Becoming an American Girl: Lessons from The Babysitter’s Club

When I arrived in Hiram, Georgia, a small town about forty-five minutes outside of Atlanta, I knew exactly seven words of English: Yes, No, and Sorry, I don’t speak English. With those seven words, I walked into the trailer of Ms. Amos’ third-grade classroom. It was a few weeks after the start of the school year, and a roomful of mostly white faces stared at me. I waited—we all waited—for the teacher to introduce me, but something seemed wrong. Finally, her lips parted open. Nay . . . Nay-hoe-bee? Just as it dawned on me that those sounds were supposed to be my name, Ms. Amos changed her mind and introduced me to the class as Denisse. No one had ever called me by my middle name before, but I didn’t have the words or will to object. Without any say from me, she had just assigned me a new American identity.

Days earlier, I lived in a high-rise apartment in the bustling city of Caracas, Venezuela. Now I was entering a classroom that rested on cinder blocks where no one spoke my language or could even pronounce my first name. I tried to be—or at least appear—brave, which I interpreted as going with the flow even though these changes felt more like a rip current.

Over the next several weeks, I started picking up English—I had no choice but to learn quickly, as the only non-English speaker in the school—but I still struggled to make sense of so much. The Shel Silverstein poems. The Schoolhouse Rock! videos. The square-dancing classes. My classmates’ questions about whether we had cars and computers where I’d grown up. Or why my mother and I had left our home. One thing that did make sense were the weekly trips to the library in the school’s main building. The library was an oasis—a quiet place where you weren’t supposed to interact with others. During one of these trips, I noticed a shelf filled with a rainbow of identically sized spines. I pulled out one of the books at random and examined the smiling girls on the glossy cover. It was then that I discovered the Baby-Sitter’s Club.

Neither my old nor new life resembled the characters’ placid existence in Stoneybrook, Connecticut, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t relate to them. I wasn’t an extroverted tomboy like Kristy, but we were both driven to do well in school. I’d never be as cool as Claudia, but I’d recently dealt with the death of my grandmother, too. Jessi and I both liked to dance and were the only one of “our kind” in our grade. Like Mary Anne, my favorite book was Little Women (or Mujercitas, as I’d first known it). But I connected most with Mallory, the shy bookworm and aspiring writer who wins the prize for Best Overall Fiction in the Sixth Grade. Like Mallory (and Jo before her), I wanted to be a writer. It was comforting to know I had some things in common with these American girls.

Through their lens, the series offered a window into a “normal” American childhood, one where kids grew up in spacious suburban houses, just down the street from their best friends whom they’d known their entire lives, and got into all sorts of hijinks that—at the last minute—always worked out for the best. My family’s move to the United States was the third time I’d found myself navigating a new school and making new friends, but more than ever before, our lives pulsed with uncertainty. My mother did not have a job and wasn’t legally allowed to work; our visas would expire in six months; our housing situation (in which we shared a bedroom) was temporary. I was losing faith in the childhood assumption that “everything would be okay.” For the BSC girls, there was a guaranteed sense of belonging and safety that I increasingly envied. Yet something seemed odd about the series’ very premise: twelve-year-old girls running a successful babysitting business. Children were just supposed to help their families and neighbors, but I was learning the American way was entrepreneurial and individualistic (even if I didn’t yet know those words). Had that been part of the reason why we had come here?

The BSC series showed me a glimpse of the American Dream we had traded our old lives for. In the BSC world, families were nuclear. They spent most of their free time with each other, at home. And outside of family, their lives were apparently defined by work. In Venezuela, I had been born into a household composed of my mother, grandmother, and uncle. Our next-door neighbors were my godparents. The downstairs neighbors were lifelong family friends. Most weekends, we would pack the car and leave the city for a small beach town, where I splashed in a pool or the sea while the adults drank beers and played dominoes, salsa always playing in the background. Weekdays, my single mother went back to work and I went back to school. If she was busy, my uncle might pick me up from school, my grandmother might feed me lunch, or my godmother might play with me. But now she and I were on our own. If we had left Venezuela, it had to be because life in America was going to be better, but the BSC world didn’t seem inherently better—just different.

With each book I devoured, I learned not just new vocabulary and grammar, but entirely new cultural concepts. Pen pals, themed school dances, summer jobs, snow days, roller rinks, sleepovers—these were the things I should expect to experience now that I was becoming an American girl. I didn’t always perfectly understand what I read, but I mastered the art of context clues, inferring meaning from the combination of the known and unknown. As a result, I grew comfortable with ambiguity and learned to trust my instincts. It was a skill that easily translated beyond the page and into my new life. When a boy handed me a folded note with the words I love you written inside or my classmates all giggled at the same line from Where the Sidewalk Ends, I had to react quickly, taking in every bit of information available before deciding whether to smile or not. I couldn’t pause to consult a dictionary or encyclopedia—every minute of the day required being a close reader of myself and my surroundings.

For the BSC girls, there was a guaranteed sense of belonging and safety that I increasingly envied. 

Even as months went by, my reality was no closer to resembling the one depicted in the books. At home, my mother discussed immigration laws, her declining savings, and the potential benefits—and real risks—of obtaining fake papers to work. It was confusing, trying to make sense of two conflicting truths: If the United States was a wealthy “land of opportunity” while Venezuela was an unstable “developing country” (I’d grown up overhearing talk of coups, corruption, and crime), then how come we were worse off here? I was starting to doubt whether my mother had made the right decision, but given how anxious she seemed all the time, I kept my thoughts to myself. Instead, I retreated into books, expanding from the BSC series into the words of Lois Lowry, Beverly Cleary, and Judy Bloom. Like the BSC gang, recurring characters like Ramona Quimby and Anastasia Krupnik became my friends. I discovered new favorites like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and looked forward to each new issue of American Girl Magazine. But even as I fell in love with the English language and the written word, I wished the lives of these girls didn’t read so much like fantasy.

