Because I Said So (30 page)

My grandmother is now ninety years old. Although she suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, her eyes still smile when I greet her, and they have a special sparkle when she sees Ashley. “You are such a pretty little girl,” my grandmother says to her, and sometimes I feel that they communicate in an unspoken language. My daughter will not have the chance to know my grandmother in the same way that I did, but I will pass on to her those stories that my grandmother told me. I will teach her that fairy tales belong in storybooks, but that heartfelt dreams, despite surprising twists and turns, are always worth reaching for.

I will also tell her stories of what a
real
little girl could grow up to be: a somebody, a race woman, and a feminist. I will tell her that the choices I made stem from the belief that women should have all the opportunities available to men, even the opportunity to make mistakes. I will talk to her about how my grandmother, mother, and other women worked hard to instill in me a sense of independence and personal strength. And I will tell her that they succeeded.

Mothers Just Like Us

D e b r a O l l i v i e r

Over a decade ago
I married a Frenchman and moved overseas.

Our oldest child spent his early toddler years in a public nursery school in Paris. Like many French citizens I took for granted a social infrastructure of family support so extensive and cherished by the French that any threat to its well-being sent millions to the streets in protest, virtually paralyzing the nation. Beyond free public nursery schools and long-term education, this infrastructure includes numerous affordable day-care options, national health-care plans, pediatricians who still make house calls, and a lavish amount of vacation time that allows parents to have a life, not just make a living.

During those early French days I’d visit Los Angeles and marvel at the army of Latina nannies tending to this white-collar oasis: the Guatemalan with her long braid pushing a Dylan or an Ashley in an ergonomic stroller. The Salvadoran doing laundry; bringing order and shiny surfaces to the chaos of the
patrona
’s world. I was reminded of a peculiar antebellum era of landed gen-try. Comfortably rooted in a French system that instead of paying lip service to family values actually underwrote them, it was easy for me to scoff at mothers who toted their nannies around like accessories. And then a curious thing happened: Shortly after my second child was born I inherited a house in California, moved back to the States, and became, for all intents and purposes, one of those mothers.

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Full disclosure: I grew up in Los Angeles with two latchkey siblings, a single working mother, and a live-in Mexican woman named Maria. But Maria was as much a “nanny” as she was Mary Poppins. Back then she was called a housekeeper. What strange spin on the onerous job of caretaking has brought us the word
nanny,
with its primly aristocratic overtones? Did the word emerge to mitigate the extent to which nannies have become indentured to us? For the only difference I could note in the decades since Maria was in our life is that the nanny has become a more pervasive fixture among American families. Even the at-home mom seems to need her these days, not necessarily to spend more time with her kids but, ironically, to spend more precious time away from them.

As we outsource the chaos that comes with children, the nanny provides priceless relief, filling in the gaps cleaved out not only by our own parenting anxieties, but also by the black holes created where our public institutions have failed us.

These observations hit me with a particular vengeance when we moved into our house in a quiet suburban American neighborhood. I found myself with a two-income family, a husband who worked overseas, and a paucity of child-care options, each as problematic as the next. Barely settled back in the States, with the social benefits of France far behind me, I realized that I needed, quite simply, a nanny.

But where to begin? I could transform a spare bedroom into a new living space, with cable TV and five Hispanic channels (TelemundoLA, Alegria y Movimiento) but I was still clueless: How much should you pay your nanny? What about vacation time? Or sick days? Does she eat dinner with the family every night? What constitutes a full working day? When does it begin?

Or end? Surprisingly, no clear-cut answers emerged—just a vast gray zone of conflicting views capped on one end by the mother who earnestly tried to bring the nanny into the family dynamic and, on the other end, by the mother who operated from a position of distrust. “Nannies talk among themselves,” said one neighbor. “If you pay more, you set a precedent. Word gets out.

