Au Pair of the Year Essay
Third Place winner - Pierre Maizener from France
Is a year as an au pair a loss of time? Is it basically a failure? At first it probably seemed so for my parents. I had quit the seventh best business school in Europe to do what? To take care of three kids in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan. Where had my ambition gone, my will of becoming the CEO of a great international company? Why did I decide to leave this easy way to dive into the unknown?
What my parents didn’t understand, but do now, is that I never considered that a failure. I came here in a certain state of mind, which has not changed in four months. I wanted to improve my English, that’s for sure, challenge myself intellectually but above all I wanted to be drowned in a culture different than mine, doing what I loved to do, taking care of children. I have always loved traveling, but my last journey, a one-month-trip in Thailand and Laos, really increased my thirst to gain knowledge of other cultures. America always had attracted me, so when my American family called me, had chosen me over somebody else, I felt so much pride, and so much happiness.
So I tried. I tried to experience as much “American culture” as I could, as I still can. I never considered myself on holiday, so I don’t do what a tourist does, but what a 22-year-old American boy would do. I registered in a badminton club, for instance, that has a high level of competition, and playing badminton in America is different than playing badminton in France because…it’s in America. Our league consists of people from Malaysia, Taiwan, China, Belgium, Germany, America, and I learned that everybody behaves differently, has a different way of losing, of winning, of playing basically. Of course I spend money I could have saved to travel, but I obey the rule I gave myself when I first came: make the most of every experience you have in America. For the first time of my life, I become proud of what I am, of how I behave, of what I do.
A lot of my friends are American, so I can know how the youth in America is, and how much different it is from what I imagined. I saw myself yelling at the University of Michigan football game, or jumping when my team, the Detroit Tigers, made a home run.
I have to confess that at one point something was missing in my au-pair life: my strong need to always learn. So I started going to the movie theater twice a week, reading American literature…and learning German! I first studied German about one hour every day by myself for a month, but now I’m studying it at college, four hours a week. My good friends here are German, and help me a lot, so I will consider studying in Germany once I’m back in Europe. Coming from a family of four brothers, and being a male au pair I also have learned a lot about women which is invaluable for any male. Now I speak French when I call my family, Spanish with my Mexican friends, German with the Germans and English to everybody! I think I managed to ally what I loved to do with what will be useful for me in my professional life.
But what most affects my life as an au pair is my family. I have learned a lot about openness and honesty in communication with my coordinator, Deb, and with my host family. There is no judgment. But above all I didn’t know I was capable of loving kids I much as I love mine. I have 20-month-old twins, Charlie and Harry, and a 4 ½-year-old boy, Sam. I never could have imagined I would be so happy to hear them say “yes” for the first time, to see them eat my smiley French fries with more ketchup than fries, or to have to wash my face because they emptied their runny noses on me kissing me. Now I know how thrilled you feel when a kid says “I love you” for the first time…But I also know how hard it is. How hard it is to watch babies ten hours a day, to change eight diapers a day, to always be patient with them. But above all how hard it will be to leave them. That’s what the au pair life is: a most intense experience that can end so suddenly, even if stuck forever in one’s head. Another life in your life.
