The other mothers

Lucy Kaylin, author of a new book on mothers' complicated relationship with nannies, talks frankly about playground politics, nannycams and how the "mommy wars" play into childcare choices.

By Lynn Harris

Read more: Working Mothers, Life

June 13, 2007 | As I type, I hear my daughter playing in the living room. I hear the infernal toy that says "Moo," "Woof" and "Quack." I hear Bess laugh and squeal. I wish she could be laughing and squealing with me. But Bess is with the other woman in my marriage. My daughter is with her nanny.

About five months ago, as my husband and I sat on our couch interviewing the woman we ultimately hired to be our daughter's caretaker, I felt like the Lily Tomlin character Edith Ann: a kid playing dress-up, spindly legs poking over the high-up edge of a grown-up chair. What do you like about being a nanny? How will you handle an emergency? I tried dutifully to follow the interview suggestions provided by my neighborhood parents organization. But who the hell did I think I was? I didn't know how to hire someone to take care of my kid -- I didn't know how to take care of my kid. And since when was I one of those nanny-having mommies? My grandparents were socialists, for chrissake.

Then something she said, something not that important in and of itself, gave me one of those rare, precious moments of maternal clarity. It was something about which playground she preferred and why, or how she'd take kids to look at the animals in the pet shop window. It was something about how she said it. At that moment, I actually got excited, excited for Bess to have a nanny, excited for Bess to have this nanny. At that moment, I didn't feel looming jealousy or guilt; I pictured the two of them off having adventures together, in a jaunty girl-and-governess fantasy from storybooks. And in that moment, I knew that putting my daughter in someone else's care while I worked, while not Plan A (Plan A being a disruption in the space-time continuum that would allow me to both work and hang with Bess full time, or a wageless society that still had HBO and sushi), was really, truly going to be OK.

And it is OK -- though it's certainly not always like that jaunty fantasy. (The real dream-come-true part is that my in-laws live around the corner and take wonderful care of Bess two days a week, which is how we can afford a nanny for two more days.) Even the most charmed arrangement is not without challenges and complications. Early on, I found myself blathering to Bess's nanny, who is from Barbados, about my ancestors' (not the socialist ones) complex relationship with black people (insofar as "master/slave" is "complex"), just, I guess, to demonstrate that I had thought about these issues. And there's this clichéd working-mom moment from the other day:

Me, all aflutter: Have you seen how well she stands up?!

Nanny: Yes, she's been doing that with me for weeks.

Separation anxiety, race and class, our very identities as women and parents: This is precisely the bumpy terrain that Lucy Kaylin explores in her new book, "The Perfect Stranger: The Truth About Mothers and Nannies." Said "truth" -- refreshingly -- is not, say, research twisted to assert that mothers who employ nannies have higher rates of self-hate, or that their children tend to grow up to be sociopaths. Kaylin's book -- her own nanny story, woven into interviews with other mothers and nannies, too -- shows that, actually, it's messier than that.

According to Kaylin, there may be as many as 1 million women now working as nannies in the United States. Their employers negotiate everything from pay scales to power dynamics in their own homes, all the while knowing that -- with so many choices available to them -- at some level, no matter what they do, the world outside will judge them. (Oh yes, and they will judge themselves.) "Hiring a stranger to help raise your kids -- funny how an act designed to simplify your life can wind up being the trickiest, most controversial thing you'll ever do," writes Kaylin, executive editor of Marie Claire and a mother of two children, whose nanny, Hy, has been with the family for 10 years.

Kaylin addresses that controversy without flinching. She cites, for example, the color-based pay scale, with an acquaintance's "Swedish" nanny at the top ("There is an element of status in being able to afford [a white nanny] ... it's something to be crowed about, like granite countertops"), and quotes Hy's spot-on remark about their separate spheres: "If it weren't for the kids, I wouldn't know you and you wouldn't know me." She criticizes "society's ambivalence" toward and lack of support for two-income families: "The message sent to moms is fend for yourself," she writes. But taken as a whole, her book is more well-crafted collage than polemic -- a portrait of the uneasy symbiosis between less-than-loaded two-income families and the "unprecedented influx of women from economically unstable places," of villageless mothers doing their best to raise a child.

In Kaylin's words, her book is also a "plea for absolution from the guilt, the fear, the gnawing ambivalence that comes with enlisting the help of a nanny." Absolution, she can't promise. But the book should at least serve as a big, huge greeting card to mothers who hire nannies -- one that says, essentially, though more poetically, "I get it." Kaylin spoke to Salon about the intricacies -- and, yes, the joys -- of the mother-nanny bond.

How did you decide to write this book?

It had become clear to me from talking to a lot of women that their relationship to their nannies -- and their choice to hire one in the first place -- is a huge, roiling issue. It didn't at all feel like my own private drama. It's the kind of thing that when anybody is given two seconds' permission to talk about it, they unload. So it seemed to me high time for a book that tried to wrap its arms around all of it.

Why is this so fraught now? We don't see Lady Capulet agonizing about Juliet's nurse.

It's especially fraught now because we have these "mommy wars" raging about whether we should go back to work, work part time or stay at home. They've been amplified by the media, but they do have some basis in reality. Get into it with moms and you'll discover in seconds how passionate and conflicted they tend to be -- and how aware they are that they may well be being judged.

And the whole nanny aspect of it becomes emblematic of the choice of a certain "camp." If your child is being pushed in a stroller by a woman from the Caribbean, it says everything about the choices your family has made. It makes it very plain to the world that this child is not being cared for during the day by her mother.

Where that really plays out is in the preschool and at the park -- places where there are children being tended to by a parent and children being tended to by a nanny. That can create all sorts of friction for you as a working mother who's going to drop in to these places when she can but not be as involved as others are going to be, and you can feel the stress and tension and judgment in that.

Next page: "Part of a nanny's job is to look the other way"