Myself, my son and our au pair “Mary”. We took Mary to Sydney with us and visited the Chinese Garden of Friendship. I didn’t know that about a month later Mary would hide a 29 year old man into our home.

Being a parent is beyond tough. Add a few degrees of parenting difficulty and knowing exactly how to keep all the balls in the air is tricky. What do I mean by degrees of difficulty? Well for a start living away from social supports like family, having a fly-in-fly out partner, or being a single parent. My own situation a few years back saw us planning a third pregnancy while living three thousand kilometers away from our social supports. In addition, we knew from two previous pregnancies that I do pregnancy very badly. By badly I mean that I vomit daily for eight months, have disabling low blood pressure and end up in a wheelchair. We knew that the only way to cope with another pregnancy (and we desperately wanted another child) was to get some extra help. We chose to invite an au pair into our home.

An au-pair is a young man or woman from another country who enters a cultural home-stay arrangement with a family in a foreign country. In exchange for room, board and an allowance (typically $150-250) dollars a week they provide help with household duties. These duties may include gardening, light housework and caring for children. Central to the arrangement is one of trust. They are to be treated as one of the family (you are called the host-parent) with similar responsibilities as if they were an older sibling.

We arranged our au pair through one of Australia’s most respectable agencies. Looking at all the applications, and interviewing prospective au pairs the applicants seemed much the same. They all “love children” and can’t wait to start their new life in Australia with an Australian family.

We chose 18 year old Mary*, from Germany because her application listed qualifications that we valued (she said she had worked for two years as a swimming teacher teaching young children) and because she was able to come the soonest.

At that stage we had two boys aged 3 and 5. They aren’t easy kids and I truthfully described them as “wild boys” to Mary before she accepted the position. I also truthfully told her the reason we needed an au pair – that I was planning a pregnancy and that once pregnant I would become dreadfully unwell.

I was uneasy from the beginning. Mary showed almost no interest in the children and seemed resentful of performing the most basic tasks. We had arranged for her to help us around 20 hours a week and it soon became clear she wasn’t willing to do this – her hours were reduced to around 12. Mary had an impressive set up at our home. Our modern Queenslander had two stories and Mary had the entire bottom floor, a living area, bedroom and bathroom to herself. Access was via an external door and external stairs connected our upstairs living area to hers.   We lived in Cairns, a tropical paradise on the door-step of the Great Barrier Reef and, prior to me becoming pregnant took Mary with us on trips to Sydney and Magnetic Island. On both trips she was resentful of helping with the children at all.

We had given Mary use of a car and it became apparent that she was a party girl – she would leave the house on Friday evening, we wouldn’t hear from her for the entire weekend and she would then arrive home, wearing the same clothes she had left the house in, five minutes before she was due to start her duties to allow me to go to work. I never knew if she would be home in time to start her duties or not, or whether she would be hung-over.

I was convinced that Mary was the wrong person for our family and was agonizing over whether to ask her to leave or not. The difficulty was that I took seriously my role as a host parent.  I was reticent to kick a young girl out onto the streets, particularly as she had travelled to the other side of the world to live with us. At this stage Mary became unwell with a bacterial infection and we nursed her through a three-week illness that made asking her to move on impossible.   In the meantime there had been numerous talks with Mary and the agency where she promised to improve her behavior.

By the time I became pregnant, sick, and in all honesty dependent on any minimal help we received from Mary she had started dating Stuart* Stuart was a Dutch backpacker, closer to my age than Mary’s who lived in his car. I never met Stuart as she never introduced him to me. She did however bring him into our home when I wasn’t there– the kids told me Stuart helped look after them. When I told Mary that Stuart was never to be around our children she secretly took the children out to meet him. When we found out about this we gave Mary one more warning. One more strike and she would have to leave. By this stage I was a vomiting, fainting mess of a woman. I was having difficulty walking, let alone caring for my kids.

In the end Mary made it easy for us to tell her to move on. She secretly moved Stuart into our home, we think, according to neighbors for two weeks. Mary had begun to tell me I had forgotten to buy various groceries. I hadn’t, she had instead been stockpiling groceries downstairs for Stuart and had me buy duplicates for the family. I found out from others that Stuart had been living downstairs secretly as I was incapacitated upstairs. When we found out I confronted her. She originally denied the allegations but when I told her the neighbors had let us know what was going in she admitted it. She left and we haven’t seen her since. As for the agency they told me they had never had a “girl behave this way” and arranged a replacement au pair for us. A year later when I was being hounded by debt collectors because of a car accident Mary had in our vehicle the agency was less helpful. Mary had left our home without filling in an accident form meaning we couldn’t claim insurance. The other driver’s insurance only wanted a letter from the au pair agency stating the Mary’s behavior had been in breach of behavior acceptable for an au pair. The agency refused saying it was my word against hers (although she had admitted what she had done to me, she denied it to them).

I realize that some people reading this will be labeling me a sucker – all the signs were there that Mary was not a good match for our family. In being slow to move her on though never did I think the end result would be a strange man living secretly in our home for two weeks while I vomited away on the floor above.
As a parent I am ashamed that I didn’t listen to my instincts to move Mary on, as her judgment, and honesty was so lacking that she may have put my kids at risk. It is one of the things I am most guilty about as a parent and I am eternally grateful that there is no evidence that any harm came to the kids while they were in Mary’s care.

After this au pair nightmare we did have two other young women stay with us, and to their credit they showed our family exactly how an au pair arrangement is meant to work. They were lovely, loving, honest young women that I wish could have stayed longer. My experience with Mary meant though that we didn’t continue to host au pairs longer after my pregnancy, and concurrent illness finished.  The positive experience with had with our subsequent au pairs (did I say they were lovely?) means that if, in the future our degree of parenting difficulty escalates again then we would welcome another au pair into our home, drawing from the lessons learnt in the past.

I have lots of friends, who have heard bits and pieces of this story ask me about au pairs, and whether I have suggestions for choosing one. My own au pair nightmare has influenced what I tell them:

– Remember that claim of Mary’s that she was a swimming teacher?   Seeing her with the children around water it quickly became apparent this was untrue.   We had paid an agency to engage an au pair for us. Agencies do the reference checks for you which theoretically is easier for host families. I would advise parents to find an au pair via an au pair website or classified site such as Gumtree and to take 100% responsibility for checking referees themselves.

-While it is important to welcome the au pair as a member of the family, they are not your son or daughter, they are a guest. If they don’t behave at least as well as you would expect a guest to behave (if not an employee) they should leave.

-Set strict rules from the outset. We created strict house rules for our subsequent au pairs – no men in the house at all (or around the kids), a car curfew over night and a curfew for themselves on nights before they had duties.

-As a rule try and host au pairs that have previously au paired with another family.  That way you can speak to the host parents on the phone and discover if there are any potential issues.

-A search of the internet shows that “party girl au pairs” are a thing. I’m not against people going out to clubs and socializing. I am against them coming home hungover to look after my kids.   When interviewing prospective au pairs a question about how they like to spend their weekends, even a direct approach about drinking and drug taking may help weed out the “party girls”.

-If you are fortunate enough to be blessed with a good au pair – treasure them!  Work with them to help them settle in, and to keep them happy.  A good au pair is a true blessing to your family.

-Trust your instincts, even if you can’t put your finger on the reason why you are uneasy. Ultimately you are trusting an au pair with your most precious treasures, your kids and a bad feeling is enough of a reason to ask them to leave.

I do realize that this is a departure from the regular theme of this blog, traveling with kids. Today though just seemed like the right time to share this story. I’d love to hear other people’s experiences, positive or negative of hosting an au pair.

*Names have been changed.

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