The Nanny Diaries
(Note to all: This is
an article I wrote a few years ago for the late lamented Metropole
magazine. When I got my ditto birthday
copy of Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey
I was visiting a friend and her four-year-old one gray morning, with my own four-year-old in tow. It wasn't one of those ever-popular "play dates," because we hadn't arranged it seven weeks in advance -- she just called me up and told me to come on by if I wasn't doing anything else, maybe we'd make some edible play dough. The morning wasn't offering anything more exciting to another friend of hers, either, whom I met at the bottom of the stairs. This woman had quite an entourage: her small daughter, her even smaller son, and a nanny to carry the latter.
Our mutual friend met us at the top of the stairs, and we all exchanged greetings, the children eyeing one another suspiciously. The nanny didn't speak, only held patiently to her quiet burden.
I wondered as I thought back later on the scene what it was that had bothered me so much about it. I am a mother who used to be a nanny, and am in no position to romanticize either role. And yet there was something troubling about the blatant admission the little picture made. The mother held her older child, big enough to walk, by the hand; but she handed the youngest over to the hired help to hold because carrying a baby isn't, or isn't only, an act of love. It's work.
Pop quiz: Which of the following statements was spoken by a small child to his nanny, and which by a child to his mother?
"Why do you always take people's toys away?" (a remark uttered after I removed a toy belonging to one person -- the child in question, funnily enough -- because he'd been throwing said toy and refused to stop)
"Why don't you ever let me play with anything?" (a similar globalization heard from an entirely unrelated two-year-old towhead when I put nix to the idea of his borrowing a glass oil lamp for his own purposes)
Can't tell the difference? Neither can I. Neither could I see much difference between being abused by an entirely-too-bright child not of my making, and one I put together myself from things I found around the house. That was why, having been a nanny for a happy two years (and, before that, an unhappy two months, but more about that later), I made the entirely unwarranted assumption that I'd been adequately prepared for the role of mother and leapt right in. Why not? I already knew what it was like to spend twelve hours a day in the company of a child who could manage to spill juice even when we were out of the stuff; who couldn't get his own underwear on without serious assistance and yet somehow ferreted out the chocolate I kept hidden and under lock and key; whose hobby was punctuating my rare moments of peace with such serene statements as "Billy poked his eye with a stick and now part of the stick is stuck in there." I'd been spit on, wet on, cried on, and loved. Why not leave the ranks of the professionals and go amateur -- sacrifice the paycheck for the title?
Turns out that there's a bit of a difference between twelve hours, or even fourteen or sixteen as my live-in days occasionally ran, and twenty-four. And there's certainly a difference between time off evenings and weekends, and being reduced to bleary, teary gratitude for the occasional undisturbed hour. And there is perhaps the most excruciating difference of all between making a little money you get to spend all on yourself, and making nothing at all but still having one or more small, greedy people clamoring for every penny you can scratch up. I would say that being a nanny was a fine introduction to being a mother in the same sense that college is a decent interim step between the parental roof and being on your own but should never be mistaken for real life.
But that's not quite fair, either. As grueling as parenting can be, there are serious advantages. No boss means no one telling you what to do (except every magazine and newspaper article in the world, but never mind, you don't have time to read anyway). You can sleep in if you can convince your child to do the same. You can take a mommy day off -- that is, do the absolute bare minimum of housework and childcare necessary for survival and not a smidgen more -- just because you need it. You set the pace. You set the style. You are the ultimate authority, scary as that often is.
Caring for someone else's child is scary in a different kind of way. It's a pain. You have to look perky no matter how you feel. You get all the blame when anything goes wrong, large scale or small, and none of the credit when the kid grows up into a fabulous individual. If you live in, it's damned near impossible to get a sick day, no matter what kind of shape you're in. (Real-life anecdote: I once had the care of a two-year-old and a case of the stomach flu so bad that if I so much as lifted my head I threw up. Guess whose mommy and daddy went to work anyway? Hey, they weren't sick.) If you don't live in, it's damned near impossible to get any respect as an authority figure, or a sense of the routine established long before you arrived on the scene. If you do live in, it's not that much easier. True, you're harder to fire, but it's also way harder to have anything like a life of your own.
