My Au Pair Nightmare

Chapter 1.

"I walk a lonely road, the only one that I have ever known" - Green Day 

I have a few skeletons in my closet this is no secret.

If you dive inside my little mass grave of a walk in closet you will see they are well organized, they are even marked with labels on their hangers.

On August 1. 2016 I was ready to put it aside and start over again, forgetting all about toxic relationships, a chaotic childhood and a lost adolescence. I was waiting at the airport in Copenhagen for my flight to London, which would connect to another airplane, which would head to New York, the Big Apple as it is also called in Europe. I had never been to the USA and now I was going to explore it all on my own. The only other time I had done something similar was in 2013 when I went to a business school in Brighton, England. However, that was arranged with my school in Denmark and classmates and a teacher followed me, this time I am really on my own.

The flight to London had a delay, which was fine by me because I would have to wait 4 hours for my connecting flight. I know Gatwick airport is big but it is not THAT interesting.

I was having a coffee with my family before the plane landed and I was weirdly enough perfectly calm. One of my little skeletons is marked with a label called anxiety and though I have learned through mindfulness and therapy to hold it down it still rises to the surface when I least need it. I finally said goodbye to my family and went through security and found my gate. I could see a few other girls with an au pair label on their carry on bags so I knew they were going in the same direction as me. I sat down nearby and had no label on myself so they had no idea I was with the same agency, which suited me  just fine. From their conversations I would say they were a lot younger than me and we did not have much in common. I have been told many times to not judge a book from its cover and considering how much I read I would say that is good advice but sometimes I have to listen to my intuition. I have a gut feeling and my gut feeling is strong, another label on a hanger in my closet; I am a damn Pisces! For those of you who do not believe in astrology I get how this will sound crazy but we can learn a lot from the stars and I honestly wish I had learned that before the summer of 2016.

I knew something bad was up before the summer began and when my dog passed away on July 23. I decided that was what my gut feeling had been telling me and completely shut the rest down. I should have listened to my father, he is a special guy in many ways but as a long time prosecutor he knows people very well. He looked at a picture of the host mother in my up coming au pair family and said "she looks mean", I told him some people (including myself) just do not smile on pictures and she was a very nice woman. I had spoken to this family since March and I knew they were nice people. We had a lot in common, we loved art and music, books and chilling, it really could not be a better match for me.... Right?

No, never judge a book on its cover; you have to get through a few chapters to find out if it is good or rotten to the core.

When I landed in England I found a nice food place with plenty of plant based options. I went to the pharmacy to buy a neck pillow and a magazine to read in while I was waiting.

The flight was long and even though it was a modern aircraft with a tablet to watch movies from it was still getting boring and I was getting restless.

The plane finally landed at the JFK airport and this was my very first time to ever step on American ground. Getting through immigration is not bad when you have the correct paper work at hand, hell I was not even asked about anything I just walked straight through.

I found a man holding a sign from the agency and a bunch of young girls chatting around and some of them were even singing out loud. My other label from my closet came forward, introverted, it says. I was just standing there watching them without saying a single word. Finally we were put in buses and we headed towards Long Island to the au pair training school. I was sitting next to a girl with a fancy orange hair color and I believe we could have been friends, however she was going to a different state than I was so that never happened.