A Mother’s Ode to a Joyful Atmosphere
When my 4 1/2-year-old daughter started preschool this fall, it marked the end of the easiest day-care arrangement I’ll ever know.
Today, our little family is adjusting to a new daily mad scramble--to assemble her lunch, get her to school and me to work, and arrange an intricate schedule of friends, neighbors and relatives who can fetch her by 6 p.m. each evening so that I don’t have to pay dollar-a-minute late fees.
It makes me appreciate all the more Delia Alpez, the woman who cared for Nora during the last two years. Boy, did I have a cushy deal with Delia.
*
I’d returned to Southern California from a tour of duty in San Francisco. I had my daughter in tow and no idea of how to find suitable and convenient child care. After checking out a far-away Montessori school, a nearby nursery school and a downtown day-care center, I realized it would take some doing to find a flexible child
care provider who could cope with my unpredictable reporting career.
When a neighbor told me about a family child-care operation a block from my house just east of the Beverlywood district in West Los Angeles, I thought: “Well, that can’t be any good. It’s too close, too convenient.”
A Santa Monica referral agency told me that Delia’s in-home operation had been licensed for many years. Prepared nonetheless for disappointment, I wandered down with Nora to the stucco house and encountered my first pleasant surprise: a friendly mother who, like me, had adopted an Asian child.
A peek inside the living room gave me pause. The place was clean, but it looked a bit run-down. However, when Delia took me to the kitchen (with its simmering pot of chicken stew for the children’s lunch) and then to the backyard playground and playroom (a converted garage), where a pack of children of all colors enjoyed themselves in controlled chaos, my gut told me to go for it. Delia’s business card clinched it: It featured a happy toddler and the phrase “joyful atmosphere.”
The cost, she told me, would be $100 weekly (a bargain that included lunch). And, because I was paying $10 a week more than other families, I could show up in the evening as late as needed. She understood that my hours were erratic. As I learned over the next few months, Delia’s Family Child Care was always open. And I mean always.
Recently, after her first week of preschool, Nora said she was missing Delia, so we stopped by. And on this Sunday, after two years of quick drop-offs and pickups, Delia and I finally sat down for a chat.
*
Over the last 12 years, Delia has cared for other people’s children every day, including some holidays. She has not taken vacation for 10 years.
She rises each morning at 5 to prepare breakfast for several of her dozen or so charges, who begin arriving about 7, and to get lunch started. And she stays on duty until well into the evening. If I got stuck at work until 8 or later, I would try to thrust a $5 or $10 bill into Delia’s hand. Usually, she would wave it off, saying: “It’s OK. I was here anyway.” Through it all, this tiny woman was always smiling, cheerful, soft-spoken, and calm.
A friendship with an American missionary couple brought her here from her native El Salvador. She met them while she was studying at a Protestant college in the 1960s. They invited her to move to Atlanta, where she learned English by mail. She spent four years there doing missionary work, then moved to San Francisco, where she married a Salvadoran man and worked at a convalescent home.
She separated from her husband and moved to Los Angeles in 1972, bringing her only son, Carlos, now 27. She and her husband reconciled briefly and bought a house. Delia tried beauty school, real estate, nurse’s aide work and a return to convalescent care. But after she and her husband divorced, her love of children spurred her to open a family child-care center. It was licensed in 1986, the year after she became a U.S. citizen.
Delia says she has loved every one of the 200 or so children she has cared for over the years. This is the level of her caring:
Thirteen years ago, when a 9-day-old boy began coming to her home, she developed a special bond. The child’s mother, meanwhile, felt unable to care for him. So he has lived with Delia and calls her mom. His birth mother takes him to school every day and drops him back at Delia’s, where he has his own room.
Most of the money Delia takes in gets spent on sprucing up her house and buying new playground equipment, food and art supplies for the children. I was stunned to hear that, at 52, she has medical and life insurance but no retirement plan.
Two or three times a day, Delia reminds her sister, Luz, who works with her, and her other helpers to give the children a hug and “make them know you’re happy to have them here.” Pretend it’s your child, she urges them.
“We are the ones who have the privilege to see them growing,” Delia told me. “Sometimes we’re the ones to see them take their first steps or say their first words. We are the ones who enjoy them. We have to prepare the children.”
Each day in Los Angeles, so many of us working people must make the gut-wrenching decision to entrust our children for most of the day to total or near-total strangers. I feel privileged to have had Delia be that stranger--and now friend--to my daughter and me.
