In hiring a babysitter of my own, have I become the mother I used to nanny for?
When the young woman appeared at my door, braless, pink-haired, and smelling faintly of cigarettes, the only thing I could think about were my shoes.
My daughter had recently gone from being a baby to a toddler, and for the first time in her short life, I’d landed a dream job that would require me to return to the office after a year off. As preparation, I’d spent hours looking for a specific pair of clog boots, the exact shoes I believed I needed to walk into my new office as a new(ish) mom, newly 40, finally in her power era. They had to be either Swedish Hasbeens or from the No. 6 Store—the ones with the shearling on the inside that came to the top of the ankle. Even though I couldn’t really justify spending $400 on a pair of shoes, I was obsessed. Something deep inside me told me these boots would complete a vision of myself that I had been fantasizing about for over a decade: practical but stylish, sophisticated but understated. I felt a primal need to have them.
Then, this manic pixie dream babysitter, complete with the prerequisite tattoos and dyed hair that changed color every week, knocked on my door, and showed me all at once where my girl boss fantasy had come from. I hadn’t put it together until that moment, but my new shoes were the exact same clogs that belonged to the mother I used to nanny for when I was my sitter’s age. Instantly I was transported back to the long oak table in their dining room, the one where I’d linger after my duties for the day were completed. For years, I’d watched this mom strut around Brooklyn in those clogs, living the life I’d desperately wanted. And somewhere in my subconscious, the boots had buried themselves as a symbol—of adulthood, of success, of stability. All the things that seemed so far away from me in my early twenties, when I first started working for her.
And in a way, they were. Fresh out of drama school in London, I had moved to New York at 23 with hopes of becoming a working actress, but instead had become what I call a “professional auditioner.” On average, I would go to something like four auditions a week, but nothing ever stuck. I was terrified of failure, terrified of everything—but more than anything else, paralyzed by what I would do if I actually got any of the parts I went in for.
Like most struggling actors, I was also broke. To make rent, I worked as a babysitter for a family in Brooklyn Heights, watching their two boys over the course of three years. Really, I was their nanny, but that word was verboten in the wealthy creative enclave that I worked under. The title would have legitimized my work, and no one—not the parents who paid me under the table, not the children I watched, and especially not me—wanted to admit that it was an actual job.
To be honest, the kids and I were never a great match; they were devoted to sports, obsessed with talking about soccer and basketball, while my athletic acumen was limited to a two hour yoga class. This didn’t seem to matter much, and the kids didn’t seem to mind, either. I would shepherd them from whatever practice they’d begged to sign up for to whatever music lesson they were being forced to take, make them dinner, give them their bath, kiss their scraped knees—and the whole time, I’d wait for her to come home.
Whenever I babysat, whether I was making broomsticks for a quidditch match in the park or listening to the same joke for the hundredth time, I was mentally elsewhere; rehearsing lines, begging my agent to get me an audition, texting some boy. But the moment Mom walked through the door, I was present; and suddenly, I never wanted to leave. At seven each night, she would swoop in from her job as a commercial producer, dressed in clothes that were always subtle but expensive, on trend but never tacky. She’d kiss the tops of her boys’ heads, take her coat off, and start telling me about her day.
Her stories about office life, about school meetings, her gossip about other parents, left me enraptured. I would study her with a mix of curiosity and fear; I wanted a version of her life, and at the time, it felt painfully unattainable.
When she was at work and the boys preoccupied, I’d spend my days gazing at the awards on her shelves, the artwork on her walls, the beautiful crown molding in her apartment. But it was more than that. As she showed me the secret corners of an adult woman’s existence, I in turn revealed my own desires, not only to her, but to myself. She listened to my ideas with respect and responded to my opinions with interest, allowing me the space to begin to think I might have some big potential I hadn’t yet realized. That maybe I, too, was in possession of the same exceptionality that I saw in all the parents at pick up at her children’s fancy alternative elementary school: the playwrights, the performance artists, the Pulitzer winners. I wanted to make something that mattered to the world—because I wanted to matter, and felt like I didn’t.
It was in those thrilling ten minutes that I spent with her each night, trying to soak up everything, that I felt like my life could finally have direction. In those brief interludes between her taking off her coat and me putting on mine, she was a confidante, a mentor, a hopeful oracle giving a glimpse of my future—and, I realize now, a mother to me, as well, in a time where I needed it.
Even so, I found myself battling a dark depression for about a year, flailing and miserable, grappling with the fact that my career wasn’t going anywhere. Eventually, it began bleeding into my work. There was a devastating moment when the nine-year-old, home sick with a stomach bug, caught me crying over yet another rejection. I thought he’d been asleep, and when he walked in on me, it seemed so taboo, I told him I was only practicing for an audition. I felt guilty, like I might have introduced something dark and scary into his perfect childhood—but truthfully, I was humiliated. I could have been so many things, and in that moment, I was a failed actress who wasn’t even allowed to call herself a nanny.
