Page 2  "Like A Second Mother"

I grew up bilingual, and Bob is Cuban, so we wanted our children to be bilingual. And my mother was semi-hysterical on that point. So when I was eight months pregnant, Mother found an Hispanic woman from God knows where, and kind of UPSed her to us. From my mother's perspective, that woman was supposed to be like the maids that I'd had, growing up-which was to be a nondescript, non-English-speaking person who would live with us and take care of my soon-to-be baby. But she quit all of a sudden when I was in the hospital-not even an hour after Christopher was born.Bob and I talked about what we were going to do next, and we realized that it mattered less for our child to learn Spanish than for us to find someone who could cope with a kid and a house, and speak enough English to be able to get ahold of us. 

So when Christopher was two weeks old, Bob and I put an ad in the paper, and a bunch of total nincompoops started calling-some really awful people. When someone is answering an ad and the first thing they say is, "How much you pay?" or "What be the hours?" you know you've got a serious problem. So we said goodbye to a bunch of people on the phone. Then this absolutely marvelous person called who had been referred by an employment agency, and the first thing she said was, "I really would love to meet the baby." And that was Di. She came right over. I remember sitting on our green couch when Di walked in. She didn't ask anything about the hours or the pay or the benefits. She just picked Christopher up out of my hands and looked at him and started loving him. And Bob and I looked at each other and said, "That's it!" [Laughs.] And that was it.

DI ("Di" is Diana Shaw"; "Diana" is Diana Barrett): I'll never forget that day: I walked in and saw this beautiful little baby, and I just picked him up and held him close to me. And I talked to him, and he smiled. We bonded right then and there. And Bob and Diana and I immediately took a liking to each other. The chemistry was just great, and I was hired that day. I took care of the whole household. It started out as a babysitting job, but I'm the type of person who will not sit around and read a book if I see that there's dishes or laundry to be done. So after I fed the baby and put him down for his nap, I would do housework. I have no problem at all with that. I have been known to vacuum the floor with a baby on my hip. I did the grocery shopping; I took care of everything. There was nothing they needed or wanted that I was not able to do for them. I grew up in North Carolina, and the women I was around had to take care of their children and do their chores, and they always had their children with them. My daughter seems to think it's something from our African heritage because when African women work, they always have their children with them-tied to their backs, I believe. So I didn't think anything of looking after Christopher and doing almost everything else. And it just seemed to work out without my even thinking about it. As Christopher got older, he would sit on the vacuum cleaner, and I would ride him around with me as I worked.

DIANA: Christopher thought it was the neatest thing since sliced bread; he still remembers riding on the vacuum. And Di always had raisins in her pocket, and she gave him raisins to eat while she was working.

DI: Christopher was always so close to me. The reason some people call me Didi is because of Christopher: I was his Didi. He's twenty-one now, and the love and respect between us are still there. I got married when I was fourteen. At that time, especially if you lived in the South, it was nothing for a girl to marry at fourteen or fifteen. And if you weren't married by sixteen or seventeen, you were considered an old maid. I moved to Jamaica with my husband, and that was the first time I had ever been away from my family. But after I had been in Jamaica for about eight years, I got very homesick and wanted to come back to the States. So we moved to Boston. At that point, I had four children: my two adopted stepchildren and my own two-all girls. When I went back to work, my children were all in school. The oldest ones came home from school first, and they looked after the smaller ones. The youngest one, Shaina, was in kindergarten in the morning, and I got a neighbor to pick her up and bring her home. And she would keep Shaina until the older girls got home.I also took care of my niece, Ki, for about a year when she was a baby. She was about the same age as Christopher. My sister was not able to take care of her at the time because she was ill. So I took on full responsibility for Ki. I brought her to work with me every day, and I would hold Christopher in one arm and Ki in the other arm, and rock them to sleep. They slept in the same crib. I have pictures of them standing in the playpen.

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