Original girl gang comes alive
I picked up my first copy of “The BabySitters Club,” in 2009, from my elementary school’s Scholastic Book Fair. I remember asking my parents for money a week in advance and browsing the website’s titles every day leading up to the fair. I chose correctly.
As an only child who waited and waited for a younger brother, these books may not have given me what I wanted, but they gave me what I needed: five older sisters. Kristy, Claudia, Mary Anne, Stacey and Dawn were my best friends and my family, and I so desperately wanted to be a part of their club, if not my own.
I couldn’t wait till the day I no longer needed a babysitter and instead, I would be the babysitter; it was a rite of passage that every BSC stan lives for.
The awardwinning books, written by Ann M. Martin, were adapted into
“the Baby-sitters Club” (PG) is now streaming on Netflix.
a 10episode series on Netflix, released July 3. Naturally I spent a weekend bingewatching the show about girls who create a hotline for babysitting jobs. How could I not? My favorite girl gang from fictional Stoneybrook, Conn., was onscreen and I was in quarantine; free time was not an issue.
Eleven years later, I still knew the number: 5553231.
Reading the books made me want to be a teenager, and watching the show made me want to be a child again. I used to live vicariously through all the beach trips, sibling rivalries, whitepicketfence houses and pizza parties that I read about. I narrated those cliche moments right into the story of my life. And while the books fell under the traditional comingofage story category, they also made me feel empowered and taught me that women can, and should, be entrepreneurs.
I’m at a point in my life, as I’m sure others are, where I’m constantly finding safety in memories of a world that I might never know again. “The BabySitters Club” was so much more than just fictional reading. Martin helped raise me, along with an entire generation of young girls.
This show made me proud to be part of this fandom and even prouder to be a part of Gen Z. It makes me want to pick up the phone and call my girlfriends and tell them how much I love them (shoutout to my girls, if you are reading this). “The BabySitters Club” books, and now TV show, will forever make me appreciate the power, importance and wholesomeness of my own girl gang.