The only thing the live-in really has in common with the biological mother is that to most outsiders, her day doesn't always look like work. The sad part is that a lot of those outsiders can be the people you work for, who really ought to know better. Yet another thrilling snippet from the actually-happened files: While I was living in, the children's mother, who was a teacher, had a day off during the week. She stayed home and had a luxurious time, as she admitted at the end of the day -- sunbathing, reading, catching up on phone calls. I pretty much went about my everyday routine -- cleaning, cooking, entertaining short shrill-voiced people -- a little awkwardly because of the extra audience and because the children kept running to their mother to say hi, hear an occasional story, frolic in the backyard as she read and tanned. I guess I should have kept them closer to me, because at the end of the week I was handed my pay with that day deducted. Since the mother had been around to "watch" the kids, I wasn't "really" on duty. Heavy quotes around both those words. Heavy quotes around the idea of my having had the day off, when if I'd actually taken off and done something entirely my own idea and for entirely my own amusement the style of her day off would have damned well had a sizeable crimp in it.
Bear in mind please that these were the good people, the ones I genuinely loved, the ones I'm still in touch with. They were, in their own eyes and mine, more than a cut above the average employer of domestic help. They were in a different universe altogether from the first family I was lucky enough to be hired by at the ripe old age of seventeen. Their real names were the Weisses -- Doctor, Mrs., and baby Jordan -- but to protect the guilty I'll call them the Whackjobs.
The Whackjobs were a great first family to work for. They made anyone who followed them look good. Their child was so evil that, during my interview when his mother left the room for a moment, he ignored my admittedly lame efforts at friendly chatter, pulled out a crayon, and started coloring on the wall. He couldn't do much damage, fortunately, because all the time he was staring me right in the eye, daring me to do something to stop him.
Actually, Jordan wasn't so bad. Well, he was, but you could kind of understand it. He was only two years old, and in the past eighteen months there'd been a parade of no less than twenty-one nanny/housekeepers in and then out of his front door. Some of them only lasted a few days. Insecurity, much?
Not that I knew any of this at the time. I found out later, in bits and pieces. I did wonder why Mrs. Whackjob was so gung-ho about my not moving my possessions in "right away." I was still living out of my suitcase a month after I'd supposedly moved in. She kept talking about not wanting to upset baby Jordan in case things didn't "work out." She also couldn't quite figure out what she wanted. She wanted someone to supervise and stimulate her (of course gifted and advanced and brilliant and mature) child every loving minute, and she also wanted her two-story, cream-colored-carpet-shod, antique-laden house kept spotlessly clean. She loved the idea of having a live-in servant, but she couldn't stand having me around all the time. Live-in, she informed me after I'd been working there a week, meant spending my weekends elsewhere. Not just the days, but the nights. (If I'd had a home to go to, why the hell would I have wanted to slum five nights a week with her crew?) But during the week, I couldn't be there enough. One night she told me that, well, yes, she'd said that I could have evenings off (evening qualifying as anything after, say, six-thirty or seven o'clock, bearing in mind that the work day started at seven sharp), but if I kept exercising that right by leaving the house, she'd have to revoke it. (I believe that was after I'd absented myself a few hours to help my four-year-old sister celebrate her birthday.) And then there was the night that I was up until midnight ironing (Dr. Whackjob's underwear required light starch, and no, I'm not kidding) and she got upset because I hadn't dusted the dining room. And there was the family's charming habit of not so much as rinsing their dirty dishes all weekend, let alone risking a strained muscle by putting them in the dishwasher, so come Monday morning I'd be greeted by the sight (and the smell) of --
Well, you get the picture. So did I, though it took me a couple of months. (I wasn't the most savvy seventeen-year-old in the world.) And it took me a lot more work in the same field and a lot of years of just plain living to find out that everyone who's ever ventured into the wonderful land of taking care of other people's messes and children (yes, I know, often the same thing) has their nightmare, can-you-top-this stories to tell.
So, yeah, I was the one cheering when I first heard about The Nanny Diaries. A woman I see at the bookstore for Saturday morning story time told me that she'd looked at it and maybe it was accurate when it came to New York nannies, but it seemed awfully exaggerated and anyway nothing to do with us west coasters. Her nanny, as always hovering patiently in the background, said nothing, and her two-year-old daughter began slapping anyone within reach, including but not limited to said nanny. This time it was the mother's turn to sit in silence. I went downstairs and bought a copy of the book.
Reading the prologue, I didn't regret my purchase. I never regret laughing out loud, especially at other people's expense. It was absolutely true that right off the bat a lot of the griefs outlined in that first mini-chapter weren't anything I could directly relate to, simply because I did my stint more than a decade ago and trends change. On the list of difficulties a nanny will run into while attempting to keep her charge alive and fed in the face of allergies and other hazards, for instance, is included a strict rule against the child eating or drinking too close to bedtime. I've never heard of this. I must be too old-school. Whatever happened to a bowl of cereal before bed?
