American Horror Story: My Son's First Daycare
March 13, 2024
In 2023, we sent our son to daycare for the first time.
This is the true, unembellished story of the demise of that daycare facility.
The events that follow took place between January and August 2023, and all names have been changed.
For the first year of my son’s life (henceforth referred to as The Baby), we didn’t have childcare. This was due to a number of factors, like a nationwide childcare shortage exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and also our general incompetence as first-time parents. We didn’t realize we’d need to get The Baby on a daycare waiting list while he was still in utero.
When The Baby was around five months old, I started a new full-time job working from home. My husband also worked full-time from home. We couldn’t find childcare and our closest family members lived a 10-hour drive away, so we worked to coordinate our schedules every day and just kinda passed the baby back and forth whenever one of us had a break.
Hot tip: I cannot recommend this setup unless it’s really, truly your only option. We were living and working in a 900 square foot, one bedroom house with two yappy dogs and an infant. If you’re wondering how we got through it, I genuinely don’t know. I’ve blacked most of it out (one benefit of sleep deprivation).
We finally found a daycare spot for The Baby just after his first birthday. It was a small in-home daycare, less than a dozen kids, about 10 minutes from our new house. And though our new place was still a rental, we had enough space to have a dedicated office instead of two desks squeezed into the living room, and The Baby could have his own room instead of sleeping in a crib pushed up against the foot of our bed. It really felt like things were coming together. I might have even said as much out loud, jinxing us to eight subsequent months of absolute chaos.
It was immediately apparent that the head teacher, a woman in her mid-40s who we’ll call Tammy, was in charge of the day-to-day operation of the daycare. Tammy had teenage kids at home and was a bit of a granola type, which is par for the course for Berkeley. She was visibly enamored with The Baby from the start, and we liked that. At first.
The owner (who we’ll call Margeaux) set up our tour and made the final decision about whether The Baby would be admitted, but was otherwise MIA. Margeaux was also a woman in her mid-40s, and I wasn't sure what to make of her from the start. She had the air of an eccentric rich person, which is also kinda par for the course for Berkeley. She had advanced degrees in child development and had been running the daycare center for upwards of 10 years at this point, so we figured it was fine that her vibe was a little bit weird. You’re not gonna click with everyone, right?
The first red flag was that daycare was supposed to officially start at 8:30am, but at least two or three times a week none of the staff would show up until closer to 9, leaving a bunch of parents & children milling around on the front sidewalk. I took dropoff. I was late for work a lot. But it took us so long to find this daycare that we both tried to write it off as maybe just a California thing? We’re not from here! And we didn’t complain.
The teachers at the daycare would send us daily updates and photos through an app, but Tammy would also text my husband and me outside of the app. First it was innocuous. She’d tell us she saw that blueberries were on sale at the grocery store, just FYI, she knew The Baby loved blueberries. It seemed well intentioned, so we mostly didn’t mind.
Then Tammy started sending us much longer texts in which she made repeated reference to “our” baby. How “our” baby was doing with developmental milestones. How much the older kids were benefiting from taking care of “our” baby. We did not love this! But we still didn’t complain. I joked to Chris that maybe she wanted to steal our son, because he is admittedly a Very Good Baby (and I am not biased).
This is a still from the movie "Raising Arizona," in which Nicolas Cage kidnaps a baby.
You should watch it.
At this point, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen Margeaux, but suddenly she started showing up to the daycare every day. Then we learned Tammy got her hours cut, down to four days a week from five. Tammy did not take this well. She reacted by sending us a very lengthy text in which she outlined that she’d no longer be working Fridays and wanted to warn us that she didn’t trust the other, younger teachers to watch “our” baby without her supervision. She offered to watch “our” baby at her house on Fridays until she got her hours restored. For free.
Yes I know what you’re thinking, this is where we absolutely should have said something. With the benefit of hindsight, I see that too. But frankly it seemed more like an interpersonal dispute between Margeaux and Tammy, and we really didn’t want to get involved. We did not take Tammy up on her offer for what I think are pretty obvious reasons. She and the daycare parted ways shortly after.
At this point, we started seeing Margeaux almost every day. She told us she was impressed with The Baby’s progress in adjusting to daycare, especially because she never wanted to admit him in the first place but Tammy really pushed for it. And we were like...okay? Why would you tell us that? To our faces? Then she told us he needed to go down to one nap a day, which was appropriate for a child at his developmental stage — something that conflicted with everything we’d read. When pressed on this further, it became clear she actually had no idea how old The Baby was.
So obviously at this point we didn’t like Margeaux at all, but then almost as soon as she appeared, she hired a new head teacher (we can call her Krystal) and vanished again. Krystal was a woman in her 30s who’d been working at her young son’s forest school before coming to our daycare. We really liked her. She had her shit together (the place started routinely opening on time!), and also did not seem like she wanted to flee the country with our child under the cover of night.
With Margeaux MIA again, the daycare had four or five employees, mostly college students. We developed a good relationship with them and Krystal, and over time they started telling us stuff. Like when Margeaux wasn’t around, it was hard to reach her by email or phone — sometimes for up to a week. One of them told us the reason she wasn’t around: she was opening a second daycare facility while barely running the first. But Krystal seemed to be holding it together, as much as she possibly could without the authority to hire, fire, or pay the bills.
Then one day we got a text from Krystal. She let us know two of the employees we’d gotten to know and trust would be quitting, effective immediately, because their paychecks bounced. This got back to Margeaux, who returned to town to hold a parents’ meeting.
At the parents’ meeting, Margeaux blamed the “payroll issue” on the fact that she didn’t trust online banking, vaguely referencing potential identity theft, saying she preferred to do it all in person. She told us that one of the teachers was still planning to quit, but she’d convinced the other to stay.
