Unemployment will take you to the most wonderful, bewildering places you will ever go in your life. When you’re changing a baby from one spoiled KISS onesie (featuring the entire band in full hair, costume, and makeup) to another, cleaner KISS onesie while holding a plastic purple monkey like a lifeline in your childhood bedroom, you may begin to wonder how you possibly ended up there. The answer is likely unemployment. Crushing adolescent unemployment.
In May 2024, I found myself right in the middle of a living broke college student stereotype. I had just come home from my first year of college and could still feel my head physically reeling from the months of self-discovery and self-navigation through my first taste of independence from home. In a matter of hours, I went from beginning my own life outside of the town I’d lived in for 18 years to sitting in my high school bedroom, staring at the polaroids of people on the wall who I hadn’t spoken to in months. It was jarring, and I craved direction again. I needed purpose.
That purpose happened to be named Yolanda, a coworker of a family-friend who needed help taking care of her 10-month-old son. From 10-5 every day, I would walk over to the little blue house on the corner where Yolanda would greet me at the door every morning with an anxious smile and hand over her son, her greatest treasure, to an underqualified 19-year-old. I would feed him formula in the morning and in the afternoon, change his diaper at least four times, and put him down for a nap around 2pm- if he was willing. I would do all this while trying to ignore the fact that I was back in my childhood home.
In my neighborhood, contracting started to run low halfway through its construction. Layouts of homes started getting less creative, and the newer sections modeled their layouts after 12 of the same floorplans. The repetition wasn’t eerie but striking enough that a common question growing up was if you had the same house as someone else. I was a master of square footage by the time I was 12. Now, for the first time since I was seven, I stood in the front door of a house so eerily like the one I grew up in, it was dizzying. Except this time, a new family left their door marks behind the frame, and this time, the largest oil painting of the band KISS I’d ever seen hung on the entryway hall, right where our family pictures used to go.
Yolanda made no mention of the painting as she welcomed me into the house for the first time. She continued not to mention the several framed pictures of her and her husband in full KISS makeup in various eras of their lives as I took of my shoes and tried to make sense of the house in front of me. She pushed down her two rowdy dogs as we walked into the living room, set up with furniture that matched the baby blue walls like the ones my parents painted. It was slightly off colored, and the furniture was set just off to the right, enough only to snap me back into my uncanny reality. I could’ve learned to walk on these hardwood floors or gone running through the glass back door with my brothers, but this house was not ours and never had been. This home had been set up specifically for the DeJohns without a trace of anything else existing before, including more strategically set KISS memorabilia spread throughout the living room. This was not the childhood home I’d built into an idol in my mind.
Yolanda was a kind woman who never seemed to stop moving. Whether it was to pick up brightly colored toys from the floor or shush the two German Shepards that nipped at her ankles, Yolanda seemed to flutter around the home. She was a force of nature whose sheer determination and direction I admired. As she prepared the formula bottles by the sink, Yolanda explained the daily schedule. The baby would wake up at around 8am and take his first formula bottle with mem around two hours later. After that, I would change his diaper the first time, play with him in the playroom until his first walk, feed him lunch, change his diaper again, set him down for a nap, wake him up after an hour, play with him again, walk him again, and wait for Yolanda to come home around 5pm. The dogs would alert me to any sudden changes, Yolanda explained.
I decided not to tell her about my old house. I figured if I were in her shoes, it would be slightly unsettling to hear from the stranger about to take care of her baby that I didn’t need a tour of her home because I’d slept there for my formative years, or at least somewhere distinctly similar. It took everything in me not to linger too much in the stairwell where I’d learned to tie my shoes, or my old bedroom, which had now been converted into a space themed nursery.
The room itself greeted me with a sense of familiarity, despite the walls beaming a shade of black and a collection of true-to-life constellations that were unrecognizable. It was the smallest bedroom in the house, with a closet in the back donning a small window that peeped into the front yard. Baby items were stacked neatly in a basket beside the changing table with a large felt rocking chair by the crib. In the center of the room, newly awoken from his nap, sat a very restless Tommy.
Tommy had a shock of dark hair and hands so small his fist could fit around two of my fingers. As Yolanda passed him to me for the first time, Tommy’s little hands immediately found the chain of my favorite necklace and yanked it from my neck, throwing it on the ground with a laugh that echoed until he spit up on both of us.
If I was someone who believed in signs, that would’ve been the biggest “GET OUT” message from the universe I’d ever seen, but Yolanda had her shoes on already and the baby in my arms was so proud of himself, that I accepted whatever was in store for me in this era of my life. A change of shirt, hopefully, was first.
On my first day with Tommy, he took his formula in the morning, threw himself around his playroom in a half-crawl, half-launch to the windows just at his height, and babbled his way through our walk. Dragonflies danced by the edge of the stroller just out of reach from Tommy’s fists. He gargled in frustration every time his hands could not grab the colorful visitors. He was reaching for a world that would not let him grab it, and thus understand it.