Eventually, I decided to go back to school, to change course. I gave up on acting at the same time I stopped working for the family. Leaving was fine, healthy even, for all of us. The kids, their parents—especially Mom and me—had quickly discovered that we had outgrown the need for each other.
Still, she left her mark. Eleven years later, I’d walk into my new job as a TV producer, in a secondhand version of her clog boots; in a way, a secondhand version of the woman I believed I was supposed to become. I’d amassed my own awards, my own crown molding—but it hadn’t really hit me how much I’d replicated my former boss’ life until my own babysitter showed up, a mirror image of my younger self, now reflecting back who I’d become on the other side.
I was working from home when our sitter first started with us, and watching her sleepy, wrinkle free eyes gaze upon my child was jarring. Not only because it’s always strange to watch someone else mother your baby, but also because I’d only ever played the babysitter’s part, and now, I’d been cast in the titular role, the one I’d always wanted. I suddenly found myself performing a kind of character, speaking a little too loudly when I was on a work call, hoping to impress the 22-year-old rocking my daughter to sleep in the next room.
Each night, before she left, I began to ask her about her life. How long had she been with her boyfriend: Several years, and they planned to get married. What did she want in the future: To work with kids in a small town away from the city. She told me she couldn’t wait to live without roommates and asked my opinion on her next tattoo. Once she gave me a handmade bracelet made of special crystals she had sourced herself. They’d help me through my next big pitch meeting, she said. I almost cried at the thoughtfulness. (She never gave my husband anything.) Was I becoming to this young woman what my former boss was to me, I wondered? Did I even want that?
While I mostly feel grateful towards my previous employer, I still harbor some resentment towards her, too. It was clear to me that while she’d likely had her own salaried caretaker when she was little, the mother I’d worked for had never taken on that job herself. She hadn’t needed to. As such, she’d never given a second thought to the intricacies of my well-being once I stepped foot outside of her apartment, and hadn’t ever really cared for me beyond those ten minutes she gave me each night. I made $20,000 a year working for her, and never had health insurance the entire time. She never offered it to me, and I couldn’t afford it. She trusted me with her children’s safety, with their lives—and yet there was no one I could trust with mine, no one to cover my urgent care bill when I got the flu, no one I could turn to when I needed someone to take care of me.
Of course, my relationship with my sitter is imperfect in its own ways. Like all 20-somethings, she’s subjected to her own hardships; friends let her down, great apartments pass her by, she works a second job catering while her peers all seem to get full time jobs with benefits. Sometimes she arrives at our home with a cloud of sadness that I know too well. Once settled, however, the fog disappears, replaced with a supernatural ability to be present with our baby; then, the next week, she’ll be wishy-washy, often canceling right before she’s supposed to come over.
Recently, she flaked on us again during a stressful moment when she was very much needed. My mother in law told me that there was always something a little off, something a little “unreliable about the kinds of girls drawn to these jobs.” Even though in part, I agreed with her, I was also offended—not only on her behalf, but on behalf of my younger self, too. I knew intimately how precarious this time in a young person’s life could be; how, for me, being “the babysitter” was fun and easy at first, then slowly became a twisted reflection of the life I didn’t have, the life that felt so far away, no matter how hard I tried to get to it.
So I try to extend some grace to the girl who has come to look after my child. Whenever she’s late, I remind myself that this is not what she felt put on this earth to do, that for all of us, this is temporary. While I can’t give her the opportunities she’s chasing, the life she’s running towards, I hope to give her the same ten minutes a day that, with enough accumulation, might make their own kind of guidance, draw their own kind of map, like the one that had been given to me. Sometimes I wonder if one day she might go through the same thing I’m experiencing now, and hire a babysitter of her own, continuing this cycle of nannies and mothers, mothers and nannies.
Often I find myself surprised by the largeness of these maternal feelings—how far they can extend out from my daughter towards everyone around me, how they extend to her, too. Once, I came home and found the babysitter asleep on our bed, the baby tucked against her, both of them breathing peacefully, their eyes flickering back and forth beneath their lids. I was almost dizzy looking at her, a vision from my past come to sleep in her future self’s bed. All these versions of who I was, who I am, and who I have yet to become, were suddenly in the room with me, asking me to take off my clogs before finding a way to nestle against these tender bodies. But of course, I did not do that. Instead, I covered them both with a blanket, closed the door gently behind me, and let them sleep.