Then another parent asked about the daycare inspector who’d been coming around to investigate, and we were like uhhhh, what daycare inspector?
Margeaux said Tammy had lodged some fraudulent complaints with the licensing board, and she was sure they’d be found baseless. We also learned at this meeting that Tammy had tried to stage a coup when her hours got cut and offered to watch everyone’s kids for free, so we were willing to give Margeaux the benefit of the doubt. Haha! I know! I hear myself too!
Margeaux also told us that the licensing board would be sending home some forms we needed to sign, because legally they had to make us all aware that there had been an investigation and what the outcome was. In mid-July, we received the forms.
It’s at this point my dumb ass realized daycare licensing violations are a public record, so I checked up on our daycare facility. And you’re not gonna believe this, or maybe at this point you will, our daycare had thirteen of them. If you’re wondering how many citations it takes to close a daycare in California, I still don’t know, but I feel like maybe it should be fewer than thirteen.
The dates for a couple of the complaints lined up with Tammy’s departure, but she had filed maybe two or three total. Certainly nowhere close to thirteen of them. The complaints dated back years and comprised everything from unbalanced student to teacher ratios, to the fact that Margeaux was not on-site the required 80% of the time (a requirement I had not previously known about).
Oh, and did I mention at this point we’d discovered that Margeaux’s second daycare facility she spent so much time at was in Knoxville fucking Tennessee? She wasn’t opening a second daycare on the other side of town or something. She was commuting across the goddamn country.
At this point we finally decided to start looking for a new daycare. We absolutely should have done it sooner, but we didn’t want to tear The Baby away from his little group of friends, even if the daycare itself was a shitshow.
So we were already in the process of getting The Baby out of this place, and then one day my husband showed up for pickup and the power was out. Just to the daycare. The rest of the block had electricity. And the teachers told him what he’d already suspected: they were pretty sure Margeaux didn’t pay the power bill.
We emailed Margeaux to ask about it and cc’ed all the other parents. No response. The Baby continued to attend daycare while we looked for a replacement, but every place we were interested in either had a yearlong waitlist or was a fancy Montessori program that cost $3,000 a month.
The following Sunday evening, we received a text from Krystal. She let us know that she was dealing with a family emergency and wouldn’t be able to make it to work the next day, and nobody was available to cover her shift, leaving the other teacher on duty to handle nine toddlers by herself. Margeaux was not responding to text or email, so Krystal made the decision to close the daycare on Monday.
By Monday afternoon, nobody had heard back from Margeaux yet. We had no idea if daycare would be open on Tuesday. We emailed Margeaux and all the other parents, asking what was up and if there was a plan to address the obvious staffing shortage, and also hey just following up on the fact that you apparently forgot to pay the power bill last week?
After 24 hours of no response, we sent one final email to Margeaux letting her know we’d be pulling The Baby from the program effective immediately. That’s when she finally replied to the other email chain about the staffing issues and the power outage. I’ll let her words speak for themselves (emphasis mine):
"I am very sorry about the need to shut down. I do feel the situation could have been handled differently with this and the PG&E [electric] issue. We had lost power during the day, which was up and working again by 5pm that evening. We had been on a payment arrangement with PG&E, and something went amiss. Yet, being summer and with the gas stove, we had all the power we needed for the children, so this did not present an issue."
Now look, I know people tend to overuse the term “gaslighting” these days, but telling me it’s not an issue that you didn’t pay the electric bill to a daycare center because it’s summer and the kids can just play outside? That’s some Gaslighting Hall of Fame shit.
My husband replied on the other, private email chain that we’d still be pulling The Baby from the program, but would be finishing out the week to say goodbye to his friends and teachers. Meanwhile, I contacted the licensing board and filed two additional complaints: one that she failed to pay the power bill, and one letting them know she still wasn’t on-site 80% of the time and probably never would be because she had another daycare facility in Tennessee. The licensing board called me within 24 hours for more information, presumably because the person on the other end recognized Margeaux’s name and was like, “Not this bitch again.”
Just for good measure, I also contacted the licensing board in the state of Tennessee to say, “Hey this woman has 13 daycare licensing violations in California and I figure the state licensing departments don’t talk to each other so I just wanted to let you know.” I also wrote a review on the local message board where we found the daycare in the first place. The moderators of the site tried to tell me they don’t allow “negative reviews” to which I responded: I sent my kid to a place with 13 licensing violations based on the glowing reviews available on your website. My review was subsequently approved without edits.
By the end of the week, Margeaux emailed us all to say she’d be shutting the facility at the end of the month. We flew my in-laws out indefinitely while we looked for a new daycare, because The Baby was 18 months old and extremely mobile and passing him back and forth during the day was no longer an option.
I genuinely thought that was the end of the story, until last month when we received an email out of the blue from Margeaux, more than six months after our last contact with her, sent to all the former staff and families, with the subject line, “Peace and Happiness.” A brief excerpt:
“I've been thinking about each of you and wanted to send out an email to let you know that you are all in my thoughts. I regret that things had not been handled better when I was there, and I feel bad about that…I realize now that holding on only led to the unraveling of all we had once valued, known and loved. And I sincerely apologize for that…The process was a hard lesson for me. In it, I lost quite a bit. The Financial loss was one thing, but the loss to the sense of who I was and who I believed I could be was immeasurable.”
She signed the email as Margot, which she calls her “new and more authentic self,” and which I call the Rachel Leviss Crisis Comms Strategy.
The Baby has been attending a new daycare since August. The owner is there every day. She has no licensing violations.
As for the moral of our story? Daycare licensing records are public in every state. Take this information with you and use it when necessary.
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