But much of what our as-yet unnamed heroine runs into is remarkably the same. That whole first uncomfortable interview with a prospective employer, for instance, who wants to know "why, if I'm so fabulous, I would want to take care of her child. I mean, she gave birth to it and she doesn't want to do it..." And on the tour of the employer's home, nameless nanny notes that "the distance of the child's room from the parents' room always runs the gamut from far away to really, really far away. In fact, if there is another floor this room will be on it." Lordy, ain't it the truth.
I was still definitely with the program some ten pages later, when the book has officially begun and the narrator ruminates about the different types of "nanny gigs":
Type A, I provide "couple time" a few nights a week for people who work all day and parent most nights. Type B, I provide "sanity time" a few afternoons a week to a woman who mothers most days and nights. Type C, I'm brought in as one of a cast of many to collectively provide twenty-four/seven "me time" to a woman who neither works nor mothers. And her days remain a mystery to us all.
(Guess which type Mrs. Whackjob was?)
And then there was this illuminating passage, early on in the narrating nanny's initial interview:
We will dance around certain words, such as "nanny" and "child care," because they would be distasteful and we will never, ever, actually acknowledge that we are talking about my working for her. This is the Holy Covenant of the Mother/Nanny relationship: this is a pleasure -- not a job.
Which reminded me vividly of a passage by Judith Martin,
a.k.a. Miss Manners,
The term "help" is an early American one, based on a democratic aversion to the idea of one person serving another. Thus the euphemistic concept that everyone does his or her own work but that obliging people sometimes appear, out of the goodness of their hearts, to help.
Martin goes on to argue that if we could all just bring ourselves to admit that we are hiring servants, not having friends (or magicians, or guardian angels) over to visit, domestic employer/employee relations would improve dramatically. If The Nanny Diaries is anything like an accurate representation of how those relations stand at the moment, they could certainly use the help.
My first real warning that things were not all that they ought to be in The Nanny Diaries came when I finally figured out the first-person narrator's first name. Nanny. No, I mean that's her name. Really. She's a nanny named Nanny. Her parents named her that and everything.
Now, it is absolutely true that there have been some brilliant satirical works with symbolically named characters. Pretty much everyone in any Dickens novel comes to mind. But you have to be a certain kind of writer doing a certain kind of work to get away with that, and the dual authors of The Nanny Diaries just don't fit the bill. Maybe if all the characters had been named like that -- if her best friend, for example, had been a girl named Best Friend (or Beth Friend, if you wanted to get marginally more realistic). But her best friend has the perfectly normal name of Sarah, which is a shame because she has absolutely no other identifying characteristics and so the reader wonders briefly who the hell she is every time she shows up on the page. Josh, the other best friend, has blue hair, but since you can't see him that doesn't help much past the first (and only) reference to it.
The fact that lots of other people had perfectly normal names brought home another point that bothered me about the nanny being named Nanny, which is this: if that had been her real name in the book -- that is, if the other characters all really thought she was named that -- then someone would, at some point in the novel, have pointed out the fact that she's a nanny and her name is Nanny and isn't that funny? It would just be perfectly unavoidable. But no one breathes a word on the subject. And so the reader is left to wonder: if Nanny isn't Nanny's name, why aren't we being told what her real name is? And if it is, why doesn't anyone act like it?
Nanny isn't the only oddly named character in the book. She meets a guy, thinks he's cute, finds out where he goes to school, and from then on refers to him as Harvard Hottie, or H.H. when the joke gets tired. Which it does pretty quickly, because that's the kind of thing that a writer could just get away with in a short story but which is almost impossible to hang onto effectively for a full-length work. Long before the end of the book, Nanny is almost never referred to by name, as if the authors were already regretting their mistake but didn't know how to fix it.
I admit I'm still puzzled by their decision to name her this. Because not only is Nanny not your typical nanny, but even she doesn't think she is. She's a young white girl from an upper-middle-class home, finishing her last year of college. What might have been more effective, in terms of sledgehammer symbolism, would be if the family she worked for constantly referred to her as Nanny. That would have recalled the bad old days of servitude, when, as Frank Victor Dawes recalls in Not in Front of the Servants,
Even the kindliest of employers seemed to regard their servants as chattels, thinking nothing, for instance, of changing their names arbitrarily if they happened to clash with those of "the family." Mary or Jane were common generic names for servant girls. Anything varying from the norm...was pretentious, and not allowed.
