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My invisibility makes the Story a double-edged sword: If the nannies are more likely to share with me the true elements of their experience -- the neglect, abuse, self-destructiveness -- they are also more likely to act out their anger at my or my children's expense, with the expectation that I will understand and forgive.

Juggling Act: Listen to Cecelie Berry

Yasmine herself was double-edged: She had the yin and yang of someone who never fit in anywhere. Her cheerfulness hid her anger; her friendliness disguised the withering contempt she held for everyone; her acts of thoughtfulness masked a desperate selfishness. Yasmine had been betrayed by everyone; of course, she would betray us.

I was putting away laundry one day. My baby son, Spenser, was asleep, and Sam was jumping up and down on the bed. Yasmine was out of the house and I was basking in the sense of relief that always accompanied her absence. I was putting clothes in Sam's drawer when he stopped jumping and said, "Yasmine calls me stupid." I looked at him. "She calls me Sam Stupid."

I thought of all the times she had said she wasn't smart. I thought of how underneath the admiration she'd expressed for Peter's abilities, I sensed her jealousy. I thought of all the times I'd been in the house with her and Sam, and that she had never, ever called him such a thing when I was around. I knew that she was more than wounded: She was sneaky and dangerous and determined to demean my son, as she had been demeaned. I didn't understand. I didn't feel compassion. I wanted to kill her.

In the fall, Ruth came. She was Israeli, in her early 50s, and her nearly grown children were well-situated: one in medical school, another in graduate school studying physical rehabilitation. She valued education, seemed practical, confident and mature -- the antithesis of Yasmine.

But then came the Story. After a couple of weeks, Ruth told me that her mother had been a Holocaust survivor. After the war, whenever Ruth came home just five minutes late from school, perhaps without a button or a handkerchief, her mother would lock her in the closet beneath their staircase for hours. As a result, she told me she was a claustrophobic and couldn't play with Sam and Spenser in their tent.

Of course, I understood -- or tried to. It must be both a miracle and a curse to have had a mother who was brave enough to survive the horrors of a concentration camp, yet remained so haunted and fearful from the experience that anything less than perfection in her daughter deserved cruel punishment. I am amazed by what a strong chain cruelty is, how it can create a hidden culture of its own. The abused become abusers, that much is clear. In the back of my mind, I knew my sons could easily become a link in the chain that had imprisoned Ruth.

So I worked from home, slipping downstairs at intervals to peek and to listen. Then, one day, as she was leaving, Ruth suggested that maybe Sam was experiencing some separation anxiety at nursery school because he was a manic-depressive. She adjusted her glasses like Freud in discourse. "These things run in families," she added.

I laughed, "I think it's just a stage."

The next day she tried again. "You should have him looked at," she said. I assured her that I had nothing but the utmost confidence in both of my children.

But she wouldn't drop it. She was angry because I wouldn't listen to her. So she went to a white neighbor of mine, who later told me that Ruth had said my 3-year-old was having a breakdown. "She obviously doesn't have the qualifications to make that call," she added.

I fired Ruth. I suspect that she was the manic-depressive and that she was projecting her own emotional crisis onto my son. She was also trying to isolate him from me, to get me to reject him. Then she would have been free to inflict on him abuse similar to that which she had suffered.

"There is nothing for us in France, no work, so my father got me a job with a family here." Sophie spoke matter-of-factly, with such self-possession that the Story was hard to identify. I think it lay behind what she said next, with a frisson of emotion. "But that family was terrible. They treated me like nothing. The father would walk into my bedroom while I was dressing."

With the help of a French couple she'd met, Sophie had left her first job and eventually found a nanny position in a nearby town known for its affluence. She seemed to have recovered from her initial experience and was happy with her current family.

We hired Sophie for the two-week Christmas break. Initially, the children enjoyed playing with her. It irritated me that she often bragged about her other family's wealth, as if she had to let us know that they had more than we did. I didn't get too concerned though. I was impressed that she was so active with my sons, helping them construct the toys and puzzles they received during the holidays. She had constructed a 3-D Eiffel Tower. I asked my sons, "Wow, did Sophie do that with you?"

"No," they said, "she did it for us."

That bothered me. Then I found a K'nex model, a Lego set, a Robotics toy, all done by Sophie -- alone. "I'm going to have to talk to Sophie about this," I said aloud.

"Yeah, right," Spenser, just 2, said.

It dawned on me that he'd been saying that a lot. "That's not very nice, Spenser. Where did you hear that?"

"Sophie says it all the time," Sam said.

I didn't have to fire Sophie. She just didn't show up one night. Later, with impressive sang-froid, she called to ask if she could come baby-sit the next day. I said, "Yeah, right."

It's still hard to look back and to realize how dangerous these women were. People think that nannies pose only the threat of physical violence or sexual abuse, and beyond that, you're home-free. That's not so. There are many kinds of abuse; violence lives in many forms all over the world. This is the understanding that I lacked, the sophistication I wanted and now have.

Cultural exchange is a marketing tool employed by agencies. Among bourgeois mothers like myself, worldliness exists as a value unto itself, making us easy targets. But when it comes to caregiving, the strength of the individual is all that counts. It's easy to imagine spending a lifetime looking for that needle in a haystack: the one perfect person of all those who apply, the person who is most capable of caring for one's family.

I've stopped looking for that person. Now I am strangely possessed by a need to advise other mothers: Hang out with the new nanny for a couple of weeks. Listen for the Story. Then you'll know what scars you're dealing with.

Most of the time they ignore me. They write me off as bitter: I didn't luck out; I'm probably a victim of my own bad judgment. And I suppose I am still bitter. Because when they tell me that their nanny is "wonderful," a "dream," a "member of the family," my eyes flash darkly as I hasten to inquire: "Where's she from?"
salon.com | Feb. 11, 2000

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