Then we all have to defend our pay scales. Start low, cut your
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losses. Those are the unspoken rules of the game.” Of course the rules of the game were not only unspoken; they also seemed largely unwritten. Because despite various books on the subject, no one seemed to have read the literature. In this frontier of domestic help there appeared to be no ultimate constitution, no code of ethics. It was every woman for herself. Which might explain why what seemed antebellum from the outside, suddenly seemed more Wild West from the inside.

I decided to accord my future nanny the rights she’d have if the politics of exile weren’t working against her: Two weeks of vacation time, sick days, national holidays, and a Christmas bonus. It was wildly extravagant for us, but somehow the idea of striking a bargain with someone who would care for the most precious beings in my life seemed base to the point of repugnancy.

Equally pressing was the notion that a well-paid nanny is a happy nanny—one who, presumably, will pass that happiness on to my children. I had only to put out a quick word. Within days, countless job-seeking Latina women were at my disposal. I met Marta and, one week later, she moved in with her blue gym bag and her
Libro Catolico de Oraciones
.

Marta’s first day: My kids clamored to the door to meet this person who would become a new presence in our lives. We’d already looked on a map, found the tiny slice of land tucked under Mexico called Belize. “Can you get there on a spaceship?”

my son asked. When the bell rang we opened the door, and there was Marta: short dark hair, pink sweater, faded jeans. She stepped forward and opened her arms with a slightly awkward air. My kids stood close to me, a bit wary at first. There was a moment of curious anticipation—a breath held, a second of mutual scrutiny.

Then, slowly, with all their big-hearted innocence, my children walked into Marta’s arms.

I showed Marta around the house, tried to elaborate on her duties. It was a colossal process in part because I hadn’t even articulated them myself. Where some mothers are consummate masters of their domestic universe, others, like myself, are bush-whackers living in a forest with a life of its own. So what kind of
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expectations to set up here? How many times should she vacuum the floor or clean out the fridge? But as Marta followed me through the wilderness of our home, it was the psychological landscape that loomed larger, the inarticulated world of this communal space we now shared. Because while I hadn’t decided how much Pine-Sol to use (in large measure because I simply didn’t care), I also hadn’t defined in explicit fashion the rules of parenting. Aside from a few basics, when it came to raising my kids I still vacillated between the more straightforward French approach and the onslaught of parenting dogma that assailed the American parent. So where, in this vast playing field, would my parenting end and hers pick up?

Life together began with a tentative play at pretending that this forced intimacy was natural. Are we roommates? Family members? Employee/employer? My kids, with their immeasurable acceptance of the abstruse, helped us out. “Marta, did you know that Jupiter is made of gas?” my son asked at the breakfast table.

Marta smiled back. “Oh yes,” she said. “Of course.” Not to be upstaged, my daughter declared, “Piggies eat clouds. Did you know that, Marta? In France they eat clouds.” Marta put her fork down. She looked genuinely impressed. Perhaps they
do
eat clouds in France.

When my son Max began kindergarten, Marta lavished her attention on my daughter, Celeste, doing things I’d never had the time or skill to do: She spent fifteen minutes working Celeste’s hair into complex braids or multitiered ponytails that stayed remarkably in place. She sorted through piles of clothes to find things that were frilly and feminine. “Why do you dress her like a boy?” she asked when I’d throw a generic T-shirt on Celeste.

“You must dress her pretty.” Every morning, as I bid farewell to my well-dressed, well-coiffed daughter, I was a mother divided: part of me had already mentally departed, my mind focused on the pressures and distractions of my job. Meanwhile, Marta seemed unfettered in this way. She was free to focus all of her energies exclusively on my daughter, because my daughter
was
her job. I tried to ignore a certain inchoate emotion that I couldn’t
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quite place. It was a vague emotion, fuzzy but not warm. Later I would realize: that emotion was jealousy.

