The Chronicles of Nanny-a
Sex, class, age, power and Jude Law -- two melodramas about parents and their domestic help have it all, and leave us feeling a little dirty, too.
By Rebecca Traister
Read more: Sex, Rebecca Traister, Life
July 24, 2005 | It's not often you get two nanny maelstroms in one week. Nannies, after all, often fly under the radar as invisible laborers, changing diapers, taking kids to school, making life easier for the parents who hire them.
But this week, nannies are news. First came a New York Times story in Sunday's "Modern Love" column by a mother who fired her nanny after reading her blog; it provoked an angry blogged response from the canned caretaker. Just a day later, news broke that "Alfie" dog Jude Law had cheated on his fiancée with his kids' nanny.
The stories are very different, but they both highlight an uncomfortable condition of middle- and upper-class life that we don't like to talk about very much. It's incredibly hard to wrap our heads around the tricky contradictions and muddled ways we view the people -- usually female, with varying degrees of education, money and racial advantages -- who help parents privileged enough to employ them balance the responsibilities of work, social life and child rearing. It's a powder-keg relationship, packed with class, gender and age anxieties, doused with the lighter fluid of psychological transference and jealousy. When it explodes, as it has in these two cases, neither nannies nor mommies nor jilted girlfriends come out looking good.
The "Modern Love" piece, by Helaine Olen, tells of how Olen started reading the blog of her family nanny, Tessy (as she refers to herself in her blog). Olen describes Tessy as a "26-year-old former teacher with excellent references," as if she were a horse-trader selling a mare with pearly white incisors. Her dismay at what she found in her well-bred babysitter's online diary makes her envious and critical of Tessy's social and sexual life, as well as doubtful about the young woman's devotion to the family.
Olen writes of her shock at learning that Tessy -- who spoke of going to graduate school! -- engaged in deviant behavior like touching her own breasts while reading the New Yorker, having sex with men and women, expressing erotic curiosity about pundit Tucker Carlson and actress Jennifer Ehle, drinking alcohol and taking sleeping pills. All of this on her own time, off the babysitting clock, but still ... Tucker Carlson?
Olen's dismay at these activities betrays her sense of surprise that a woman who pursues an advanced degree might also have desires, quirks, pleasures, breasts. In short, it came as a shock that Tessy's nannyhood did not preclude her humanity.
But of course what Olen feels (and to her credit, acknowledges that she feels) is jealousy of Tessy's youth, her energy, her unencumbered and active sex life -- all of which she writes she used to have herself, before her marriage and her kids. Olen even admits that in the past, she'd been comfortable listening to the woes of previous babysitters who'd had abortions or had their hearts broken by unfaithful men. "Those were problems I could feel superior to and that made me feel grateful for the steady routine of marriage and children."
The trouble is, it's not a babysitter's job -- any more than it is a housekeeper's or a pool boy's or an office mate's job -- to make an employer feel secure about herself. A babysitter's job is to provide care for the children.
Olen's description of Tessy indicates that she is possibly of the same economic caste as her employer. But Olen's staggering assumptions about her relationship with Tessy reveal how she conceptualizes class. That Olen should not feel in any way threatened by someone who works for her -- simply because she works for her -- is a major leap from the reasonable assumption that she should receive services from the person she pays. As for the moral lines we draw around things like marriages and bonds with children, they are certainly blurrier; but Olen gives no indication that Tessy violated those. Olen says that Tessy made her doubt herself; that's a transgression only if the base assumption is that those who work for us are, and should be by definition, less than we are in every way.
It's also clear that part of what chafes at Olen was the fact that Tessy did not use her blog as a forum in which to extol the joys of caring for her children. "Most parents don't like to think the person watching their children is there for a salary," she writes. Perhaps she thinks they show up every day for the spiritual uplift of cleaning up her children's vomit. Has she considered the pesky matter of making a living? "We often build up a mythology of friendship with our nannies, pretending the nanny admires us and loves our children so much that she would continue to visit even without pay," she writes.
Sure, many of us former babysitters have built lasting friendships with the parents and children whose lives we entered. But that's not in the contract, lady.
Next page: "Ms. Olen is shocked by a single woman who has and talks about sex," Tessy blogged