The Hard-Knock Nanny Life

Knowing they had not prepared me for any kind of security, my MFA professors told me to maintain a shitty job after graduation. Something like waitressing. Something that would keep me writing, if only in order to prove to myself that I wasn’t just a waitress.

I decided to become a nanny instead. It was an easy thing for me, since I’d already helped raise one baby, my nephew, and—probably more importantly—since I was white and well-educated, an uncommon phenomenon in the underpaid childcare industry.

I never had a hard time finding a job, but cobbling together a schedule between multiple families who needed me part-time was often a challenge. I trekked from Prospect Heights to Hell’s Kitchen to the Upper East Side, sometimes all in the same day, in order to make enough for a decent paycheck. I hung out for hours on Pier 83, the only outdoor space in Midtown that didn’t give me panic attacks, after finishing work with one family and before starting with another.

I cut corners by slyly eating food from the kitchens of the families I worked for. I never opened anything and I never finished anything, but I did feast on the middle parts of their cracker boxes, their cereal, their leftovers. I ate spoonfuls of almond butter—something I never bought for myself—and sometimes a granola bar if the open box looked fairly full. Once, after devouring a brick of an energy bar I looked at the label and found it was made from cricket flour, which probably is actually a cheap source of protein, but struck me at the time as such an extreme luxury I felt I’d just accidentally consumed foie gras without even paying attention.

“You can eat our food,” they usually told me when I started working. “Help yourself.” But they also seemed secretly pleased when I didn’t run up their grocery bill. “Madeline hardly eats anything!” they’d say, smiling, and I’d take it as praise. The other nannies I knew—mostly minorities—always brought their own food to work. I would’ve felt too guilty eating any more than I did.

I took the jobs in order to fund my writing, with the intention of keeping each stint temporary, but the truth is I enjoyed them. Even when you try to guard yourself against it, knowing the kids aren’t yours to keep, love seeps in. I started telling stories about the children to my friends, watching little videos I’d taken after hours, relishing in the gloppy tempera paint pictures gifted to me.

Strangers were constantly mistaking the children for my own, and I accepted the compliments about their chubby cheeks and big blue eyes as if I’d created them, because it often seemed simpler to say, “Thank you” rather than, “Oh, she’s not mine.” When I did admit to being the nanny I was met with a strange skepticism. The toddlers’ gymnastics instructor looked back and forth from the little blonde girl tumbling down a mat to me, repeating, “No, she looks just like you! You’re not related at all?”

I began to think about the strange intimacy of the job, how easy it was for me step into someone else’s shoes, and at the same time about the absurd impossibility of actual transformation. When I chatted with other parents about the struggles of potty training or getting the baby to nap, I had the sensation that I was play-acting as a mom instead of working as a professional in the child-care industry.

I’d stopped using hormonal birth control for the first time since I started having sex, and even though my partner and I were using other methods, every month I became convinced I was pregnant. It was a sort of nightmare/fantasy that I kept giving in to. I knew it would be a disaster to get pregnant at that moment, struggling to afford groceries and health insurance, but my inability to plan for it made me want it all the more. It’s clear to me now I was just desperate for something to change my life, to completely overthrow it, to thrust me suddenly into the world of the families whose homes I occupied daily.

* * *

I’ve always been interested in the dual emotion of envy—the way it simultaneously demands elevation and debasement of that which is desired. On the one hand, I wanted to be these mothers, on the other hand I wanted to strip them of everything that separated us. I felt above them for being able to live without what they considered basic necessities—dishwashers and name-brand purses—but this superiority was clearly rooted in my own insecurity. As often as I secretly berated the mothers for their anxieties over the most privileged of problems, I berated myself for my own powerlessness to make ends meet.

When employers asked to take my coat, I handed it over with my face burning. I wore the same thin jacket I’d purchased with my student loan money for years and the lining was shredded, the buttons all mismatched, but I couldn’t afford the $150 tailor fee and I certainly couldn’t afford a new one. “Are you warm enough?” a mother asked me once as we pushed the toddlers through the snow on Park Avenue to her house for a play date.

“Oh,” I said. “Yes, it’s wool.”

Everyone around us was in waterproof down coats. It was ten long blocks from preschool to that little girl’s house and I was freezing, snow leaking into my terrible boots.

That was also the day we were cut off by a black Porsche speeding out of a parking garage without stopping, and she joked, “That must be Madeline’s car!” to the delight of the other stay-at-home moms in our company.

I fake-laughed, hurt that a mom I usually liked would mock my social standing, but then, when we arrived, slyly took pictures of her view of Central Park from the playroom.

I was learning what it really meant to want. I hadn’t wanted as a child, though I grew up without any of the luxuries that now surrounded me. I hadn’t known those luxuries existed so I couldn’t desire them. Now I lived all day with these people, in their most intimate spaces, and then had to return to my own apartment, with the living room ceiling always threatening to cave in. I didn’t know what to do with this wanting. Scared it would twist me up into something bitter and hateful if I didn’t shape it into something, I began to write, letting my character’s envy motivate her, letting her follow the dark paths I didn’t dare venture down in real life.

* * *

I was invited over for wine and cheese at the holidays, to birthday parties, given champagne when the parents returned from dates. I was aware of the privileged space I occupied as a young, educated white woman. It was clear I was immediately granted a sense of trust by everyone—other nannies, parents, the grandparents, as well as my own employers—that other women had to work for. “I get your whole thing,” one mother told me, “working with kids to put yourself through school. I’m not sure about our nanny, though. I just don’t know if I get her.”

I didn’t bother to explain that I’d actually graduated years ago and now was just poor. These peoples’ ability to put me inside some kind of box—even an imaginary one—worked to my benefit.

Fellow nannies told me horror stories about employers lowering their pay without discussion or forgetting to give them checks. One woman, probably the most inexhaustible and patient adult I’ve ever seen interact with a child, cried frantically to me at the park while the kids were occupied. She opened her purse and showed me the wads of un-used toilet paper she kept in a plastic bag. I furrowed my brows, confused by what I was seeing. “They asked me where all the toilet paper was going,” she explained. “I told them they have a three-year-old who is learning to wipe herself, but they asked if I was taking it home so now I’m scared. I have to bring my own.” She grabbed my arm, “Get out,” she told me, “You’re smart. You went to school. You speak the language.”

It seemed beside the point to explain that art school might not ever lead to financial security. I also didn’t know how to tell her that families would never treat me the way her family treated her, and if they did it would be easy for me to leave, to find someone else to hire me. That woman had two children to support, she struggled with English, and she might not have been living legally in the United States. I never did get pregnant; I was free.

“I’m trying,” I said.

* * *

I gave my last boss a month’s notice—citing the cross-country move I’d decided to make. Though I apologized sincerely and thanked her for the opportunity to work with her son, her response was not the thank you for the past year and a half I thought I’d deserved. Instead, she reacted with a panicked meltdown, begging me to reconsider, though offering no incentive to do so. A week later, before paying me, she pulled me into her bedroom and, holding her pocketbook between us, demanded further explanation as to how I could do such a thing as quit after performing my job so well. How I could possibly do this to her, how I could dare put my own life before hers.

I had generally been well respected, but when push came to shove, I was just a servant. It took watching the way she clutched her wallet firmly in front of her as she ranted for me to finally recognize my own privilege. I didn’t need her. I was smart, I went to school, I spoke the language.