Cecelie S. Berry

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.
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.

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?”

According to the Daily Mail, the increased use of cautions is part of a wider program to reduce the number of criminal court cases clogging the justice system and to ease overcrowding in British prisons. Under the new guidelines, a caution may now be used at the discretion of the arresting officer if the offender has no prior record. According to the Daily Mail, those circumsatnces might include situations in which the accused is elderly, and the victim required acknowledgment that a crime had been committed; or when the offender is very young and has been referred to treatment or rehabilitation outside the criminal justice system.

Not surprisingly, domestic violence advocates find the changes troubling. Nicola Harwin, chief executive of Women’s Aid, a charity devoted to eradicating domestic violence, comments, “I think it is worrying that cautioning for rape is something that is not discussed, explored or explained … We need to be told the exact circumstances in which cautions are given, what the ground rules are and whether they are applied properly.” And those concerns seem especially valid given the fact that the number of rapes reported to the police has increased annually, while the number of convictions has declined from one in three cases in 1977 to one in 20 in 2004.

Now 20, Jane Doe has brought a civil action against the three, and named Haidl’s father, a wealthy former assistant sheriff in Orange County, as a codefendant. Doe alleges that Haidl’s father should have been aware of the parties, which featured drugs and alcohol, that were held in his Corona del Mar home, where the assault occurred. In an unprecedented legal move, the $26 million case also names Haidl’s defense attorney, Cavallo, and his two investigators, John Warren and Shawn Smigel, for their actions in causing the plaintiff extreme emotional distress.

Doe alleges that Cavallo and his investigators crossed the bounds of appropriate representation of her attackers when they “staked out her Rancho Cucamonga house, went through her trash, stalked her, improperly obtained her medical records, broadcast her identity and once cornered her in a parking lot while snapping pictures.” Doe recalls that after the defendants were arrested, fliers appeared in the parking lot of her high school naming Jane Doe as the accuser. When she sought refuge in another school, she says, investigators appeared in the parking lot of the new school and screamed her name.

Cavallo said in response, “Everyone knew who Jane Doe was anyway.”

Because of the existence of the videotape, Jane Doe has a strong civil case against her attackers. The outcome of the case against Cavallo is less certain. It challenges the established “litigation privilege” that prevents the actions of a defense attorney in a court case from becoming the subject of a lawsuit. Doe is seeking to overturn legal precedent; her claim against Cavallo will test the boundaries of what actions an attorney may authorize in the defense of clients. If she succeeds, she will have stripped away key weapons in the arsenal of cruel tactics that have intimidated many sexual victims into silence.

Ramos has become a symbol of the country’s small antiwar movement. The protest letter states that El Salvador is “an accomplice to a military occupation that violates the fundamental laws of this country and a co-participant in widely denounced human rights violations.”

After Ramos delivered the letter a group of army officials showed up at her home and told her that her letter would not prevent the deployment of another battalion to Iraq. Ramos told them, “I don’t want those troops to go.”

Bishop Medardo Gomez of the Lutheran Church of El Salvador described Herminia Ramos’ courage. “She is a poor woman of few words whose pain led her to speak out. She’s dared to stand up to the powerful, to our government, and above all, to the military.”

Despite the ongoing cultural debate over what kind of family is best for children, the new policy is supported by findings that single mothers and their children fare just as well as those in two-parent households. The NHS move came as hospitals and clinics began worrying that they could face discrimination claims for denying single women fertility-related treatments.

Natasha Zuka, 35, a software developer, tells the Independent that while she is “considering being inseminated,” she has some reservations about the new NHS policy. Although she believes “that all women should have the option of accessing some NHS funding,” she worries that “the consultation for donor insemination shouldn’t be like a routine check-up.”

Choosing to become a mother “is a very tough decision,” said Zuka, “and shouldn’t be made ‘on the fly.’”

Plus, I love the drama.

