The Dinner Where She Said “Pay Me”
The answer came at the family’s monthly dinner. Em had left work early again and come only because her mother called it tradition, even though she had a huge presentation the next morning. She was checking email under the table when Kate asked whether she’d brought her planner so they could look at some dates. Amy gave a loud fake cough and stood up like she was accepting an award. They’d booked a week at Pine Valley Lodge, she announced, all expenses paid.
The relatives cheered, and Em quietly calculated how much of her own money had just bought that cheer. Then Sarah spoke in her sugary voice: Em was so amazing with the kids, and they’d love having her watch them that week. Em stopped mid-bite. Amy explained that it was all planned and Em could stay in the little cabin behind the main lodge, which came with a mini fridge. That meant five children under seven, around the clock, while everyone else skied.
Em said she couldn’t take a week off in the middle of a huge merger, and Amy waved her hand like she was swatting a fly. Just reschedule it. Sarah added that Em didn’t have actual responsibilities like they did, because her job was “just, you know, a job.” Em stared at the woman she’d rescued hundreds of times, the same one who once made her cancel a client meeting because her kid wanted McDonald’s and she was too tired to drive. Mom chimed in that they were family and Em was so good with the kids, and Amy said they wouldn’t behave for anyone else.
Em knew better. The last time she’d watched them, one had finger-painted her work laptop and another had tried to feed her phone to the toilet. “If you want me to watch five kids under seven twenty-four hours a day for an entire week,” she said, “you need to pay me.”
They looked at her as if she’d suggested selling the children to the circus. Sarah clutched her pearls, and Amy said Em wouldn’t enjoy the trip anyway, since she had no husband or kids and would just be on her laptop. Aunt Lisa, who’d been quietly sipping tea, finally asked whether they could hear themselves. Em had a successful career, she said, and they couldn’t expect her to drop everything because they didn’t want to pay for child care.
Em pulled out her work laptop and did the math. A nanny in her area runs $25 an hour for one child plus $5 for each additional one, which comes to $45 an hour; across twenty-four hours for seven days, that’s about $7,560, on top of what she’d already paid toward the trip. Amy laughed like it was the best joke she’d ever heard, and Sarah gasped. “It’s not a job when it’s family,” Sarah insisted. Mom added that Em wasn’t doing anything that week except running a merger, and Sarah scoffed that it wasn’t like she was saving lives.
Em looked around the table at Mom shaking her head, Dad hiding behind his phone, Sarah smirking and Amy trying to stop her kid from drawing on the tablecloth. “You’re right,” she said, packing up. “I’m used to working hard. I’m used to putting everyone else first. But I’m done being your free babysitter.” Sarah told her she was being dramatic and that this was why she was still single, since men don’t like women who are so career-obsessed.
Em stood so fast her chair almost tipped. “I’m single because I choose to be,” she said. “I’m successful because I work hard. And I’m leaving because I finally realized that none of you actually care about me as a person. You only care about what I can do for you.” She walked out with her head high, and through the window Aunt Lisa gave her a thumbs-up.
One Click and a Boss Who Said “Finally”
Em sat in her building’s parking garage for what felt like hours, replaying the dinner. Her phone lit up with Amy’s photos of a sad-looking nephew, clearly staged, since that kid can’t keep a straight face for two seconds, plus Sarah’s paragraphs about her “un-Christian behavior” and her mother’s sad-face emojis. She thought about every time she’d dropped everything for them: the client meeting she’d left for one of Sarah’s emergencies, the night she’d worked straight through to cover a day off for Amy’s business conference. Then Aunt Lisa texted that she was proud of her, and Em cried, mascara everywhere, for all the times she’d said yes when she meant no.
Upstairs, in the one-bedroom with floor-to-ceiling windows that Sarah calls “cute for someone her age,” Em looked at the desk where she’d built her career and the shelf of novels she finally had time to read. A thought struck her, crazy for her and probably normal for anyone with healthy boundaries. She opened her laptop and started pricing flights, then hotels, then full vacation packages. She had a chunk of savings she’d always called her emergency fund, though it was really her family emergency fund. As Sarah texted that the kids were crying because their favorite aunt was selfish, Em booked a week in Spain, a real phone-off vacation covering the very week they wanted her to babysit.
Then she wrote to her boss asking for two weeks off instead of one, admitting she hadn’t taken a proper vacation in three years. The reply came almost instantly: finally, her boss had been trying to get her to take a real break for ages, request approved, and don’t you dare check email. Em turned off her phone and stood at the window with the city lights below. For the first time in years, she felt like she was choosing herself.