1998

I was done with school.

Obviously university wasn’t for me. I remember walking to the university counsellor and thinking what am I going to do now. I saw this poster on the wall:

“Do you like traveling? Do you like children? Become an Au Pair!”

There it was… Nanny. So I walked out of that counselling office and went back to my room and started making some calls. Within two months I was on a plane to Austria.

No one really prepares you for what this experience is truly. They wine and dine you with the adventure. Sort of like teaching programs nothing prepares you for the actuality of the situation. The pictures I had received were of two little blonde girls and a baby. Much like a classroom setting no one tells you these children have baggage. They have had several nannies come and go so they were obviously distrusting from the get go. The baby was almost a year. It wasn’t doing the normal things a baby of that age might do and for good reason. After having surgery to remove tumours from his stomach he was behind on the developmental curve. Not to mention he puked a lot.

I couldn’t speak any German and everything was new. I spent two weeks crying in my room. I remember crying the first week up at my current school. I was overwhelmed and underprepared. A few weeks there I enrolled in German classes. That is where I met the other Nannies. Our group consisted of A couple Swedish girls, a couple Finnish girls, and a Spanish girl. This scary adventure became not so scary. We all had interesting families and my sick little angel was nothing compared to some of the stories I heard. Like teaching, after I heard that I was not alone an it is hard, it gave me permission to just try and do my best. I had people who knew almost exactly what I was experiencing. It allowed me to relax to enjoy what I was doing.

I travelled and I grew as a person. I loved that little boy with all my heart and it broke when I left. I made mistakes, poor choices, fantastic connections, all in all the experiences were irreplaceable.

I came back to Canada, full of a new found confidence, I worked for a year until I could register for school again.

I wasn’t done with school.