In this sisterhood
of mothers with nannies that I had unwittingly joined, mutual grievances were shared and a sort of home-spun, do-it-yourself legislation was constantly in flux. “Why should I pay my nanny when
I
go on vacation?” asked one. “My nanny needs back surgery and has no health insurance. What happens if I don’t pay for it?” asked another. Among the talk, one horror story inevitably emerged that set off a tsunami of paranoia. A child drowned in a pool while his nanny looked on. It was her fault because, as one woman put it, “the nanny didn’t know how to swim.” I found out that Marta didn’t know how to swim either and, wondering what else she might not know how to do, I immediately enrolled her in a Spanish CPR course. It was an ironic gesture because I’d never taken one myself, and God forbid I should have to, say, perform the Heimlich maneuver. But Marta was now spending more time with my daughter than I did (a sobering reality), so what if Celeste plummeted down a cliff? Or got burned? Or needed mouth-to-mouth?

However, CPR, so I was told, was the least of my worries.

Because while a surface wound could always be dressed—a skinned knee, a broken bone—an emotional one lasts forever.

And it was here that the NannyCam asserted itself—that wireless hidden camera with 2.4-Ghz video transmitter and receiver stuffed inside a fluffy teddy bear. Never mind the suspicions that a nanny might steal, lift, or somehow lick the frosting off our hard-won cakes. “I caught my nanny screaming at Cindy. I fired her on the spot and got a NannyCam,” said a neighbor. When I asked what she thought of this egregious infringement of privacy she replied, “What’s more important, your nanny’s privacy or your child’s well-being?” Familiar prime-time horror stories of abuse and abductions floated in the ether here. But when does simple discipline—a stern voice, a time-out—turn into actual abuse? (In France, a little slap on the rump will raise eyebrows only if those
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brows belong to Americans.) And what mother left to care for toddlers and clean house for eight hours a day (or more) wouldn’t scream from time to time, let alone pull her own hair out?

Oblivious to the irony, we shuttle to parenting workshops to figure it all out while the nanny stays home with the kids. And perched in a crib there is the NannyCam, a mechanical eye patrolling a static corner of the nanny’s world. Meanwhile, the nannies get the big picture of
our
lives. Marta, who’d joined a sisterhood of her own in our neighborhood, came home with stories from the front: tales from the nanny who worked in the messy

“piggy house.” Or the place where they had “those bad videos”

(she shook her head: porn). There were the hair-raising fights, the piles of dirty underwear, an unlocked gun found in a dresser. I was intrigued by the dirty little world behind the closed doors in this preternaturally calm suburb where we lived. And then I wondered: what does Marta tell other nannies about us? After all, she was exposed to it all: the intimacy of a rumpled sheet mangle after a love tryst, the domestic spats.

But what unsettled me most was not that Marta was witness to the private inner life of our home—it was the growing intimacy that she shared with my daughter. One night I returned late from a meeting. It was one of my favorite moments—the dreamy joy of coming home, the look of angelic repose on my children’s faces. I tiptoed into my daughter’s room, where a mobile of bright fish slowly turned. But when I pulled down the sheet for a silent good-night kiss, there was Marta, her face nestled against my daughter’s as they curled into one another, both asleep. Though I’d fallen asleep countless times putting Celeste to bed, I was vexed by the image. For Marta and Celeste were clearly a duo now, partaking in their daily routine of outings, meals, naps—moments of joy and disgruntlement, the stuff of life. Here was a web of emotional exchanges that the NannyCam could not pick up: invisible bonds that for many mothers are the hidden source of deeply charged and complex emotions. For to see these growing bonds between nanny and child is to experience the silent confirmation that a mother’s role has potentially been usurped: her role as the child’s
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one and only mother, the one who should be tucking the kids into bed at night, the one who should be doing the disciplining.

Perhaps that’s why the nanny exercising normal discipline becomes unacceptable to a mother.

It was in this context that I had implicitly asked Marta to love my child as she would love her own. And she rose to the task with an almost swooning attachment to my daughter. So why shouldn’t my daughter love her back? Let her exercise her own heart muscle, I thought. Let her learn to spread her love around. Still, there was lingering discomfort. Possessive mother, guilty conscience. I roused Marta awake. “Sorry, Marta. It’s late.” She woke, bleary eyed, and shuffled into her room.