Do You Mind Paying Your Nanny a Living Wage?

I guess it had to happen eventually.

I was a nanny for ten years. I have been a mother for nearly three. Inevitably, my loyalty would have to cross the divide, falling decisively on one side or the other.

A friend told me today what she pays her nanny, who has a degree in child development and years of experience.  Her nanny is a grown woman and lives in NYC, where it costs about ten dollars for a bottle of coke and the selling of a kidney to buy a monthly Metrocard. I expressed surprise before I had the chance to stifle my reaction. Or perhaps I didn't try hard enough because I was annoyed, which was decidedly immature and impolite on my part.

But I have been down this road before. Every time mothers start to complain about the cost of childcare in the city I have to make a decision: to get into it or to ignore it. Sometimes I want to shout:

"You know I am right here, people? You know that my side job for ten years was caring for the young of others? You know that you are all crazy and ungrateful and selfish, right?" But I don't. They cannot comprehend. It isn't worth the argument.

My husband and I can't afford much childcare; my toddler is approaching three and we have only just now enlisted the services of a sitter for 4 hours a week. Still, I pay the going rate, despite my babysitter quoting me a lower figure.

Because I know. I know what sitters and nannies do and I know how hard they work. I also know that people think that if one wears dress shoes to work, one has a "real" job, and if one wears sweatpants (in order to chase after a toddler all day) one has a "pretend" job. Parents seem to develop instant amnesia the second they hand a child over to a sitter, forgetting how incredibly hard their task is in raising kids.

Let's take a look at what a nanny does every day:

1. She arrives at a stranger's house with a smile on her face and a stability that cannot waiver from one hour to the next: her job is to be emotionally available, loving, a guiding influence and a boundary-setter.

2. She must be BORED for many hours of the day. Childcare is tremendously rewarding but it can also be the loneliest of tasks in our segregated modern world. She must summon emotional courage and stamina in order to endure the sheer number of hours of playing with a child that she faces every day.

3. A nanny gets sunburned every summer. She schleps tired children over her arm, she pushes strollers over long hills and city sidewalks, she stands for hours awaiting a child at the top of a burning hot slide. However slathered in sunblock she is, a nanny gets burned every summer. As a bonus, there is never anywhere to pee on those playgrounds.

4. A nanny soothes. A nanny chats. A nanny wipes soiled bottoms. A nanny dries tears and sings lullabies. A nanny rocks a child to sleep. A nanny reads with her best character voices out loud from the same books over and over. A nanny bathes and applies baby lotion and puts on diapers and sits with a child who can't sleep, stroking a sweaty head. A nanny cuts the crusts off of bread. A nanny cleans the kitchen if she gets an hour during nap time. A nanny parents.

5. A nanny forges a bond with a stranger in order to give that little stranger the comfort and love that their parents are unable to provide while they earn a living (or in some cases go to the gym or to the movies or go on a date or clean the house.)

It is in many ways analogous to prostitution: nannies offer up their bodies and souls to make an hourly rate; they pretend to love sometimes unlovable children because that's their job. More often than not, they pretend hard enough that they end up loving them for real.

A nanny is someone who knows intuitively and through experience how to take charge, how to love, how to nurture and how to hold a tiny sticky hand even when she is desperate for five minutes alone, just five minutes to urinate or have a snack.

So anyway, my friend got mad. Real mad. She sensed my surprise and all of her insecurities came tumbling out in a volcanic heap of mother exhaustion. She threw every bit of pent-up disapproval she had for my mothering at me. She "disagreed" with my choice to let our child co-sleep, she "disagreed" with not having a completely routinized day, she "disagreed" with me that I didn't like the idea of cry-it-out, she would never let a child stay up late, etc...

It was pretty awful. It turns out that like every other issue to do with parenting, how much you pay your nanny is a hot button item.

I don't regret the loss of the friendship. Sometimes things just don't work out. I also couldn't care less what she thinks of my mothering. What I do care about is that mothers aren't the only ones who are tired, defensive, much maligned and unappreciated. Those people you see caring for kids who aren't their mothers and fathers? Those are nannies and daycare workers and babysitters. And they have to pay for the Metrocards that bring them to work every day to care for other people's young.

If you live in an expensive city, you should be paying your nanny a wage appropriate for the cost of living in that city, and appropriate for the exhausting physical and emotional effort of her job. You should be making sure your nanny has food and drink, you should be asking your nanny how her day was and not just if the kids are all right. She is a person who lives in your home for much of the day, and therefore she is family. And if you don't respect her needs, she will find a family who does.

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Across the Divide

This nurse was a prim Newfoundland dog, called Nana...There is a room in the basement of Miss Fulsom's school where the nurses wait. They sat on forms, while Nana lay on the floor, but that was the only difference. They affected to ignore her as of an inferior social status to themselves, and she despised their light talk. -Peter Pan

After ballet class today, the nannies were talking. One little charge wouldn't eat anything but pasta, the other refused to sit down in the bath, that sort of talk. Chit-chat. No different from the chit-chat one hears among mothers conversing about the world's most boring topic: their own children's foibles. They strolled their charges toward the elevator as my daughter ran ahead and pushed the button. I kept hoping that the elevator would take long enough to arrive for us all to share it. I really wanted to take part in the tedious nanny chat.

I have always wanted in, but no matter which side of the divide I've been on, I've never managed it. When I was a nanny, most of the other nannies assumed I was a mother, because the tables were turned and I, being white, was the minority in the group. To be white meant I was a mother, surely, and therefore an invader, spy and judge on the playground. There are other Caucasian nannies, but I would estimate that we make up about 10-20 percent of the Manhattan nanny population.

Somehow the mothers always knew I wasn't one of them, either. I wore no wedding ring, I usually wore sweatpants and the rumpled look of someone who had arrived to take the children at 7:30 am. Or they knew because they knew the real mothers and fathers. Conversations with parents were as abbreviated and curt as those with the nannies, try as I might to pick up a thread of dialogue and sew myself into their tapestry.

Maybe I'm just not very good at conversation and it has nothing to do with social status. But I can't help thinking that appearances seem always to matter so much to people. Assumptions cling despite our efforts to break down walls and share something of ourselves, to let the other person who is spending the often lonely day of childcare know that you want to be friends and make the day go faster together.

I speak only from Manhattan experience. Perhaps being guarded is a survival trait ground into our bones here, our very DNA mutating in our cells to harden our exteriors that we may survive our underground commutes and near daily-run-ins with people screaming at us on the bus or with cars determined to flatten us with one quick right turn. Perhaps people here are very tired and it is far easier to assume that a person sitting next to you on the playground is your enemy because it saves you the trouble of vulnerability, of effort, of making small talk with someone new.

I have some friends from the time my child was a newborn, a "mommy group" that used to meet regularly. I consider them my friends, but I have been troubled at times whenever the conversation turns to the topic of babysitters and nannies. Can you BELIEVE the cost of sitters? Can you believe they charge you if you are home, just getting your child used to them -- I mean, we are right there! Can you believe the base charge the agency has for New Year's Eve? Yes, yes, and yes. Childcare is hard work, and mothers should know this better than anyone.What is it that hardens the hearts of so many mothers on the topic of sitters? What makes reasonable pay for an exhausting job that demands so many skills so difficult to fathom?