When I was younger, my brothers and I would play badminton under the River Birch in the front yard. In my skort and racket too-big-for-my-hands, I would struggle to hit the birdie over the net to meet my older brothers waiting to spike it back to me. Having Meaghan on the opposing team was a surefire way to ensure a win, as long as you didn’t get the bridie tangled in the long branches of the tree above us. I hated that I could not reach the birdie. I wanted to be as tall as my brothers who reached up to untangle it from the tree, the rare few times it ever did get stuck. I wanted to be able to just grab it. That anything was out of my reach in this world was frustrating to me.
The tree was not in the front yard when I walked Tommy back into the garage. There wasn’t even a stump. We were both reaching for things that eluded our eyes the second we found them; the only difference was in Tommy’s loud disgruntled burps.
That afternoon, I made frozen peas and pasta marinara for Tommy- most of which ended up on the floor.
It was hard to be mad at Tommy. He hardly cried, and instead spent most of his time with a puzzled look on his face, or dimples that stretched up to his eyes. To keep himself entertained, Tommy clutched a bright purple monkey in his fist, lighting up when the right button was smashed to launch the plastic toy into the same melodic song each time:
Maybe you
Could be
A purple monkey in a bubblegum tree and
You could fly
In the sky
Then you can fly back to me
The song got old immediately, but it was the one thing that seemed to keep Tommy happy while I cleaned the kitchen floor alongside the dogs. I kept the purple monkey beside me through playtime, the second diaper change, and the second round of formula.
By the time Tommy was ready for a nap, he had practically already fallen asleep in my arms. I used my broken necklace as a charm, letting him play with the rounded edges of the crescent moon at the end and the bumps in the chain that led all the way back up to the clasp. The nursery was deafeningly dark with the blackout shades pulled shut over the windows, and the steady heartbeat from the sound machine on the side table was enough to make my eyelids feel heavy to blink. Still, Tommy fussed quietly in the dark. I’d tried humming, rocking, reading, and even pretending to fall asleep on the felt-backed chair, but to no avail. Tommy’s fussing turned into crying, as if he realized for the first time that day that I was not, in fact, his mother, but a cheap stand-in that was still getting used to holding a baby that constantly wanted to move.
Sunlight peeked out from behind a door just slightly ajar. Tommy’s little eyes followed its path with an intense, extremely focused gaze. The kicking came to a steady stop. Tommy’s eyes blinked from the light intrusion until his whole face seemed to glow amber. With one hand over his chest, he blinked into sleep while I desperately hummed the song that had been the soundtrack of our whole afternoon:
Maybe you
Could be
A little bird with polka dot wings and
You could fly
To the sea
Then you could fly back to me
Playing hide and seek with my brothers was an experience likened to the harshest and bloodiest of battlefields. My oldest brother, Will, was taken out almost immediately, unable to handle the suspense for very long. Typically, I’d be found next, usually caught looking for the source of the commotion when the first person was found. My youngest and middle brothers were always the hardest to find, as they were easily able to fit into small corners and crevices created by the furniture arrangement. On average, it took twice as long to find Daniel and Jack as anyone else.
On one particularly tricky hunt, Daniel was missing for over an hour. My parents playing witness in the living room grew from amused to slightly worried overtime. Daniel had a history of trying to make a break for the front door, so the innocent hide and seek game quickly became a whole family search and rescue endeavor before the police had to eventually be called.
Searching into my room, everything appeared to be exactly as it had been before. There were no signs of a disturbance or any wiggling small child near furniture pieces. Almost no sign of him.
The only indicator of another body in the room other than my own was the soft sound of my brother giggling from under a blanket in the corner of the room. Daniel had taken advantage of the room disorganized from a long day of play and worked himself around it until he became a physical part of the room and not just a visitor. If it hadn’t been for his giggles, he would’ve spent another few hours under there, beaming with pride at his conquest and likely only pulled from his hiding spot by a crew of bewildered firemen.
To this day, I am still unaware of how or why Tommy fell asleep when he did. Day after day, the conditions never seemed to line up completely around nap time. Somedays, Tommy would take the whole bottle of formula and fall asleep in minutes in the complete darkness. Other days, the nap wouldn’t take in the first place and both of us would be left crying.
Sometimes I wondered if the switch between the rest of the house and the nursery was too jarring for him; if the sudden movement from night to day was too lonely for a baby whose entire world was dancing just out of his reach. Sometimes I wondered if he was looking for the giggle in the corner of the room, the reminder that he was not alone.
Other times I wondered if I had zipped the sleep sack too tight on the formula stain spilled on the front of his onesie earlier.