Two recent articles exploring women’s supposed emotionality in the workplace made me think about my own tendency to tear up. In the New York Times, Martha Stewart and other female honchos say that women who want to succeed in business must not weep, period. It’s a remnant of advice from the era when women felt they had to imitate the dress and behavior of men in order to succeed. And a number of women executives in the article attest to the fact that, regardless of a female’s biological predisposition to cry, stoicism is essential to her credibility as a leader.

A cover story in Newsweek on “Women’s Leadership” takes a polar tack. There, successful women from politics, science, media and business expound on the unique emotive capacities that women bring to their management style. Unlike the women in the Times story, the women in Newsweek share a sensitivity to work-life balance issues, to building a sense of community at the office, and a keen, unapologetic recognition of the obstacles to advancement women continue to face.

It seems that when it comes to assessing whether women’s emotions are a hindrance or, simply, a difference, we are still as divided as Janus.

I discovered early on that crying was controversial. “People will think you’re weak,” my older sister said, when I came home from a schoolyard fight in tears. “People will think you’re unstable,” I was told as a summer associate in a big city law firm, when I went crying to a female lawyer after a senior partner obliterated one of my memos. “People will think you’re unhappy,” my mother warned when I cried at my son’s brilliant performance as Charlie Brown in the kindergarten play.

Often I’ve been cautioned that emotions make people uncomfortable. As a black woman, I am also aware that my crying jags might fulfill a stereotype: that all black women are prone to fly off the handle, to be illogical, perhaps uncontrollable. I remember, after the O.J. Simpson verdict, how the exultation of many blacks was seen by some as a collective intellectual failure to understand the legal issues of the case. Emotions can be used against you, rendering you either too human, or less than human. And yet, yielding to the tornado of feeling that whirls inside me at times is irresistibly cathartic, and ultimately empowering. Public tears feel liberating, an act of defiance against those who would subdue me with decorum and logic.

My father was the first person to tell me it was OK to cry. Perhaps it was this early support from a male authority figure that has given me the license and the confidence to remain emotional. I was about 7 when he caught me sobbing at the end of the film “Heidi,” at the denouement, when Heidi’s friend Clara tosses her crutches away and ambles across the Swiss mountaintop. My father took me on his lap and said, “Princess, never be ashamed to cry.”

Of course, I was a girl. I never saw him cry, and I don’t know that he ever said as much to my brother, but I doubt it. It’s too bad because they both would have benefited if they’d had the freedom to let the tears flow.

I have become a crying booster. When I see my sons, or other boys, crying, I want to say, “That’s right! Just do it! You da man!” If men and women became more comfortable with expressions of emotion, we could humanize the workplace, lead more fulfilling personal lives and welcome authentic compassion into political life.

The response to Katrina had me over the moon because it illustrates my point: Emotions, particularly when expressed by men, are powerful. Mayor Ray Nagin’s expletives; Kanye West saying “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” on national television; NBA basketball star Stephon Marbury weeping uncontrollably at a press conference; the breakdown of Jefferson County Parish president Aaron Broussard, as he described the calls for help from a friend’s mother who drowned in her nursing home. These incidents placed heartbreak on the political agenda. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s cool appraisal, “It’s an emotional time,” seemed a paternalistic understatement intended to dismiss these protests as uncontrolled ravings. But on display in the days after Katrina were unvarnished tears and genuine empathy, which eventually compelled action.

Tears teach. What stirs us to public emotion reveals our needs, reflects our values. It also asks others to evaluate what, if anything, they are doing to provoke our tears, to take responsibility for our feelings by trying to make things better. This is why emotions are politically incorrect; they impose on us burdensome questions: What have I done? What can I do? The images of men breaking down and speaking out after Katrina exemplified true compassion, not the propagandistic kind that is safely contained and manipulated with photo ops and false camaraderie. It was raw, it was real and it won the hearts and minds of the nation. Let’s hope we haven’t seen the last of it.