The International Nanny

In my research to find how the world views nannies, I found this article on salon.com.

It really pissed me off.

Cecelie Berry contends that it was difficult for her to find the proper "international" nanny. She goes on to list the nannies she worked with, and how each would eventually reveal their own given "story," the emotional baggage they were carrying. Berry suggests these back stories eventually would seep over into the caring of her children. She says that at first, things would seem to go well only to crumble when secrets from the nanny's past came to light. I take major exception to this idea.

We all have "baggage." Positive and negative experiences from our pasts that shape the adults we become. We use our personal history as a tool that helps us determine the proper way to raise a child. Some of these tools are beneficial, and some are harmful. Some are neither, and that is where a gray area arises. That is what I like to call a nanny conflict of interest. A scenario where the intentions of the parents and the nanny don't sync up. Where the nanny and the parent both pull in different directions. In the salon.com article, Ms. Berry points out some rather dramatic incidents that caused a termination for the nanny. I do agree that these situations merited serious action, and certainly in some cases dismissal. My frustration with Ms. Berry's ideas stem from her generalizations and pretensions.

From the beginning, we learn that finding an international nanny is what is important to Ms. Berry. She states her only criterion for finding a nanny, was acquiring one who came highly recommended. That is understandable. However, she focuses her search solely on international nannies. When speaking of another mother, Ms. Berry says, "She sounded so cosmopolitan, so superior, and it seemed that the next best thing to visiting those countries was having a nanny from one of them." I do not mean to suggest that she shouldn't have sought a foreign nanny. My question is, why exclude the possibility of an American nanny? I gathered from the article that the reason was purely based on pretensions and status. "If she can do it, so can I."

I have always assumed that in the quest to find the right nanny, a family makes a list of what is most important to them. I would also venture to say that for the most part, a mother is concerned that a.) her child(ren) is (are) well cared for b.) the nanny is intelligent, fun-loving, dedicated, kind and has a genuine love of children. Other items may be more subjective; age, years of experience, and perhaps race. But I hate to think that a mother would think, "Well, I have to find a nanny that is not from this country, because if that mouthy mother next door has a Nepalese nanny, and the mother from play group has an Australian nanny, why shouldn't my nanny be worldly?"

And in my own biased way, I can't help but wonder if some mothers wouldn't prefer an American nanny, who was likely raised with similar customs and backgrounds.

I am not at all implying that women ought to seek out a nanny from their own country. That being said, I also think it is ridiculous to think that mothers intentionally seek out nannies from different countries. When a family makes a list of what is is they are looking for in a nanny, it shouldn't matter what country that woman will come from. It's all about priorities.

It's a human being, not a handbag.

I have highlighted passages in the article that particularly boiled my blood. I welcome your comments. I'd like to know if anyone feels the same way. As me or Cecelie Barry.




U N I T E D -N A T I O N S- O F- N A N N I E S

I wanted to be Lady Liberty, but my nannies from foreign
lands never became part of the family.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Cecelie S. Berry

Feb. 11, 2000 |I didn't intend to hire nannies from so many different countries. I started out believing in the perfect nanny just as I had believed in the inevitability of true love. And I pursued my nanny just as vigorously, bringing to my search optimism, determination, perseverance and, perhaps most important, an open mind. Unlike some mothers, I didn't have a preference for, say, West Indian or European nannies. There was no continent or region that I wouldn't consider. My only criterion was that the nanny I hired come highly recommended.

So come they did. There was Loretta from Panama, Sophie from France, Georgette from Ghana, Samantha from England, Yasmine from Sweden and on and on. Looking back on it, I must have felt like Lady Liberty and perhaps went on a suitably sized ego trip.

Yes, ego too was involved. I didn't just feel I needed a nanny, I felt I deserved one. Even now, having been around the block a few times, I feel envy toward the professional mothers who have their nannies call me to arrange play dates. My thinking was: If I've got the most important job in the world, where's my secretary, my girl Friday? It seemed to me that a nanny was an indispensable accouterment of accomplished motherhood.

My competitive streak made me a ready patsy in the nanny shell game. But there was also inside me the girl from Cleveland who had never convinced herself that she was a woman of the world. I remember hearing one mother rattle off a list of the countries from which her nannies had hailed: Turkey, Italy, Greece -- a veritable travelogue of exotic locales. She sounded so cosmopolitan, so superior, and it seemed that the next best thing to visiting those countries was having a nanny from one of them. Maybe better. After all, this approach saved time and money. There was no jet lag and no need to pack light. I imagined her children as little polyglots who, having soaked up all that culture, would be advantageously situated for 21st century globalization. And I thought: If she can do it, so can I.

When Yasmine came to us she seemed fertile with cultural provenance. She had been born and raised in Sweden by her Swedish mother and Nigerian father. Although they divorced when she was 5, she seemed proud of her mixed heritage. Yasmine was 13 when her mother remarried and moved the family from Stockholm to a small northern town close to Finland. There, Yasmine and her sister would negotiate the difficulties of growing up half-African in a world almost entirely blond and blue-eyed. Their little half-brother, Peter, would have none of these difficulties; he not only "looked Swedish" but was also blessed with a family more stable than Yasmine had ever known. (Peter was about the same age as my oldest son, Sam.)

Yasmine chatted nervously in the car on the trip to our house. She had heard of lots of successful black Americans, like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Cosby. Did I know any of them? I laughed. It seemed that the cultural education would go both ways. She showed me a picture of her mother. "She is not a blond," she said. "I want her to dye her hair, but she won't. Don't you think she'd look better if she were a blond?"

"I think she looks great as she is," I said.

Perhaps I should have taken the next U-turn back to the airport. (*MY NOTE: Why?!) But I didn't. I expected Yasmine to have insecurities. I know too well what it is to grow up not being anybody's idea of perfection. And I know what a great opportunity that can be, with the proper support. I thought I could actually help her, that we could help each other.

Then we passed a local college. "I was never much good in school. My brother is very smart, everyone says. And my sister is pursuing her studies."

I brightened. "What is she studying?"

"Makeup artistry," she said.

In time, Yasmine introduced me to Swedish "culture," as she experienced it. She showed me photographs of a favorite springtime activity. The teenagers in town would each climb on a huge floating piece of ice in a nearby lake. Using gondolier-style poles, they would ram these small icebergs into one another. "It's slippery, so you have to be careful, but it's so much fun."

"Yasmine," I breathed, "that sounds so dangerous."

"Yes, if you fall between the icebergs, they won't find you until late summer. Maybe never. There isn't a lot to do there, though. That's why I'm here."

With every nanny I hired, there was the Story, one they mentioned in casual conversation, in a perfectly normal tone, that chilled you to the bone. It's not a story they include in their curriculum vitae or even, I suspect, one that they tell their other employers. The nannies I've had are more open with me because I'm a black woman; they assume I'll understand and, probably, that I've even been through worse. In their eyes, what I might think or feel doesn't really count.

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.(*MY NOTE: This to me, is the root of the problem. Because one has gone through strife doesn't at all mean they will take it out on an innocent child.)

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?"