…Today I see it is there to be learned from you:
to love what I do not own.

Sharon Olds, excerpt from “Exclusive (for my daughter)”

There was a babysitter with jetblack curly hair who spoke Italian. We made a homemade pizza once. Once, she opened the freezer, the light of the window highlighting her fly-away frizzles.

There was another babysitter who carried around a ziplock bag of carrots in a fo-leather purse. She stood by the white steps of Temple Ner Tamid on a baby-blue skied day in white pants.

A few years ago, my dad pointed out her obituary in the newspaper. I had long forgotten her name – I could only recall the half-bitten carrots and a feeling of warm safety.

Trying to access the amorphic consciousness of our childhood mind is a tender experience. These women, who were in no way blood-related to me, who were paid by my blood-related parents to make sure my little human needs were met, kept me safe and clean. The fact that I seriously can’t remember any other shared moments makes me wonder about the energy that truly did pass between our beings during this time of care.

I’m curious about which influences of theirs stuck to me; which securities did they provided to make me develop into who I am now? I’m curious about their emotional and spiritual landscape at the time when they pledged under the role of my “babysitter” or “nanny”. What were they looking for in life? What did they observe from the outside about my family? What were their fears, their dreams?  What small wisdoms did we exchange with each other?

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

Oscar Wilde

The role of a non-blood related caretaker becomes quite a nuanced one in the context of the nuclear family.

A nuclear family is defined as a family structure containing a pair of adults and their socially recognized children. Much of the way we perceive family has to do with our experience within the paradigm of the nuclear model. Historically, many individuals in the West have spent the majority of their lives immersed in two nuclear families: the one they were born into, and the one they created upon marriage.

We’ve all heard the statistics: that family structures in the US have started to shift. Divorce rates are high, reproduction rates are low, people are prioritizing different kinds of lifestyles. Though the change may be representative of a slow social revolution, many of us still judge ourselves and our values based on traditional roles that we play in our (often fragmented) nuclear families. Many of us experience a heavy sense of failure, loss, and isolation when the nuclear families we recognize cease to function, and cease to foster safety and fulfillment. I think that part of this is due to the isolation of the nuclear structure. And so, I think it’s really important to open the tight fist of the nuclear family to the open arms of more people we love. In other words: expanding our definition of family, we would be able to integrate more creativity and fluidity into our “inner circles”.

The “nanny” must be a creative artist. She often finds herself on foreign nuclear turf, facing the temporary joys and struggles of parenthood. In the midst of gauging alien family dynamics, values, and childcare, she also has her own expectations and triggers to engage with. And then, at the end of the day, she goes home to her bed, knowing she is paid for her time. In this entry, we meet Amanda*, who fell into nannying by accident but the impact of the experience left its mark on her.

When they were nine months old, one wanted a toy the other had. She grabbed her sister by the shirt, threw her to the floor, and took the toy! Humans are shit. From the beginning.

Amanda

Amanda grew up in New Hampshire, surrounded by a vast landscape of pines, winding roads, and silence. Her parents got divorced when she was fourteen and chose to live on the same street. With a sweet-but-quick-tempered father, and tough-but-socially-isolated mother, Amanda found herself straddling two very intense worlds – walking from one’s house to the other daily.

After studying English and Composition in college, and then working in a “horrible food service job”, Amanda was itching to get out of there and jump into something new, something that made her feel less alone, used, and exhausted. Amanda’s acquaintance Stephanie* announced that she had given birth to twin girls and invited her to come play. Eventually, she offered her a job as a nanny despite her fearful inexperience. And so Amanda’s journey began. Over the next two and a half years, she became “like a third parent. Or a third child. It was a weird in-between thing.”

When asked about her experience of bonding with the children and getting a window into the family dynamics, Amanda reflected:

“I was just alone with the girls for nine hours a day and sometimes they cried the whole time. I carried them up and down the hallway and sang. Sometimes I cried while singing, because I swear – the sound of crying babies makes you nuts. The mom would come home and see us all crying. I’d think “please don’t fire me”, and she’d say “please don’t quit”. I’d see her argue with her husband. I saw the inside of their marriage.”

The strenuousness of the childcare brought out Amanda’s inner anger – her anger that “humans are shit”. That humans take things without asking, and throw things, and hurt people – even when they grow up to be adults. As a result, she recognized her need to change her attitude toward both the baby girls, and toward life. She started going to therapy and meditating – which she continues to do now to help with everyday life stressors! She remarks “with the girls I had to be an even better self”.

If intimacy is sharing all the dirty little bits of life, then it isn’t all about love.

Amanda

As a woman in her late-thirties, Amanda herself had considered if she wanted children. Her mother would “pester” her, even when she wasn’t in a romantic partnership. But monogamous structures seldom appealed to Amanda. She dreamed of developing her own family with friends – it would be like having an non-blood related extended family with some couples, some children, some caretakers. The pressure of care and money would be distributed across a group of people who could focus on both their individual desires, and their children’s needs. But as she and her friends who daydreamed of this grew into their thirties, they started moving in with partners, bought houses with a couple-signed mortgage, and slipped into isolation. She is still craving the community of a non-nuclear family to grow with. When asked about how she felt nannying had impacted her perspective of parenting and relationships, she reflected on how much like “family” this experience felt to her:

“The kids would eat bites off of my lunch. I would eat what they dropped on the floor. If we are sick we’ll be sick together. And we were! All five of us had this horrible cold for like all of December in 2016 and got pneumonia and everything.”

To Amanda, the confusing dance of attachment came harshly when the girls had to start pre-school. When I asked her about her how it felt to leave, she exclaimed:

“Oh my gosh. The day they told me it was going to end I thought someone had ripped out my ovaries and hit me with them. I thought to myself, “you moron, they’re not your babies.’”  

Talking to Amanda, I felt the complexity of the dance of her nannydom. The process of being responsible for the children in a family for a time that isn’t technically considered to be “your own” is outside any experience I’ve had. Amanda “took a million pictures of them that last summer” intending to make a huge photo collage of their faces “but is that weird to do with someone else’s babies?”.  She visited them every few weeks after it ended and asked them about pre-school.

“At first they did ask for me. They would say “I don’t wanna go to school! I wanna go to the playground with ‘Manda!”. But I think if I asked them now if they remembered going to the playground with me all the time, they wouldn’t remember.”

This post is sort of an ode to and contemplation of people who cared for us when we were children who we may not remember much about. It’s a reminder (to myself at least) that the human family is much larger than it seems, and our circles of love are complex and integrated.

Thank you for reading, friends! ❤

*Changed the names to keep some semblance of privacy!