On the flip side, why can't a nanny of the same or a different race let me in? Has she had so many bad experiences with her employers that I have no fighting chance of becoming friends? (Perhaps.) How much do I long to tell these nannies, who take their charges to ballet class each week, that I know how long their day is, that I know how relentless and dull it can be, that I want my child to be friends with their charges and I want to be friends with them. We are all in the embarrassing position of trying to get toddlers to "gallop" in a circle. We are all mortified when the teacher comes in and sings the "Duckie Song" and the Thumbkin Song" and scolds us when our child leaves the tedium of the circle in pursuit of some actual exercise and adventure.

Maybe it's that my own assumptions are incorrect. Maybe no one else is mortified by our teacher's antics. Maybe no one else does have need of as much human interaction as I do on a daily basis. Before I had a child I think I was about the same, but it's possible my need for community has increased since spending most of my hours alone with a toddler. And when I was a nanny I certainly longed to share conversation and resources with other nannies and parents.

I did form a few fast friendships with other nannies and some mothers over the years. I crossed paths with people from both sides of the divide who were willing to talk about interesting things: books they had read or their fantasies of where they'd like to live or what their dream job would be or how much they couldn't wait to get a haircut. I treasured those intimacies.

Childcare should not be as lonely as it is. Something has gone terribly wrong in our part of the world, where the work place and the home is divided by an iron wall. If that system is too entrenched to tackle, perhaps we can at least work toward a bridge among caregivers. I'm willing to talk about the superiority of rice pasta over white flour with any nanny or mother as a starting point. Just let me in and one day we could be dishing about our wildest dreams or our most frustrating experiences, domestic and otherwise.

Doesn't everyone need more close friends?

As my daughter and I meandered home after class, she spotted a black nanny and her white charge: a little girl in pigtails of about four years old. They were holding hands, waiting for the light to change before crossing the street. I, meanwhile, was making a mad dash through the crosswalk with my child in my arms. My daughter pointed and said, "That Mommy and her little girl are waiting for the light."

"Yes," I said. "That Mommy is much more responsible than yours."

Alice B. Woodward, 1923 illustration of Michael riding Nana.

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Fine Linen

A few weeks ago I was visiting a former client on the Upper East Side.

Her older daughter is in school, but her younger is about my child's age. My wild nymph ran past the little girl, who was so porcelain pristine in her silky cotton dress and cashmere cardigan that I was afraid the wind stirred by my child might knock her over.  My daughter was dying to see the toys in the nursery, which is a Neverland of wonders of huge quantity and variety. The nursery itself feels like its own country. That it manages to contain the toys and the play house and the play kitchen and two beds and has piles of the softest carpet and not one but two life-like rocking horses with saddles and stirrups makes it a fairyland.

When I entered the front hallway, its walls lined with pencil sketches of sailing boats and maps of Maine, and then proceeded to the living room with its Sotheby's air of old money collectibles and upper crust curtain patterns and of course, chintz wallpaper, I was reminded of a famous quote of F. Scott Fitzgerald's. It is apparently often misquoted as having been uttered in conversation with Hemingway, but it comes from a short story called "The Rich Boy." (I looked it up.)

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.

I'm going to take a deep breath and assert that I believe this is largely true. Try as I might, I can think of no exception to this rule whom I ever came across among the wealthy clients I served. Not one.

We had a chat, my old client and I. I was there, actually, to pick up some hand-me-downs which she had set aside for my daughter. We hadn't spoken in a long time, but she sent me an e-mail announcing that she had a bag of "gently used" clothing for a little girl. And to be honest, I was surprised. And to my relief, I was grateful rather than annoyed. (She has made no pretense of "friendship" so one might view the gesture as patronizing.)

Have you ever tried to capture air in a net? That's what having a conversation with her was like. I couldn't help but wonder if she reserved her deep reflections and intimate emotions, even entertaining anecdotes from her day, for people who weren't "the help." I couldn't help but create several alternate identities for her, so desperate was I to put any identity behind the mask of vague politeness that she wore.

I groped for a few topics I thought might work.  How was she enjoying the brief respite from the freezing winter this year? Were they going on any vacations soon? Did her older daughter still have the books I gave her when I left my post? The conversation trickled like blood in a corpse.

Affect is a funny thing. It can both mask and reflect character. In my earlier years I frequently confused the nonchalance and ease of the wealthy with intellect and confidence. They must know something I didn't, talk about important things when in the right company, have access to books before they were published. In fact, they were nonchalant simply because they had no worldly cares. And perhaps because of that, no interests, worldly or otherwise. And I am sure I never saw any of them reading a book.

How I envied whatever those embroidered, ironed pillowcases and lilac soaps seemed to endow their owners with. I didn't know what it was, only that it was out of reach, formidable and invisible. I wanted so much to understand what I must be missing. In truth, there was only the decoration. It was just like wandering the elaborate set of a play or film.  If you got too close, if you examined the linen and the monograms and maritime maps very closely, you would see that they were merely props and a facade of a hollow interior, like a street front in an old Hollywood film.

It was wonderful to lie on those soft quilts as I tucked children into bed. Every knickknack was a luxury, every toy looked like an illustration in an old book. But eventually the air grew stale and I wasn't sure I could get enough oxygen to breathe. And then the parents would finally come home and it was late and I was tired and we fumbled with money the way a prostitute and her client might, except I daresay a prostitute is never asked for change to make up for three dollars over-payment. And the father would rarely be allowed even to glance at me. He would make his (often) drunken way to the bedroom while the mother interrogated me about the children's baths and bedtimes, homework and meals.

I would exhale in the elevator down to the lobby and say "goodnight" to the doorman. When I arrived at the street I would turn the corner, brace against the midnight cold, pocket the extra money for cab fare and walk to the nearest subway home.

Why do humans measure their worth by comparison with others? Most of us do it at one time or another. Primates are social. It's got a dark side. When my daughter and I first walked into the apartment that day, she set down a book she had carried with her on the walk. It was a pretty book  -- lushly illustrated with an inviting cover. My client's daughter desperately wanted to hold the book and read it when she noticed it as we were leaving. But the mother was in a hurry to have us out the door, so she cried.

My child and I ran up the avenue. Later, when we got back to our apartment, my daughter breathlessly related the most interesting story of the day to her father. "The little girl wanted to read my book but her Mommy said, 'No, no, no!'" Even the youngest of primates enjoys being envied now and then, particularly when she has just spent an hour envying the very someone who now wants just one thing that she herself possesses.

A scene from Metropolitan, a low budget film that both spoofs and nostalgically idealizes the high budget world of the East Side. 

Related:
http://hungrylittleanimal.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-billowing-tent-on-hill.html

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"An Egg Cup Makes a Very Good Hat"

The poor Wagners* have taken a bit of a beating in my Nanny Notes of late. I have used them to illustrate some of the darker aspects of child-rearing among the very wealthy that I have witnessed repeatedly, mostly on the East Side.