But in spite of the sprinkling of quotes from older works of
fiction addressing the perils of domestic servitude, The Nanny Diaries
is not a work demonstrating any awareness of itself as fitting into any global
or historical context. Which is a shame,
because this century could do with a really revolutionary work on the subject
of how to remember that your nanny is human just like you, plus she's taking
care of your very own kid so maybe you could cut her some slack and even try
and make her life easier now and then.
The very first quoted work in The Nanny Diaries is Jane Eyre,
About a hundred and fifty years ago, Anne went into service as a governess, because she needed the money and as a bid for independence from a family that tended to regard her as a perpetual child. In a five-year career she had two different postings, both disastrous. She realized that the fault in both cases was not her own, but rather that of the common attitude of the rich toward their employees, especially governesses, who lived in a kind of social limbo: too educated to be lumped in (or socialize) with other servants, but too poor to rank with their employers. A sort of genteel invisibility ensued, horribly destructive to any sensitive mind, but especially cruel to one pining for her loved ones. Anne went home and determined to tell the world of her experiences -- not maliciously, but in the hopes that those who followed her might have better experiences in the field. The result of her efforts was a slim but effective work entitled Agnes Grey.
The book is a good one -- George Moore once called it "the most perfect prose narrative in English literature" -- though it has been overshadowed from the very beginning by its "big sister" Jane Eyre. Yet the works are very different. Jane Eyre is dark and dramatic, a love story bordering on the sadomasochistic. Agnes Grey is a quieter, simpler tale, far more realistic, and perhaps that is why it is so often ignored. Yet its author lived her short life in the hope that it would do some good, and perhaps achieve real change. As Angeline Goreau writes in her introduction to the Penguin edition of the book,
[Anne Bronte] would surely have felt that she had fulfilled her aim in writing Agnes Grey if she could have read the comment Lady Amberly recorded in her diary more than a score of years after the book was published: "read Agnes Grey...and should like to give it to every family with a governess and shall read it through again when I have a governess to remind me to be human." [ellipses in original]
We all need reminding to be human now and then. The Nanny Diaries should have been the book to do that for a particular place and time. I'm willing to accept the idea that the ex-nannies who wrote N. D. were trying to act as conscience-spurs just as Bronte was. Their book even resembles Agnes Grey in a great many ways, though I sincerely doubt they've even heard of the work. But there is the same rough story line. An innocent and rather nondescript heroine seeks work caring for children. She has a lively and sympathetic family -- so much so in N. D. that between the zany and always magical grandmother, the quirky dad, and the witty, socially responsible mom, one longs in vain for a breath of dysfunction. The heroine finds employment in a family of rich, self-centered materialists, including a mother more concerned about appearances than true character and a father almost constantly absent. Her profession is derided by pretty much everyone she runs into, and it is almost impossible for her to do anything right in the sight of her employer. She eventually meets the man of her dreams not only in the course of her employment, but as a direct result of it. This man wishes to change the world for the better and help the poor and unfortunate. Oh, and a dog is rescued from the evil employer family and ushered safely into Anges/Nanny's loving arms. Have I missed anything?
The main difference between the two works is perceived intent. Agnes Grey is, by all accounts, so thinly veiled as fiction that one is surprised she even bothered changing the names of the people she'd worked for. The few changes from life to fiction are ones she might have taken quiet private pleasure in, such as socially demoting the first family she worked for. But she kept her story accurate exactly so that she could claim that it was an accurate portrayal of the miserable lot of the governess. Her character has very little in the way of personality because her personality isn't the point; what matters is the essential inhumanity with which governesses in general were then being treated, a fact Anne wished passionately to change. She was the only one of the sisters with anything like a missionary zeal, and it shows.
The authors of The Nanny Diaries might well claim to have the same aims as Anne Bronte. But their book tends to come across as catty and self-serving. Also less than realistic. Agnes Grey kept an even, dispassionate tone with which the author aimed to establish her credibility. The Nanny Diaries is hard to take seriously, because it's just too hard to tell when it's kidding, or at least exaggerating, and when the authors might, on being asked, say, "No, that one really happened! No, really!" And when the exaggerations are too blatant to be believed, they're not usually funny enough to justify their own existence. One evil rich woman mentions that her nanny has "another 'appointment' for her hip replacement....I swear, it's the third one this month. I'm really losing patience with her." Yeah, that happened. No, really. And if it did I still don't believe it.