As Tommy slept, I wandered, careful to toe the line between curiosity and nosiness, careful not to disturb the toys that lay scattered on the floor. It was hard to remain completely silent as I walked, often running into walls or doors I subconsciously thought would be taken out with my family’s old renovations. It was uncomfortable to be back in a past where I did not belong anymore. Everything was almost exactly as it had been, only I was a bit taller and more awkward with the arms and legs that knew the peeling paint of these walls before anything. It was eerie until I could force myself to stop thinking of it as my home and start recognizing it as Tommy’s. If I squinted just enough, I could pretend I didn’t know any of this.
As the summer went on, Tommy started growing up. He stopped taking his morning formula bottle, stopped dropping his food on the kitchen floor, and started taking shorter naps with less predictable sleeping routines. It seemed every morning there was a new milestone he’d reached the night before, relayed proudly to me by Tommy’s father, Kyle, who tried his best to connect with his child’s babysitter (once when I had come in with a Hozier shirt, I had been asked if he was the guy from The Smiths). Tommy was still shaky when he stood on his own, but running after him was becoming steadily more physically taxing. If Yolanda was a few minutes late coming home, I would lay out in the playroom and rest for a minute, letting the rays from the sun catch my face while Tommy climbed all over me. After a full day of play, the purple monkey song seemed to be burned into the back of my head. The DeJohn Family must have been responsible for half the royalties paid to the Little Tikes recording label.
I was laying on the Styrofoam puzzle pieces of the playroom when Tommy took his first steps.
For weeks, he had been holding onto the wall, hesitating to walk over to me or his plastic dinosaur trike. His parents had been monitoring every shaking step, waiting for the day his foot would come down and he would make his way over to them for the first time in his life.
Yolanda missed it by five minutes.
Tommy walked over to me by the window, inevitably drawn in by a glint of a wild animal passing behind me. The whole house was blanketed in shocked silence. Even the dogs, who had been scratching at the laundry room door for the past five minutes, became unexpectedly still. Tommy fell, shrieking with glee at his accomplishment as he grabbed at the fabric of my shirt to try to pull himself up again. Yolanda walked in a moment later.
I kept my secret to myself. When Kyle broke the news of Tommy’s first steps to me the next week, I acted as surprised as I could muster. That was not my moment to steal. This was not my house. That was not my baby.
My younger brother did not speak until he was four. For years, a string of speech pathologists tried every method in the book to try to get him to say a single word. He stayed silent.
The speech pathologist with the winning lucky method came around right before his fourth birthday. My mother, Dr. Sherry, and Daniel sat on the carpet together, pointing to flashcards and sounding out phonemes that Daniel would stare back at unwaveringly. A Tickle-Me-Elmo sounded off just behind my mother’s shoulder, placed there to entertain my older brothers and me while Daniel learned to speak. In a flash, something crossed behind my brother’s eyes: recognition, connection, and the fire of an audience to bear witness. Just loud enough for the speech pathologist and my mother to hear, Daniel muttered, “Elmo!”, pointing directly at my mother. On the official reports, Daniel’s first word was “mama”.
My mother never actually believed Daniel’s first word was “mama”. She held onto the story of the Tickle-Me-Elmo doll because she believed in the efforts of the leagues of medical professionals who worked to connect her to her son. Today, they are the reason she can get a one-word response from him to a multi-faceted question and not worry.
I let the DeJohns believe they were the first people to witness their son’s first steps so they could see their anxious joy reflected on their son’s face as I had seen myself reflected in his. Within the same walls and square footage, 20 years apart, this home would make itself known to Tommy as made itself known to me. I was a brief visitor. In a few years, Tommy would doubt my existence the way I’d doubted Dr. Sherry’s the morning my brother and I first spoke.
The reason KISS became a band of any notability was not, entirely, for their music, but rather for their larger-than-life performances. To listen to KISS is to give into the act. To believe in Gene Simmons playing with full pyrotechnics in the middle of a high school gym at the peak of his career. KISS is not there for the introspective music-listener. KISS is there to believe in something insanely over-the-top greater than us.
I choose still to believe in my childhood home because it connects me back to the days with my family when the world still felt out of reach, before change creeped its way through the open sliding glass door and the house where I was young in was gutted into an agreeable gray. These bones still call to me in hardwood made from trees whose branches never touched. This is a house identical to several others in my neighborhood, and yet a part of me will always feel a claim to it.
I choose still to believe in the purple monkey because it connects me to the promise of furniture scrapes on the walls and playpens broken down to make room for tiny footsteps. I believe in the purple monkey because the purple monkey, in all its royalty-free glory, believed in the inhabitants of the small house with the blue shuttered windows, and the nanny who made her brief reappearances over stretches of laminate that felt too familiar. I believed in the purple monkey like I believed in the memory of walls that cannot talk, and I watched again as it flew back to me.