But recently I remembered the egg cups.  I wanted to write about those too, as it is only fair to reveal the kindnesses as well as the slights. (I have plenty more of the latter to share as I have the time to recollect and write.)

My husband and I were married in the fall of 2008. It was a beautiful, early fall that year, as I have previously mentioned. I took the two Wagner girls to their tennis lessons in September and October and lay under a canopy of golden leaves while the rubbery bounce of balls on the tennis courts just beyond the gate induced a near meditative state.

For a glorious 45 minutes I was child-free but on the clock, and as long as there was no incident on the courts requiring my attention, I could ignore the chatter of Park Avenue mothers on surrounding blankets and dream about the wedding approaching at the end of October. I was nursing a labral tear (although I didn't yet know it) but aside from the pain I was floating on the thrill of our late autumn wedding.

I was scribbling vows into a spiral notebook when I took the bus to and from work and I was getting my $99 wedding dress altered to fit perfectly. I didn't want a veil or bridesmaids or flowers. Not that those things aren't beautiful and don't make for lovely forever photos, but they just didn't suit us. We were getting married in an old movie theater that had fallen into disrepair after its heyday in the 1920s. It had once seated a thousand people but the seats had long been torn out and all that remained were a few fading Art Deco touches on the walls, a marquee out front and a crumbling, cavernous space within. The place barely had running water and we had to clean the space, hang our decorations (some strings of white lights and a few balloons and candles) and put soap and toilet paper in the bathrooms in the week leading up to the big day.

A few days before we were to take the train to Philadelphia to begin our week of hands-on location preparation, I was at work, giving Ariana a bath. We were singing together and her mother and older sister were in the other room, working on homework. When I had gotten Ariana into her nightgown and combed her wet curls we emerged and she ran over to her mother and sister. On the table were two wrapped packages. I knew they were for me and they were for the wedding and I felt a tremendous shyness overtake me. I have never been good with presents -- I love pretty new things but I am embarrassed to be the recipient of any sort of token, however large or small.

 I don't know why, perhaps it's in my nature or perhaps some long-forgotten childhood experience turned me off of this particular social exchange. Anyway, in the face of this sudden goodwill from a client who was the source of such consternation to me, I felt an instant guilt for thinking ill of her and her social choices. Here she was, proudly presenting me with something special for my big day! Shame replaced embarrassment as I sat down at their dining room table.

The first box held a beautiful silver frame. I still have it -- I believe it actually holds the one wedding photo we have up in our apartment. Of late I have been writing of silver frames and their uniform ubiquity on the East Side, like soldiers lined up to do battle in a war of Martha Stewart blandness. And yet they are indeed quite beautiful. At least the one given to me by Adelina and her girls was beautiful to me.

The second box held a painting. Ariana's older sister Samantha had drawn a wedding cake and filled in the colors in a wash of beautiful paint. "Congradulashions on your wedding!" it read at the bottom. It's in my wedding book to this day. It matters not one bit how I ultimately felt about the Wagners almost two years later, when I finished working for them. That card and a few photos I have of the girls, not to mention the fancy frame, will always mean a great deal to me. People are complicated. They can be cheating the Whole Foods delivery man of any tip out of anger at the company for charging more money to come to the East Side with over $500 worth of groceries one minute and thanking their nanny lovingly for teaching their children about climate change the next. They can teach their children that status and money and connections are what matter in life on a regular basis and on a particular afternoon take some time to give a token of genuine affection to a virtual stranger in their employ only two months.

After the wedding, I returned to work. The Wagners were getting ready to move back into their renovated showplace off of Fifth Avenue. It was around Thanksgiving, and lush baskets of corn stalks and baby pumpkins overflowed in the lobby 17 floors below. Adelina couldn't wait to get out of the rental space on the slum of Third Avenue and into her newly gilded marble home on Fifth Avenue.

Almost everything was to be new. So what would become of the old wooden side table by the couch and the woven storage baskets and the odd chairs that were slightly worn? Even the set of mother-of pearl-cheese knives in a velvet box was evidently no longer welcome in the Wagner universe. I was selected to be their recipient. I can't remember how Adelina asked me if I wanted her cast-offs, but my husband and I were newlyweds without much money and we could certainly use nearly everything she offered. My husband had recently sold a screenplay and we had used most of that paycheck to finance our relatively modest wedding. Now that I think of it, the very monitor I am looking at as I type this belonged to Adelina.

One cold night in November, my husband came after work to help load the odds and ends into a taxi. We lived just across the park then, but that might as well have been another universe. To the west of Central Park, around 100th Street, there is a group of buildings called Park West Village and while they are perfectly nice, they are institutional, grim looking buildings that date back to a very unfortunate period for New York architecture. I believe our buildings were built as housing projects, and the amount a city cares for the beauty of a housing project is sadly in evidence when one looks at the buildings in our old neighborhood.

Since we lived there, Columbus has become a bit of a shopping mall, with a Sephora and a Whole Foods having moved in and towering modern high-rises overlooking the once down-trodden section of the avenue. Long gone is the dilapidated C-Town grocery store on the corner of 100th, with its sad displays of limp fruit and dusty boxes of graham crackers. Even so, crossing from East to West on the 96th Street transverse (starting around Madison Avenue especially)  is crossing from great luxury to a place where people don't wear Hermes scarves. You re-enter a world of many skin colors and income levels and you leave a world of polished streets and shining sidewalks, marble staircases and fancy doormen.

Oh yes, the egg cups. Adelina asked if I wanted 12 blue porcelain egg cups. I said yes, because why say no? They were so adorable and perplexing. My husband and I lined them up on the top shelf of our insanely tiny kitchen and stared at them, pondering what we would do with them. We would never have 12 people over for eggs. And further, what type of egg were they meant for? They were so little. Too little for poached, we decided, not that we ever poached eggs. Too little for hard-boiled. My husband finally decided they were meant for soft-boiled eggs. He knows about these sorts of things: varieties of egg preparation, from years of watching cooking channels. But he acknowledged they seemed a bit small even for that. Maybe they were for canary eggs? Or those fancy quail eggs they now sell at Whole Foods?

They were the only utterly useless item we kept in our house until we moved years later. We loved their uselessness and their uniformity. We loved how pretty and silly they all looked lined up together. We loved having a visual punch line for guests. But mostly I loved the cups because they represented the softer side of the East Side. I suppose one could argue that giving your cast-offs to the help is not an act of kindness, but even that Adelina didn't want to put things on the trash heap just because she was finished with them meant that her soul was not, perhaps, completely lost. She told me it mattered to her that these things find a home and that she was thrilled for newlyweds to have them. And I chose to believe her.

My remaining time with the Wagners was punctuated by more ups and downs: ups mostly with the girls, downs mostly with their mother as she settled back into life on Fifth Avenue. Ultimately my realization that my beloved Ariana was lost to the forces of Nightingale Bamford and Hampton Jitneys broke my heart and led me on a path to finding new employment.