One day, I received an invitation for my first sleepover party from my (real) friend Bethany, who was turning nine. It was a chance to finally experience something I’d read about—that is, if I got approval from my mother, who was skeptical of the idea of children sleeping away from their homes. She insisted on picking me up before the sleepover part of the sleepover began while I begged her to reconsider, trying to persuade her that this was a thing American kids did. (This was not a compelling argument for an immigrant parent, I soon learned.) Finally, I pulled the last card I had: My birthday was also that weekend—didn’t I deserve to do something fun? My mother sighed, agreeing to consider letting me spend the night, but only after having a conversation with Bethany’s parents. The only problem was that my mother didn’t speak much English.

That Saturday afternoon, my mother drove me to Bethany’s house, stopping on the way to buy a gift that was appropriately discounted without looking like it. We rang the doorbell and were ushered into the foyer. My mother held on to my overnight backpack while I set our gift in the pile by the fireplace and joined the other girls, all the while keeping an eye on my mother as she somehow struck a conversation with Bethany’s. How was it possible for them to talk for so long? After an eternity, my mother called out my name. Naihobe! It almost sounded unfamiliar in this new environment. I rushed to her side, hoping my friends weren’t confused by this other name, hoping Bethany’s mother had passed the test. Pórtate bien, my mother said, leaning down to kiss my forehead and handing me my bag. My heart filled with excitement.

Being at Bethany’s house was like entering the world of the BSC—I was finally part of a group of American girls doing American things. The entire basement floor was our territory. We feasted on unlimited snacks and soda. We snapped Polaroids and drew on Doodle Bears. We watched The Adventures of Mary-Kate & Ashley. It was the most fun I’d had in months. Eventually, we were called upstairs—it was time for cake. In the dining room, a huge frosted cake glowed beneath the flicker of nine candles. We gathered around Bethany, sang for her, clapped for her as she blew out the flames. Moments later, Bethany’s father descended from the stairs carrying a wrapped box in his arms. We held our breath and practically gasped when the gift was revealed: a beautiful American Girl doll, blonde and blue-eyed and dressed just like Bethany.

While we stood around stuffing our faces with cake, I let it slip to Bethany that my birthday was the following day. Perhaps even shy bookworms needed a little attention sometimes. It’s Denisse’s birthday tomorrow! she called out to the room. All eyes were suddenly on me. Questions about what I was doing to celebrate followed. Oh nothing, I tried to say as nonchalantly as possible, but no one wanted to accept that as an answer. How could I tell them the truth? That I was supposed to do my homework and help my mother clean the house we shared with two other families. That maybe they would sing me Feliz Cumpleaños. That I, too, longed for an American Girl doll custom made to look like me, but knew better than to ask for something so expensive. Bethany’s mother pulled me aside to apologize for not having a present for me, which only embarrassed me more. I was sorry I’d drawn any attention to myself.

Later that night, as all the girls around me fell asleep, I thought about how I was playing a supporting role in Bethany’s American birthday story but would not have one of my own. I stared at the ceiling, tucked into my borrowed sleeping bag, wondering why this sleepover felt different than the ones in the BSC. But it was not the sleepover that was different—it was me. I remembered one BSC book where Mallory’s family struggles financially after her father is laid off from his job as a corporate lawyer. Worried that her family may lose their house, she starts babysitting rich kids for extra cash. But she feels out of place in their mansion. Seeing their privilege up close makes her feel poor and inadequate—much like how I was feeling. By the end of the book, though, not only does Mallory’s father find another job, but he explains to her that he’d been receiving severance pay all along and they’d never been at risk of losing their house. I didn’t think my own family’s problems would be resolved so swiftly.

It had never occurred to me that I wasn’t reflected in the BSC and other books I read because I did see parts of myself in the characters—but only parts. There were never any scenes of girls translating for their parents, being teased for the food their parents packed for them, or much less worrying about things like immigration raids. The characters’ problems were so simple, yet received so much attention. It was the same with my new friends, all middle-class white girls who had never met someone born outside of Georgia—much less the United States—until I came along. What did they really know about me, especially compared to what I knew about them? That night at Bethany’s house, the differences between our lives became more palpable, and I began to suspect that becoming an American girl wasn’t going to be as easy as simply inhabiting the point of view of a default character. No one in Stoneybrook—or Hiram—shared my experiences. I was an immigrant.

The next day, I was the first girl to be picked up. I said goodbye to my friends and went back to my regular life, these new thoughts percolating in my precocious little mind, and picked up a pen. So much was out of my control, but I wanted to be more than a passive reader, more than a sidekick without say. I drew on my favorite aspects of each BSC character—Mallory’s love of creative writing, Claudia’s artsiness, Kristy’s enterprise—and drafted, illustrated, and bound a story in my newly acquired language. A creation of my own. A gift to myself. The characters were children who were not distinguished by their ethnicity, class, or nationality; I didn’t want anyone to feel excluded from a world of my making. After all, Ann M. Martin had created a very specific world for the BSC girls in which kids like me did not appear. Their lives were presented as “all-American,” but who got to define what that meant?

That weekend, it occurred to me for the first time that maybe I could have a say. On the last page of my bound story I included an “About the Author” section where I described myself in my own words and called myself by my full name: Naihobe Denisse Gonzalez. It was the start of a lifelong purpose: I would be the author of my own American stories.

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