Exploring the almost verboten territory that exists between caregivers and employers, Lucy Kaylan shows the world how many things hang in that precarious balance. How much did one struggle with the idea of having a nanny (especially live-in care), the daily dance, the implied intimacy of the relationship between mothers and "almost moms", what trust did we place in them, how much control would have to be relegated to make the relationship workable?
In a town like this where having a nanny is almost a given rather than an upper class luxury, it is interesting to see how the dynamics can be pinpointed so thoroughly.
For me reading this book was intensely personal; a way of trying to find my footing after two failed attempts at finding that elusive "perfect stranger". At what point did my usually good intuition about character fail me? Why wasnt it more apparent to me that I had hired someone who wouldnt see my children in the same way that I would? Did I have unrealistic expectations of the nanny? was it my own standards that were absurdly high and, if I was honest, that I would never find someone who would do everything I really wanted from them?
Of course hindsight is 20/20 but I find it difficult to get past the idea that someone I trusted so implicitly with my children's care and well-being would ever think it was acceptable to leave my not-yet two year old son alone at home; or that the next person I would hire (after that initial shocking incident shook me to the core and I thought that the next one was going to be "the one") would leave us high and dry with two weeks notice and no help after discovering that we were expecting again.
I understand, now, that to her, this placement was just a "job" and not the family she purported it to be, but I still feel the slap of that harsh feeling: betrayal. I felt further betrayed, the working mother's worst nightmare, when I heard my son role playing that he was to call the nanny "honey" while she called him "my son", my two girls just sad after-thoughts to her daily care of the family. Absurdly I had known that she was treating him like the son she left behind in her home country, but didn't really realize the extent of what that truly meant.
I will be the first to tell you that looking after three children, whose personalities are at times so vastly different, is a difficult thing to deal with and yet...does having a large family then mean that finding someone who can love all of them equally is an impossibility?
So now that I am home with the kids, I am afraid to use this time, this reprieve, to look again; my negative experiences filling me with doubt that I will ever find someone who fills our household's empty role.
The book itself was extremely Americentric--filled with tales of Mexican and Carribean nannies and their own sets of cultural biases--and it certainly affected my perspective that the author was the managing editor of Marie Claire, a popular fashion magazine that is as high powered and executive and certainly as time consuming a career as you could possibly have, but still had great insights and revealed some startling truths.
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