But the kindness and humanity of people I feel are mostly lost is particularly powerful. It's like Westley in The Princess Bride being mostly dead. The difference between mostly dead and all dead is all the difference in the world. Just ask Miracle Max.

I don't know where those egg cups went. I fantasize that toddlers of all income levels and colors and New York City neighborhoods are using them for hats, just as Eloise does. I love a good bit of irony.

Eloise in her hat wear of choice. 

*All names have been changed. A lot.

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The Soul Hunter

September 2008, Notes from a Nanny's Diary...

It's a Thursday afternoon in late September. Autumn arrived an hour ago, very suddenly, the way it does sometimes. I have finally persuaded little Ariana Wagner, 4 years old, all curls and blue eyes and peach skin, to put on a cardigan before we stroll to the library branch two blocks west of her 17th floor apartment overlooking Third Avenue. She has agreed to a cream cashmere sweater with pearl buttons down the front and lace at the cuffs. We place it over her pink fairy princess dress and ride down to the enormous lobby. To the left of the concierge desk is a swimming pool and an exercise room. To the right is a large closet in which to hold the countless packages that arrive daily for the residents of the luxury high rise.

The Wagners are slumming it here. They are renting while their Fifth Avenue home is under renovation and it won't be ready until the first of December. Adelina sighs when she tells me of the struggles of squeezing two girls into one bedroom and having only two bathrooms and no powder room for the entirety of Autumn. I nod sympathetically as she complains that their espresso maker won't fit on the marble kitchen counter. I wonder if a few laps in the swimming pool would help her unwind.

We walk across 96th Street and a sharp wind picks up. It plays with Ariana's curls as she runs ahead of me. She stops to grab a small broken tree branch on the sidewalk that must have snapped in the wind and fallen to the ground. Stick in hand, she dances toward our destination, looking every inch a bohemian Tasha Tudor illustration. She is adorned by the emblems of youth: sticks, tutus, windblown disarray and an easy lack of self-awareness that cloaks her like a magic veil bestowed for a precious few years.

She generates a lot of admiring stares and I bristle protectively as a woman calls out to tell her how pretty her dress is. (Now that I have my own little girl, I know even more the invasive dagger a shouted compliment can be to a young child, a private moment shattered can feel like anything but goodwill.) Ariana is a wood nymph skipping toward the public library.

Once there, we choose the Story of Babar and she settles into my lap. Should I skip the part about the hunter shooting Babar's mother? Should I shatter her East Side fortress with a fusillade of bullets? I decide to read the story as is.

Children's eyes actually do widen. When Ariana stares at the picture of Babar's fallen mother, her body wet with tears from her baby elephant's eyes, I realize I have broken our trust. She asks me to read that part of the story again, a sure sign I have erred mightily. She asks me for a third reading, and trying to repair the damage to her psyche, I insist we move ahead to the next part of the story, in which Babar runs off to the "city" and makes an almost comically speedy recovery as he's doted on by a little old lady with deep pockets and a fondness for elephants.

Both Ariana and I are relieved to be ensconced in Babar's new cosmopolitan life. He has a bathtub, a bed, and a wardrobe quite literally fit for an elephant. He travels to the countryside in his own red sports car. Babar has landed in a nest of material comforts and evenings with wealthy intellectuals, and in addition to the companionship of his sugar mama his days are filled with self-improvement and the finer things.

Ariana asks to go back to the scene with the hunter. I oblige. I tell her elephants are sometimes shot by heartless, bad people but that no elephants will ever be shot on the Upper East Side. I tell her that her mommy will be home at five when we return and that while I make dinner she will tell her own mother about her day. This seems to quiet her obsessive anxiety and we close the book. I gently pry it out of her hands.

Midway through the story, Babar does remember his mother and cries again over her loss. He decides to return to the land of the elephants: sentiment wins the day (although he brings along the fancy sports car and all the other material treasures.)

Jean de Brunhoff wrote this story many years ago, first reciting little episodes to his children at bedtime. It is a dated book, an odd book with an almost nonsensical story line that picture books today usually lack. He never considered that a child ought to be shielded from the reality of hunters. Some have accused the story of imperialist overtones, even white supremacy, but I think it is merely a fanciful, rambling bedtime tale spun in a different, less enlightened era.  At any rate, it is a story about an elephant who loses his mother and cannot rid himself of grief despite the palace in which he finds himself recovering.

Ariana was troubled by Babar's grief far more than she was interested in his material acquisitions. I thought about her dozens of Madison Avenue sweaters and dresses and tutus and boxes upon boxes of games and dolls and french flash cards and blocks of all color and material and the many expensive "enrichment classes" she attended each week and I thought of Nightingale Bamford waiting to devour the childlike sweetness of her mind that right now was feeling for the baby elephant and shocked by his plight.

I wondered how many years of living among closets stacked to the brim with cashmere jackets and American Girl dolls and baby mink coats it would take to shift her heart's attention from Babar's grief to his fancy red car? At some moment I knew it would happen -- her soul would skip away like a dried leaf rustling in the suddenly sharp Autumnal wind. No cashmere sweater can warm a body from whom a soul has departed.

I hug Ariana in the library. I don't know how many such moments with her remain.

An East Side luxury high rise just off the park. 

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A Nanny Recovers from PTSD

Don't make a quick judgment, I told myself as we rode the elevator to my daughter's dance class this morning. We were sharing the ride with another mother and her little girl. She had lots of bows and a pink chiffon sweater to match her pink chiffon hair bows and her perfect pigtails. A pink chiffon skirt trailed from underneath her jacket.

You know that you have no control nor desire to control your daughter's preferences, I told myself. Why assume this woman has any say in what her daughter wears? You are a mother now, you know better. You have known since you were a nanny that children like to dress themselves. Don't make assumptions. 

The mother wasn't warm. My daughter and I are so chatty that I am quick to dislike someone who isn't immediately effusive or generous with conversation or clearly desirous of forming some sort of we're-in-it-together bridge with a stranger. Perhaps I try too hard. Perhaps others don't try hard enough. Perhaps both. I know I'll ponder that for days despite knowing there's no objective answer to that question.

The mother was blond and her hair was blown-out and her jeans were tight and her boots were untouched by months of brutal weather. I felt small next to her, partly because I am small and she was tall but also because silence feels like a reproach when one is eager to converse.

A child is in my daughter's class who happens to be a television star's offspring. The star came the first day, with her nanny, and tried to hide behind her ski hat and glasses. She just wanted to be able to attend the class with her baby like all the other parents. I wish for that problem on some days, but that day I felt her pain and the compromises of stardom.

After class that first day, the blond, tight-jeaned mother, while clutching her chiffon princess's hand, went up to the television star. A frisson ran through me and I hadn't even heard the gambit yet. But I knew. I knew. 

Our children seemed to hit it off, I should have my nanny call your nanny to set up a play date.The television star was polite. Sure, was all she said. I didn't see much of the interaction, because I was consciously trying not to look and because I was so dreadfully embarrassed to witness it.

