My friend’s first nanny quit because she needed a job with health insurance to cover an unexpected surgery. Her second nanny left after she found a job as an assistant to a well-known children’s photographer. Her third was a bridge until the fourth one could start. And the fourth quit after she got pregnant and wanted to stay home to care for her own baby.
Now, Nancy is on her fifth nanny, a nursing student from Thailand, and her older son is just turning 3.
The first time she left her son with a stranger, she was crazy with fear that she would come home from work and discover him missing. Now she worries that this nanny, whom her kids adore, also will leave. She doesn’t even care that her younger one is beginning to speak English with a Thai accent.
The woman who takes care of my children part-time is a Polish Mary Poppins. She is energetic, always smiling and patient, competent in all she does. She arrives at my house once a week with plastic bags full of fresh bread she picks up from a bakery in her neighborhood, still warm from the oven, and cheese and juices imported from Poland — which she feels is healthier than what is available where I live. In season, she brings us vegetables from her garden. My children love her — deeply. A few months ago, my older son, who was then 4, told me he wanted to give a gift bag he received (just the bag, he kept the gift) to someone he really loved. That was Dana.
I feel guilty that I pay another woman to care for my children while I work and jealous that sometimes they seem to love her more than they do me. I am driven up the wall by her Old World ways, her belief that children must be kept warm and her suspicions about modern medicine.
But, like my friend, I mainly am worried that she will leave us, this woman who is one of the truly good people in this world. She works nights cleaning office buildings in the Loop, and I am preparing myself for the day when she will tell me that even the few hours a week she gives us is too much for her. I won’t be able to do anything but agree.
Lucy Kaylin, author of “The Perfect Stranger: The Truth about Mothers and Nannies,” and now deputy editor of “O” Magazine, said the mother/caregiver relationship is inherently fraught because we give up control when we bring another female authority figure into the picture.
It’s a huge leap of faith, and what is at stake, she said, is the well-being of the people we love more than anything in the world. On top of that, mothers wrestle over whether it is a selfish choice to work and enjoy a career.
Let go, she suggested. Accept your choice to have a career and the need to possibly, as she put it, “feed that side of yourself.” Likewise, she said, micromanaging the nanny only makes her feel undermined and disrespected.
Kaylin is right. Does it really matter if my older one likes his milk warm, because Dana believes that cold milk is bad for children’s stomachs, or that my younger son likes to sit with a blanket draped over his lap? When they are with her, they feel well cared for, safe and loved. And that is my security blanket.
