Why is there a hole in the kitchen ceiling?

On babysitters, trust & estate planning, and surrender

Last night I had a dream that we had a new babysitter watch our daughter. The babysitter, who was around 20, with a dewy half-Asian face out of an Ilia ad and wide-legged jeans, arrived while my daughter was napping. Her eyes widened when I told her to help herself to anything in the kitchen, referencing a fridge full of freshly washed organic berries and a pantry full of Trader Joe’s snacks. I’m not sure whether it was understood that my daughter would wake to a total stranger before we got home. I wasn’t concerned about this in the dream. I remember only that when I got home, hours later, and the babysitter was paid and gone, I went into the kitchen to tidy up and noticed a neatly cut hole in the ceiling. In the weird way of dreams, there had been another hole in the kitchen ceiling, where we kept bananas tucked away on a little shelf (obviously). The babysitter, wanting a banana and noticing this banana stash, seemed to have not wanted to take a banana from the existing hole’s shelf, and decided instead to neatly cut another hole in the kitchen ceiling and to look for a banana there.

The one defensible use of generative AI is asking it to illustrate surreal elements of your dreams.

There’s obviously a metaphor here, something about the way in which you have to let go when you task someone else with caring for your child. You have to accept that they not always going to do things your way. They are not always going to know they can just take a banana from the existing banana hole. When you greet your child the morning after she is put to bed by a babysitter, for example, she will be squeezed into last summer’s pajamas. But if you look closely you will be able to see the traces of the sitter’s effort and her care—the pajamas you laid out will be in the hamper, soaking wet (?) and you will surmise that the sitter, in frantically looking for a dry pair of pajamas, grabbed a pair from the giveaway bag in the closet instead of from the dresser drawer. This is the extra banana hole in the ceiling. And you have to decide whether you will just let it go, just as I have had to let it go that my daughter always (inexplicably) comes home from daycare in yesterday’s socks.

We were supposed to have a new sitter come this weekend. This dream was probably a way of working through some of my anxieties related to leaving my daughter with someone new. But you may be surprised to realize that my anxiety about leaving my daughter with a sitter is not so much rooted in how she will be cared for, but rather in fears about what could happen to us while we are out.

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CONTENT WARNING: The rest of this piece discusses the possibility of and logistics related to parental death. (It’s also going behind a paywall.)