Oh, how this blond mommy wanted to mingle with the stars! In a world of status and ambition, catching a celebrity's child in your golden net is the ultimate coup! Don't judge, I told myself, maybe the kids did play well. Except none of the kids interacted at all. It was a bald-faced lie, a bald-faced attempt to ingratiate and get in in in with the television star. Status. Status. Status. How many rungs are on that ladder, anyway, and what is the destination?

I heard the blond mother talking to her chiffon daughter before class today. "Maybe __ will be in class today and we can have her nanny bring her over for a play date, wouldn't that be nice?" The little girl with chiffon bows stared into space.  I saw her mother's projected and vague fantasies float through the air and land on her daughter's head. At some point when she's older, they'll penetrate and enter her brain. And the cycle will continue.

The "famous" child wasn't in class today, as it turned out. But I shivered several times as I replayed the moments in which the status-seeker sidled up to the television star or her nanny over the last few weeks, because those moments  embarrassed me profoundly. I seem to absorb the shame of someone else's ridiculous act instead of being able to observe it from a peaceful distance.

I realized today it was more than embarrassment. It was post-traumatic-stress-disorder. After class, some of the mothers were chatting. I heard phrases like feeder school and waiting list and then I heard the name Episcopal and my blood ran ice-cold through my veins.

How many children had I picked up at The Episcopal School on East 69th street when I was a nanny? I don't remember. I do remember the parents, though. I remember the Hermes scarves and the Chanel ballet flats and the Gucci quilted tote bags and the Burberry headbands. I remember being ignored violently and I remember trying to bury my nose deeply in the scent of a Victorian novel to block out the feelings of confusion and dissonance that standing in a crowd of wealthy lost souls chatting about vacations and summer houses can evoke.

Episcopal School on East 69th Street. 

My daughter loves to play after class. While she romped in the sunny empty space of the dance studio, I tried to collect myself from what felt like a gut-punch. I heard my daughter singing and asking me questions, but fuzzy panic was filling my ears like cotton balls and flashbacks were making me dizzy and tense.

I was back on the East Side, in the land of monogrammed Pottery Barn chairs for one-year-olds and tennis lessons for four-year-olds and private schools for two-year-olds and thousand dollar cashmere throws on four thousand dollar sofas and lectures about giving a child a banana from a fruit stand because it wasn't organic.

Status, status, status... Like a vulture, the concept preys on the wealthy mothers of the Upper East Side and they crawl and climb toward anything that dangles the dream. To try to have a meaningful conversation with one of these mothers is to tilt at windmills. You can't fight the dragon. Maybe in the few hours you spend with their children you can make some small difference by discussing some things that matter, but the beast of status is more powerful. It feeds on long lists of toys at Christmas, birthday parties at the Plaza and visits to Dylan's Candy Shop on Third Avenue.

The mothers have their butterfly nets ever poised to catch what truly matters-- play dates with yet wealthier parents whose older kids are at the "right" schools, a spot in an art or violin class starting at two years of age so that admission to a "top" nursery school is assured, and invitations to elite dinner parties and children's birthday parties.

It preys on us all, to some extent. Who hasn't wanted at one time to be a famous actress who needs to hide behind sunglasses? Who hasn't wanted to be admired from afar, to possess Gisele Bundchen's golden tresses and have her army of beauty specialists attending to her as she nurses her infant? To be a social creature is to be aware of hierarchy and it is part of being human.

But it's the bad part. Especially in places like Manhattan. Status, status, status... You hear the whisper like Gollum's whisper of "my precious" in the cave when he can't bear to lose the magic ring to Bilbo.

As the stroller brigade headed to the elevator, my daughter and I stuck around for a while to play in the empty space. I had to get my head back on straight. I was, drowning in memories of East Side castles. (It isn't only the East Side. I've worked in the Hotel des Artistes and enormous brownstones off Central Park West and towering penthouses overlooking the Museum of Natural History and five-star luxury hotels and houses in Gramercy. Actual houses in Manhattan. I've seen every form of renovated kitchen that springs from a limitless budget and a very limited imagination.)

My daughter ran down the hall to watch the African dance class. I heard the steady beat of the drums and I followed her. I turned the corner and her tiny face was pressed to the glass while she bent her legs in time with the dancers on the other side of the door. They were sweaty and pumping to the music and I wanted to fling open the door and jump in with my daughter and lose myself in the beat of the drums and shut out the images...the frilly comforters and the silk sheets and the professional photo shoot pictures mounted on those endless East Side hallways and my desperate ten year search for humanity in those photos, a search for some expression of  genuine joy or whimsy in those cookie-cutter portrait shots in Restoration Hardware gallery frames.

I should have my nanny call your nanny. I am trying to block out the memory. I wish I hadn't heard that desperate blond mother scratching and pulling her way up the ladder because she thinks one exists.

Don't judge, I tell myself. Maybe she's a theoretical chemist. Maybe she's a poet. Maybe she's a good person who just happens to be friendly only with people who have status.

My daughter is a child now. We are starting our interactions with the world. When I was a child and stymied by a value system alien to me, my mother would repeat one of my grandfather's favorite expressions: You can be with them, but not of them. And you don't have to be with them most of the time. There are lots of other people in the city. You only need find them in the dense metropolis. You just have to be able to manage it, like finding specific grains of sand on a beach.

Let go, I told myself. You are ships in the night, our daughters share space in a sunny dance studio for forty five minutes a week. She has no power over you. You don't need to report to her what you and her child did all day.You don't need to deliver or show up at her house tidy but not glamorous, articulate but not chatty, obedient but not self-consciously submissive. She's just another mother now and she can't hurt you.

So I let Episcopal and the Burberry headbands go. We listened to the drums and watched the dancers sweat and then we trailed home through the snow. I contented myself with the thought that I will never be picking up another child at Episcopal School again.

Now I just need to get my husband to agree to pull up stakes and move to that imaginary cottage in Devon I keep dreaming about. The one where there isn't a Pottery Barn or a Madison Avenue for miles and miles and miles.

Related: A Nanny Says "Goodbye."

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Maternity Clothes (A Nanny Says "Goodbye")

Sometimes the best place to start is not at the very beginning, with all due respect to Maria Von Trapp. Sometimes the event that completes a story is the best way to introduce the story. I'll get to the beginning and the middle soon enough.

I recently pulled out a little Net Book that my husband purchased for me as a Valentine's Day gift in 2011. I wanted very much to write some stories about my life as a nanny. We found the smallest, no-frills baby laptop Staples offered and took it home. I remember shifting on my heels and asking for a seat while the salesman showed us our options. I was aching. My hips were sore. I was tired. I was impatient to get home and go to bed. I no doubt had the flu.

I was pregnant. I wouldn't find out for another week. My husband was about to leave for three months of work in a small town three hours from NYC by train. The morning he departed I started to count the days. Was it really five? A week earlier I had been babysitting for a client I loved and became desperate for bacon at 11 at night. The kids were asleep and I found myself madly frying bacon when their mother was due home in ten minutes. I ate it virtually raw out of the pan. I hate bacon. No bells rang. Perhaps when we want something very much we are afraid to believe it has happened.

