, a reliable babysitter is worth his or her weight in gold.

This issue recently reared its head at girls’ night at a friend’s house. Even though it was Friday night and the sangria was flowing, somehow the conversation steered to babysitters. A woman I’d never met before mentioned, in passing, her babysitter, whose name I recognized. I said that I have a babysitter with the same name—let’s call her Mandy--and wondered if it was the same girl. Suddenly the light-hearted conversation screeched to a halt and she glared at me in sudden recognition and said, in so many words, “You’re the Maggie who stole my babysitter!”

Super long story short: this woman, who I’ll call woman #1, had started using Mandy when she was 14 and has been using her regularly for over 5 years. Woman #2, a friend of mine, had met Mandy when she picked up her son from woman #1’s house and asked Mandy whether she’d be willing to sit for her sometimes. They worked out a schedule and now Mandy was working for woman #1 and woman #2, as well as occasionally for woman #3, the hostess of this Friday night gathering. Last spring woman #2 recommended the girl to me and I, too, started using her sporadically.

At any rate, there was woman #1, suddenly lecturing me about how Mandy is a college student and is now so overworked because woman #2 “and others” are taking advantage of her, and also how now “her” sitter is never available because she’s spread so thin. She went on to say that when a family initially finds a babysitter who turns out to be reliable and good, that babysitter “belongs” to that family and other families are not allowed to “steal” him or her.

The whole thing half amused me and half disturbed me. I hadn’t realized there was apparently such a feeling of ownership when it came to babysitters. I couldn’t help but think “slavery”; in fact, I was curious about the parallel and Googled “stealing a slave from owner.”

In 1732, Virginia enacted a law stating that “wicked and evil-disposed persons…who steal any…slave …from the possession of the owner or overseer of such slave…shall suffer death without penalty of clergy.” Yikes. By 1732, the laws were a little more lax; a statute of Tennesee’s Laws on Slavery stipulated that any person found guilty [of] tempting an enslaved [person] to leave his owner's service… was to pay a fine of $62.50.” Ok, $62.50 or death—you choose; the fact is that those laws were applicable back when slavery was legal and accepted; these days it is neither.

Slave, babysitter—the fact that this woman kept referring to Mandy as “hers” made it clear that—at least in her case, but I suspect others feel the same--there is a sense of ownership when it comes to long-term, reliable caregivers. What do you think—is a childcare provider so necessary to the balance in your life that the idea of someone “stealing” him or her makes you indignant?