Given the authors' lack of writing talent, they'd have been
better off writing a tell-all memoir instead, which also would have helped that
credibility problem some. And we might
have been shown a few characters who are either
convincing or compelling. As it is, nyet. The
dialogue reads like it came straight out of Coyote Ugly
Perhaps the biggest flaw in the book is that Nanny herself is nothing like nice. No, she doesn't have to be a picture of injured virtue; but with so many real wrongs aimed at her, the jabs she sometimes takes feel spiteful rather than righteous. Mrs. X, for example (yes, that's her name), is so willfully shallow she'd beach a balsa-wood boat. She doesn't see her husband for days at a time, and apparently only to want to hang onto him because he's rich. But when Nanny aims a prayer for "a real, honest-to-goodness job with set hours and an office where the boss's underwear isn't drying in the bathroom," I felt a twinge of sympathy for said boss. There's all the difference in the world between showing up late or not at all to relieve your own babysitter, especially when that babysitter has places to be and people to see just like you do and has told you as much, and letting some of your unmentionables dry in the bathroom on the day the sitter happens to be there. There's something supremely unfair about the idea of working in somebody's home and insisting that the place be kept in company condition. That's going back to the whole idea that the employee is there on a whim rather than to work.
There's also something more than a little presumptuous about Nanny's wanting to have the privileges of both nanny and parent. She wants to be able to just sit and read while her charge plays off by himself, and still get paid that twelve dollars an hour, which even in New York sounds like pretty decent wages to me. And not even at home with the kid, but out at a park or other public play place. Once she leaves him completely on his own in the company of a child she's described to herself as "a potential homicidal maniac," one who in her presence has already hit, kicked, and tried to smother her charge. So naturally she drops the two children off together and sits down with a cupcake to kvetch about her job to another nanny, getting up only when she sees, out of the corner of her eye, the psycho kid grabbing her charge by his necktie and pulling as hard as he can while said charge, little X, turns red. Breaktime's over. What a drag.
The biggest disappointment of this book, in the midst of the meaningless title (there are no diaries here), the spelling and punctuation errors that make one wonder if a copy editor even heard about this book let alone looked at it, and the fact that you'd never know the book was going to end if you didn't notice the pages running out since the authors don't sweat small stuff like drawing things to a natural close but let the book screech to a stop like a crosstown bus -- the real letdown is that there are occasional patches of good, even brilliant, writing to let you know exactly what you're missing and what the book might have been if the authors had decided to write a book instead of ride a gimmick. Ninety pages into the book I was jolted into my first laugh since the prologue:
"You know Giselle Rutherford?"
"Jacqueline Rutherford's daughter? Of course -- oh, her mother is too much. When it was her turn to do snack she brought in a chef and set up an omelette bar in the music corner. I mean, really. The rule is you are supposed to come with the snack prepared."
Just as this passage demonstrates a knack for tricky humor -- the one-two punchline so difficult to do well -- another scene has a child talking the way a child would really talk while still being fun to read, which is about the hardest kind of writing there is. Nanny opens a bathroom door without knocking and accidentally barges in on a four-year-old, who shrieks in real red-headed indignation. This child loses no time in telling on the culprit: "Mommy! She took my privacy!" You can see that. You can feel it. As opposed to Nanny complimenting her grandmother: "New necklace, Grandma? It's charming." (Note to the authors: if anyone ever actually talked like that, it sure as hell wouldn't be a girl whose response to adversity, observed or experienced, is always a heartfelt and poetic "That sucks.") There's even real pathos in this book -- not in the impassioned and insipid talking-to-the-nannycam scene toward the end, but when Nanny is stuck taking care of her charge all night when he's really sick and she can't reach his mother so she calls her own. Sounds trite, I know, but it works.
But the rare glints of brilliance aren't anything like enough to make this book worth reading. The real shame is that the book it could have been, the book that might really change people's thinking and remind them to be human, may not be written any time soon, because anyone setting out to write a genuinely intelligent and pointed work on the subject will be held back by the fear of looking as if she's ripping off this work or trying to ride on its success. And that's a loss. In a supposedly enlightened age where nannies are about as appreciated (and get about as much time off) as their nineteenth-century counterparts, we are in real need of an Agnes Grey to set us all straight.
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