The morning my husband kissed me goodbye and headed for a 6am train I was beginning to feel that something was off.  I fell asleep folding laundry. I ate Chinese food and thought I must have developed an allergy to MSG because I was so breathless and thirsty. I felt bricks in my intestines and pain in my joints. My eyes weren't focusing.  I was five days late so at last the potential began to sink in.  By the evening I had worked up the courage to go to Rite Aid. They had a sale and I got two sticks for ten dollars. I called my husband in his lonely hotel room and listened to the day's events. Then I told him of my day. And then of his impending fatherhood.

The next night I ate some ice cream and ran to the bathroom to bring it right back up. My old hip injury flared from the surge of hormones I suppose.  I was too excited and too frightened to sleep. I was breathless because of the drastic increase in blood volume. My uterus, which was later diagnosed as irritable (yes, that's the clinical term and I have to admit a perfectly chosen one) was contracting and aching and heavy. I watched anything on TV. I have no idea. The nights were lonely. I couldn't sleep because my skin crawled. I began losing weight from nausea. I took shards of Dramamine to be able to get a little nutrition in. I listened to Benny Goodman and watched School Ties and any other beautiful movie I could find on cable on a loop to drive the demon of hormonal depression away. Still, every minute was an hour and every morsel of food was a test of my determination. And my husband was so far away...

But I had this shiny laptop. It was lovely and new and I was supposed to write my stories about caring for other people's children. I had envisioned typing at Starbucks or a diner and spreading my notes out the way the cool kids do and clicking away on my tiny keyboard.  But pregnancy made it hard to leave the house. By 16 weeks I couldn't work much any more, my uterus spent so much time contracting. So much for taking ballet classes up until the moment I went into labor--I had assumed this would be my trajectory.  So much for working and earning a living -- I couldn't lift a child much less push a stroller.

So I sat up in bed and typed on the laptop that I had hoped strangers would admire in the local coffee shop. I had wanted witnesses to my being writerly. Instead I had to type whatever I could in solitude and then close the computer and lie in bed watching Judging Amy reruns.

Still, I wrote a fair amount.

I wrote about the families I adored and I wrote about the social problems in the families I had great difficulty respecting or understanding. I wrote about the interior moment-to moment world of being a nanny and I wrote about the children I had loved and those I had found baffling. I wrote about the potential psychopaths and the neighborhoods one was most likely to find them raised in.

I loved a family on the Upper West Side. I was their nighttime babysitter and their wonderful nanny used to pass the children to me at 6 pm on the nights that the parents were going out. The little girl and her brother were imps defined. Their father was Irish, as in real Irish accent Irish and their mother worked in something corporate but was also a painter. On one of my last nights working I lay in bed next to the little girl, whom I'll call "Mary." I was trying to soothe her to sleep -- she was the night owl type. And I felt a kick in my belly. It was an early kick but still quite clear. I told her that the baby had kicked. She asked me if I was having a girl or a boy. Her mother was nearing the end of a third pregnancy and the gender of that child was to remain unknown until his birth. I told Mary I was finding out the next day. She told me she hoped I was having a girl. I told her I was hoping that too.

The next day the technician looked over the heart and the kidneys and the various measurements and said in her thick Russian accent, "You don't want to know, do you, the sex?" Yes, we did! She looked at the screen again and said, "Oh yes, I see. Okay." I thought she must have seen a penis. I thought about all the boys I had loved and cared for over the years. "You see here? It's a girl."

Even after I couldn't work, Mary's mother treated me as a friend. When I was about 20 weeks I made it up the small hill to her apartment building and drank some water to try to slow the contractions. She had a big bag of maternity clothes for me. She had just had her third and final child, whom I had cared for at ten days old, and she was ready to part with the clothes. We went through the piles and she told me to take anything I might want because I could always pass it on if it didn't end up working for me.

I remember sorting the clothes. Tennis sweaters and spring coats and knit dresses and even a bridesmaid dress specially made for my client at nine months pregnant! My employer was passing the baton on this gray mid-June morning. Her six week old lay gurgling next to us and if you tickled his cheek you elicited that early lopsided grin. His arms waved wildly and he cooed. He was a baby. I had a fetus but if all went well she would grin one day too. The clothes felt more real than the baby. Pregnancy and motherhood have nothing at all to do with each other. I loved the clothes. I was amazed that I would fit into them, that my body would truly grow that much in the next 20 weeks.

My Irish family was moving to the west coast at the summer's end. I was familiar with the feeling. All New York City families seem to move once they have two children. Sometimes they last until the third is born. I had long known the clock was ticking and that this was their eventual plan. But the sting is still sharp when a beloved family leaves, leaving the nanny behind. Even though I was not a nanny anymore. I was an unemployed woman with a complicated pregnancy. I was a future mother and I had a husband and I was an actor and a dancer. Still, when a family leaves, a nanny feels unmoored.

This sunny apartment at the north end of the Upper West Side had always vibrated with the energy of a temporary residence: a perching place that a young and prosperous family would flop in for a while but never settle in permanently. it was homey and lived in -- they were the sort of people who had no worries about their coffee table being scratched by cars and games or their couches being wrestled on or being filled with Cheerios. It was also colorful and fully decorated. I had wandered in that apartment for two years, pondered the clues every family home offers: photos, choices of artwork, paint colors on the walls and book collections. I had put two children to bed in this apartment for two and half years. We had trudged the length of the hall from the renovated kitchen (it was an owned, not rented space!) to the kids' bedrooms, where we ate crackers and they drank water from sippy cups and we read A.A. Milne and Dr. Seuss and then scoured the shelves for more because Mary was never ready to sleep.

But I always heard the clock faintly ticking. Perhaps what I was hearing was my own clock: I did not want to be a nanny forever, it was meant to be a cash job in between acting gigs and somehow a decade had gone by. It is an old story for performers, especially in NYC, where the cost of living is prohibitive. There were a few small black and white photos of the Golden Gate Bridge on the wall in the living room. They had family there and California is more spacious than Manhattan, to be sure. When the kids are bigger... this is an oft-repeated phrase among one's adopted families. It was like the sounding of a bell whose ring intensified instead of dissipated with time. That bell's jangle signaled the coming tidal wave that would carry all my families out of the city, one by one.

Manhattan was a way-station: a train platform to wait on between their gay twenties and the wide-lawned, sprinklers-at-dusk and parties-on-the-4th-of July permanence and solidity of the suburbs. (In my imagination, the suburbs to which people move are always a meeting of Barry Levinson's Avalon and Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, without the traumas and melancholy and with an extra dose of children staying at the neighbors for dinner and rocking on porch swings in the summer and fall.)

Every time I lost a family, I felt the ground shifting beneath my city-slicker feet. I lost the certainty that a "real" life could be built in the dense metropolis; I wondered if such a life was a dream based on unrealistic hopes of creative and financial success.

A sense of the finite pervaded my last year with the family.  I was a static foil in a dynamic environment. I lacked momentum. The apartment also awaited abandonment. How odd it now seemed to admire the granite countertops and the black and white tiles in the sunny bathroom with the claw-foot tub and the study off the kitchen which was carpeted and housed a whole counter of desk space and a window looking into a European-feeling alley across which other families could be seen making dinner. This apartment was no longer the prom queen. Its moment had passed and it would soon be replaced by a proper homestead in a leafy glade.

