The Summer I Became an Au Pair in Spain

This guest post is part of the Travellers' Tales series, an open platform where travellers share memorable experiences and what they learned along the way. In this edition, Amy Aed of Wandering Everywhere tells us how she ended up as an au pair in Spain. If you have a story of your own, email your text, pictures and a short bio to admin@europediaries.net.

Why would anyone do this to themselves?

Fair question. Au pairing means living with complete strangers, often for months, looking after children their own parents find hard work. I have heard the question phrased more bluntly than that, and I have never had a tidy answer.

The honest one is boredom, followed closely by desperation.

I knew that once my first year of university ended I would have a whole summer in front of me, and I wanted it filled with something worth remembering. My application to be a hotel representative was rejected. My application to hand out vodka in Ibiza nightclubs was accepted, which tells you something about the standards involved, and which I would have been catastrophically bad at. So I sent off an au pair application instead.

Accepted, and immediately terrified

When word came back that I had been accepted, the first thing I felt was not excitement. It was a quiet, internal "oh, no". What had I actually agreed to?

A Skype call with the family helped. The children were seven and twelve, which ruled out nappies, winding, and strangers in the street assuming the baby was mine. It sounded manageable. Possibly even fine.

I booked the flights still convinced something would go wrong. Then I went to Alicante for what turned out to be the worst holiday of my life, and felt an unreasonable wave of relief when my host family finally collected me and drove me to Valencia. How hard could it be?

At the start, the family were not sure either. They told me they could not see much of a connection between me and their children, and doubted how much responsibility I could summon. I assured them I was exactly the right person and that the children were about to have the best summer of their lives. What I mainly wanted was not to lose my free holiday before it had begun.

Valencia: two weeks that barely counted as work

We spent the first fortnight in a seaside villa in Valencia, exploring neighbouring towns and eating ice cream on the beach. I think I spent around six hours in total alone with the children across those two weeks. It was, by any measure, a good start.

Then the family drove to Madrid so the parents could return to work, and the real job began.

Madrid: mornings, television and a language I did not speak

My days started with the business of getting two children out of bed. Their father had a firm rule that everyone was up before 10 am, but had omitted to mention that it would take at least fifteen attempts each morning, and that success usually required spraying them with water.

After that, we mostly sat in front of the television. I understood none of it, because it was all in Spanish. I would like to say I learned a great deal from the programmes; in truth I learned the theme tunes.

Then we found the pool

The local pool changed things. The daughter and I bonded there for the first time. When something caught her interest and she actually paid attention to me, she was genuinely fun to be around. The moment we stepped back indoors she would retreat to her bedroom and behave as though nobody else existed, which I found strange then and still find strange now.

So we went back, several days a week. Each visit nudged us a little closer to being friends.

Becoming part of the family

While I was working out the children, I was also being absorbed into the household. I went to cousins' birthday parties and to long, formal meals with the grandparents. I had never been part of a family quite as close as this one, and it was a pleasure to be inside that world of support and strength and family values for a summer.

The father's mother and I got on so well that I had to stop myself calling her Abuela.

The children came next. I called the daughter out when she lied, which she took better than I expected, and when we discovered a shared love of the Netflix baking show Sugar Rush, I bought a mountain of ingredients so we could bake along with it.

The boy made more sense once I understood that his attention simply did not last. He was never ignoring me; he was unable to hold on. So I broke his daily homework into shorter blocks, which kept the anger fits away, and gradually the whole arrangement started to work.

We went to the pool, the skate park, the river, the basketball court and the football fields. We took small cross-country adventures. Somewhere in all of that I stopped seeing two difficult children and started caring about them a great deal. By the end, I was something close to a big sister.

Leaving

When the time came to leave my temporary Spanish family, nobody was in a good state. I gave the children small presents to remember me by, and got the biggest hugs in return. My host father had to work hard to keep his tears in.

What I brought home

Back in England, I thought about the summer properly for the first time and volunteered to take the children in my own family out on day trips, something I had never done before. I ended up glad I had signed up, despite the fact that I disliked children when I started. It taught me more than I expected, and gave me more than I had any right to hope for.

More about the author

Amy Aed is the editor behind Wandering Everywhere, a site dedicated to solo and female travel, travelling with Crohn's Disease, and thorough guides to beautiful places. She is a self-proclaimed tea addict on a mission to document the most beautiful, genuine and exciting places in the world. Her work has appeared in Wanderlust Magazine, The Mighty and Able Magazine, among others. You can find her on Instagram or Twitter.

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