Our au pair flew home last night. The house is quieter this morning.
A year with an au pair — what it made possible for our family, and a thank-you at the end of a chapter we'd choose again without hesitating.
Our au pair flew home to Spain last night. This morning the house is quieter than it should be, and everyone keeps almost saying something about it.
She lived with us for a year. When she arrived, our youngest was barely walking and our daughter was still fully in kindergarten mode; my wife was looking for the way back into her working life, and I was building a working life that happens mostly at home. Twelve months later, all of that has shifted — and a lot of the shifting was possible because there was one extra pair of hands, and one extra heart, in the house.
I've written before about deliberately bringing my work closer to home, and people sometimes read that as a productivity choice. It never was. It was a family design choice — and the au pair year was quietly one of the biggest pieces of that design. Working from home with small children only works on paper. Working from home while someone wonderful is folding the chaos into shape downstairs — school runs, snack negotiations, the thousand tiny handovers of a family day — that actually works.
It gave my wife the room to go back to work without every day being a logistics puzzle. It gave us, for the first time since the kids arrived, the occasional evening that belonged to just the two of us. And it gave our children a big sister for a year — someone who wasn't Mama or Papa, who brought her own language and her own ways, and who they will remember in that half-magical way you remember the people who were kind to you when you were very small.
You invite someone into your home to help with the children, and a year later you realise she helped with everything.
Living with someone who isn't family and becoming family anyway is its own experience. There's a vulnerability to it — your unwashed Tuesday-morning self is on full display — and a reward that surprised me: the house got more generous. More patient. You behave a little better and love a little louder when someone chose to spend a year of her twenties with your family.
Next summer our daughter starts school, and with both kids in their routines we won't be needing an au pair again. That feels right, and also a little like closing a door on a room where something good happened. This wasn't a stopgap we tolerated; it was a chapter we'd choose again without hesitating.
So: to her, and to the whole strange, warm institution of inviting a stranger into your home until she isn't one — thank you. The house is quieter this morning. It was better with you in it.