I, too, would be replaced, but this didn't bother me. I never felt territorial despite my fierce familial affections for these certain families whose offspring I had bathed and sang to and picked up from school. When I was with them, that was our time and once out of my sight they existed primarily as symbols. Their impending flight more than the resulting absence was what loomed.

And then just before spring, I was pregnant. As Annette's belly grew improbably large I began my journey into nausea and dizziness. I envied her being nearly finished with pregnancy as I endured fairly common first trimester events: bleeding, fainting, sleeplessness and depression. By June I was in my second trimester and I was sorting those well-worn but new-to-me clothes. I held a polka dot jacket I had seen Annette wear over her growing belly one date night a few months earlier. I had admired it and now it was mine for a time.

I watched Annette's newborn third child for a few hours one night in May. Annette said: "What do you think of him? You realize this is going to be you, right?" I did realize it. For some women the baby is an abstraction: pregnancy is fairly easy and they are preoccupied with their work and at some point tidying the nest and looking at layettes and some even feel the baby is coming too soon, they haven't had enough time to prepare! With my ever-contracting abdomen and uterus, with my relentless second and third trimester nausea, I had to focus on the baby part right away. I couldn't wait for eviction day! Also, because I was a nanny, babies and children were already my daily life, they were not an abstraction. If anything was surreal it was that for the first time I would be the baby's first choice of arms, of comfort, of solace.  I was not to be the baby's nanny, but her mother.

Annette drove the sacks of clothes to our apartment the next day, my birthday. Her belly seemed to have all but disappeared. Her hair was as blond and freshly cut as ever and somehow her post-birth glamour infused me with hope. (Alas, it was not to be for me. My body took many more months to break down the tissues and structures of pregnancy.) But on my birthday, my husband took me to lunch and the movies. I peed 12 times in an hour and a half. The movie was about a road trip. I am not sure I saw any of the actors' stops along the way, but I became very well acquainted with the bathroom tiles at Lincoln Plaza Cinema on 63rd Street.

My Irish family departed in July. I went down to meet them at a hotel on Amsterdam where they were spending their final night in Manhattan, after their apartment had been packed up and their belongings shipped west. Mary and her little brother were playing as I entered the Hotel Lucerne and Mary patted my stiff belly and asked if there was still a baby in there.

And then they were off. And so was I. Their family had a new adventure calling, and I was about to begin the adventure of having one. A family, that is.

And here you have it. One of my entries on that shiny laptop. I called them Nanny Notes.

Related:
http://hungrylittleanimal.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-good-parts-version.html

And here is a post about the relationship between nannies and their employers and why it often goes wrong:
http://hungrylittleanimal.blogspot.com/2013/12/parents-and-guide-books-that-eat-them.html

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Parents and the Guide Books that Eat Them

Three spring times ago I sat crouched in a Barnes and Noble, bent over the "Bible for NYC parents."  City Baby. I was about ten weeks into my own pregnancy and ten years into my time served as a nanny to families all over the city.

I was not unfamiliar with guide books. I was not unfamiliar with being treated as "the help" by people whose children fell asleep in my arms. I knew that being a nanny was not unlike prostitution: you are paid to love and if you find a particular family or child less than cuddly, you are paid to pretend to love. Finding the intersection of a guide book with my intimate profession and seeing, in black and white, where, how and why it all goes wrong, well that was a bit of a shock.

I hurried home and typed an essay, for no one but myself and my imaginary newsletter to the city of New York. Here it is in all its first burst of fury fullness. In the following, I don't mean to imply that due diligence in hiring a nanny isn't important, but to me that is so obvious that it hardly needs to be stated in a guide book. What I do mean to say is that parents will reap what they sow in their relationships with those who spend so much time with their babies. There is so much hurt, so much misunderstanding. These are topics I will address soon enough: how one should be with his nanny. (Hint: personable and loving.) But this is the unedited screed of a woman who had sweated through years of changing other children's diapers, and it seems a good place to begin the conversation.

City Mommies and the Guidebooks That Eat Them (written in May 2011)

“When the nanny starts it is important to watch how she and your baby interact in order to make sure they are comfortable with each other…It’s a good idea to have a list of duties as well as what is expected of the nanny on a daily basis aside from child care, such as cooking, cleaning and laundry…Be specific. We are big on giving a nanny a “trial” period. Take this opportunity to observe her with your baby. You may also want your nanny to have a physical examination. Once a nanny is on the job you may want to monitor her activities in your absence. You may want to tell your nanny that you have a camera so she is always on her best behavior.”

“We have changed nannies several times… The most important person in your child’s life is you, the parent. Kids eventually adjust to a new nanny or caregiver.”

-City Baby, New York

When trying to figure out where it “all” went wrong, how many mothers in New York got imperialistic and entitled and just plain crazy in their behavior toward “the help” do we need to look any further than this relatively new breed of book, The How-to Guide? These books, as do all products of clever marketing, fill an imaginary void -- an identity void.  

If who we are is what we do, then learning the techniques of any craft or skill gives us an identity.  But what happens when being a certain type of person requires following certain rules and techniques? Does that make being doing? Being a mother is one of those conditions that despite our best efforts, despite the thousands of magazines and books and blogs and calendars devoted to this state, is not a job or a skill but merely a state of being. A passive state of existing in relation to someone else.

This is where the books come in. They may look like they are simply conveying basic information: the best deals on cribs, a guide to East Side pediatricians’ offices, a list of rainy day haunts for toddlers. But what they are really peddling is identity. City Baby has a cartoon drawing on the cover: a gentle, innocuous “mommy” with a kerchief covering her hair on a windy day as she passes by the rooftops and trees of an urban landscape. She looks very much like the Mommy bird in “Are You My Mother?” whose arc for an entire storybook is fetching food and bringing it back to her newly hatched baby.

So at home with her role as baby-carrier and kerchief wearer is the mommy on City Baby’s cover that you can’t really square the section on nannies at all. Why does this kerchief-wearing baby carrier need a nanny? She is wearing a checked kerchief! Checked kerchief wearers don’t hire nannies. They carry their babies through their days of collecting food and bringing it back to the nest. And isn't this one of the first types of images a newly pregnant woman summons? Protector, carrier, fort in the storm goddess? Nest builder and fountain of wisdom? Ah, marketing. How insidiously it matches the embryonic visions of all our intangible dreams.

How cleverly it can suck a woman in with stylish and symbolic cover art and then re-craft her into a rule-following, urban-jungle avoiding East Side yellow pages reading useless waste. An imperious, perpetually worried, self-doubting mess, no longer wearing a kerchief and toting her spawn capably through the streets. What terrible treachery these books are! How cruel is the implication that a woman is incapable of hiring someone to help watch her kids without the specific and exacting advice of experts? How undermining is the implicit suggestion that a woman can’t figure out how to judge someone’s character with the tools she has accrued over many years of living? How insidious the notion that danger lurks everywhere and if you don’t follow  interview guidelines and suggestions on the best places to buy a nanny cam your child will meet certain peril?

The mommy bird in “Are You My Mother?” flew from the nest before her baby bird hatched. She thought she would have time to get a worm and fly back before the big event. She does not interview a fellow bird before requesting that she keep an eye on her nest for half an hour. She does not ask another bird for help at all. She just assumes that her baby will be okay for awhile as she cruises the landscape for nourishment. And when she does return to an anxious baby who is remarkably already aware of the existence of mothers, she does not weep in waves of anguished guilt. She tells her baby where she was and assumes that he’ll be just fine. She does not have to check a video feed later, either.

A kerchief is much lighter than a guidebook. And far more useful. Mothers of Manhattan are weighed down by advice on how to achieve the identity of motherhood. Once you know how to interview a nanny, set up a nanny cam, check repeatedly for signs that your child is “comfortable” with the nanny, you are a qualified mommy. You are in the club of self-assurance.

Except you are anything but self-assured. Instead, you have dutifully followed advice on how to be a nervous, antagonistic, nanny-baiting wreck. Which is one of the most dangerous types of people a child can have around. Abandon the guide books, mommies-to-be! If you have an instinct that tells you that asking about a person’s interests and hobbies might ingratiate you and establish a sense of familial good will, follow it! If your instinct tells you that announcing the presence of a spy camera might be insulting and hurtful to an already thoroughly reference-checked nanny, it’s right! Congratulations! You are the proud owner of common sense and kindness, two invaluable characteristics that will ensure the health and well-being of your new baby.

What was all that advice about your diet when you were pregnant? Eat food that is healthy for you, because it’s healthy for the baby too! Take good care of your nanny, the advice should go, and you are taking good care of your child. You are already a mommy. A mommy is just a person who had a child. It is not someone who knows how to interrogate a stranger and terrify her into a submissive state. It is not someone who needs to be reassured that she will be more loved than a babysitter. A mommy is a bird who comes back to the nest, certain in her choice of worm, to feed her child. What would we think if the story ended with the mommy bird collapsed in tears over her decision to fetch a worm too close to the deadline? She would not seem terribly Mommy-like, would she? 

So why allow yourself to be terrorized by guides that tell you that you don’t know how to interact with the world already? That make you jump through hoops to assume a new identity when you possess it the moment the baby pops out? Trust yourself and not the advice givers. If you think nannies are people just like everyone else, you know a lot more than the guide books do. 

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City Mommy, City Nanny

Writing about nannies in Manhattan is like holding a large container of gasoline, standing next to an open fire and saying "Oh, what the hell, let's see what happens?" Of course I am not writing about nannies, but about being a nanny. In Manhattan. Which can be like jumping into that flame to find a few scraps of cash within it before they burn.

Let me say at the outset that some of my best friends are families with children whom I have cared for.  I say that tongue-in-cheek, but it's true. I have formed lifelong loving friendships with both parents and children I have met and cared for in my expedition in the jungle of Manhattan service positions. These families hold my heart firmly, and lest anyone accuse of me of protesting too much, I have the memories and stories to prove it.

I also owe a debt to my clients because they taught me much about children and the way they work, how their internal mechanisms are as intricate and finely tuned (and easy to disrupt) as the wind parts in an antique watch. Spending all day with a child is rather like a Buddhist exercise: one must let go of "plans" and see where the path takes you, where the child pulls you.

When I became a mother it was my greatest fear that I would have suffered terrible burnout and be unable to feel the joy of accompanying a child throughout her day; it would be old-hat. Happily, I didn't. Not to say there aren't slow hours in the day (when will I master the art of letting my child put imaginary oregano in her imaginary cocoa instead of insisting that it needs some cinnamon or whipped cream? My husband, fortunately, is a whiz at tea parties. My being an actor, I have, perhaps ironically, no gift for that sort of pretend-with-no-boundaries, such is my compulsive allegiance to reality.)

There were dark passages too. I have tales of times when I met children who despite (or perhaps because of) their financial good fortune had me running to the dictionary to look up the definitions of "conscience" and "character." I once witnessed a 13 year old boy torturing a bunny rabbit. His pet bunny. I reprimanded him, only to be told that "the bunny started it." I wish I could report that this child had a precocious gift for dark humor but alas it was as straight-faced as the torture was aggressive. I took the bunny away and told his parents. What they chose to do with the knowledge, or the bunny, I don't know. I asked my agency to cross that address off the list of my future appointments. You can't save every bunny, alas.

But mostly the problems stemmed not from the children, but from the parents.

Why does it sometimes go wrong with the nannies? Why do some families fail at forming loving and respectful relationships with those who nurture their babies?

When I was in my first trimester of pregnancy I was wandering the baby book aisles of the local bookshop -- trying to understand the magnitude of the shift that was about to occur from being a nanny to being a mother -- when I stumbled upon a popular title. It was called City Baby, and its cover illustration spoke of all things gentle and peaceful and benign. The cartoon drawing of a mommy, wearing a kerchief as she carried her young babe along a horizon of  high-rises  looked so much like the mother bird in P.D. Eastman's Are You My Mother? that surely she was trustworthy. Surely she homage to the cuddly feeling that book inspires.  I could take advice from this kerchief-wearing hippy about raising a child in New York City.

The cover of the self-appointed "New York City Baby Bible."

My heart sank and my blood boiled as I leafed through its pages. I scribbled angry notes in the margins of a magazine I found in my purse, as I didn't want to forget a word of this dangerous "advice," so potent and so wrong that I despaired at the thought of families obtaining "wisdom" from its pages. Of course the section that was of particular interest was that on how to "train" a nanny. With advice like this infiltrating the population like a fleet of armed robots, we need a State Department fully staffed with ambassadors to broker a peace between nannies and their employers. Gasoline on the fire, indeed.

Poor City Baby. It is my sacrificial lamb: one of so many books that shred the bonds between those who nurture our young and those who need their help. So exemplary of bad advice; it is my pick for most misleading, most likely to cause trouble, to wound souls and to give mothers dangerous notions that not only sever their bonds with nannies but even shred the fabric of polite and decent society. Am I being dramatic? I hope so, because there is nothing more dramatic than our relationships with others. Souls and happiness are at stake in the mommy/nanny dynamic. This is something that has to be gotten right.

The good news is that it can be gotten right. I will return to City Baby and the specifics of its crimes against parents and their employees (not to mention against their children) in my next post. I would like to end this post with a note of hope, a trumpet of good will, a thank you to all the children and their parents who are my forever extended family. The little girl with whom I read The Doctor and The Dormouse, the little boy with whom I had tea parties and bubble cakes at bath time, the little boy who gamely ate his dinner dressed as Snow White according to his older sister's wishes. A thank you to the parents of two little girls who seemed to have sprung from a birthday cake such was their sweetness, to the parents who asked me how my day had gone and made sure I made it safely to a taxi at 2 am. Thanks for the memory - so many collectively that they will fill many happy posts.

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