On Keeping My Distance

learning to place principles before personalities

I have been a nanny for three years. I take care of babies and toddlers and preteens. Some of them puke in my hands when they eat too much goldfish before they swim; some of them ask me how to do winged eyeliner for the middle school dance. I have potty trained three children and was recently a first responder during another’s menstrual period. I have a favorite nanny kid. Favorites are easy to choose because they’re easy to love. Olivia is my favorite. She is 10 years old and in the fifth grade. Olivia is addicted to TikTok and goes to a private school that costs $30,000 per year. Her favorite toys are Barbies and the makeup that her mother buys her from Sephora. She is on a gymnastics team and takes dance lessons at Abby Lee Dance Company. She is Jewish and has an undisguised disdain for Shabbat. She will say the prayer over nonalcoholic wine while she rolls her eyes. Her mom firmly tells her to be serious. I try to encourage her.

I wish I lit candles every Friday when I was a kid, I tell her. That’s so cool. You’re basically doing a spell, I tell her. 

Yeah, like WitchTok, she replies. 

Yeah. Judaism is like WitchTok. 

She loves to draw and write little notes. She keeps big drawing pads all around her room. She draws pictures of Taylor Swift’s outfits from the 2014 VMA’s and writes love notes to her crush whom she has loved since kindergarten. She draws pictures of girls with short skirts and high heels and crop tops. She names them and describes their lives in the margins. 

This is Mallory. She has an iPhone 12. She dresses preppy. She loves TikTok and Instagram. She is 16 years old. She is a bookworm but still has friends. 

Sometimes, I clean up Olivia’s room while she plays Roblox. A few weeks ago, I was putting away markers and paper and notebooks. I like to look at what she has drawn and written in the open pages strewn around her room. I always see something that makes me belly laugh. Sometimes I take a picture and send it to my sister.

I moved a sparkly notebook from her bed to her nightstand. It fell open. It looked a little more private than most of her big drawing pads because it was small and closed, but when it fell open, I looked down like I always do at Olivia’s stick figures and conspicuous love letters.

When Olivia leaves a note on her desk, it reads something like, Sammy, I like you so much. Your style and hair are perfect. Also I love you. The border of the page is lined with hearts. She is unadulterated innocence. 

This time, my eyes fell on the sentence, I want to fucking kill myself. I want to hold my breath until I die. My parents are always fighting. I just want a hug.

My heart crushed in and folded on itself a million times. Unintentionally, I had violated this child’s trust with whom I had built a two-year relationship. 

I had no idea how to tell her parents. When I was a suicidal 11-year-old, my mom handled it the best she could. But I still felt like I was in trouble. I played out all the versions of how her parents would react. How they would make Olivia feel like she had done something wrong. How they would make me, the Help, a scapegoat when Olivia became upset that her parents confronted her about what she wrote in her journal.

It was your nanny, they would say. Ruby was reading your diary. She shouldn’t have been doing that, they would say. And they would be right. 

Olivia’s parents are wealthy for reasons I can only sort of explain. Sarah and Brian are both unsuccessful artists, but they own a home in central LA (the nice part) that last sold for a couple of million dollars, according to Redfin. They were married when I started nannying Olivia, but one day, Brian’s closet was empty and he didn’t come home after “networking” at the country club. I wondered why - maybe because Sarah was always making fat jokes about Brian. Maybe because Brian is racist and cranky. Maybe people will fall out of love if they stop watering the plant. They fight in front of me and they fight in front of Olivia and they call each other names. Olivia started calling her parents the names they called each other - big guy, narcissist, self-centered. I became a mediator of some arguments between her and her mother. Maybe I got too close. 

One of my favorite pieces of advice to pass off as my own is an Al-Anon principle: keep people at the distance you need to love them. Honestly, I think that Sarah and Brian are insufferable. I also love them and they are like family to me. Is Sarah keeping me at the distance she needs to love me? Can that principle apply to someone on your payroll? Perhaps that has been the greatest devastation in the fallout: they cannot love me like their estranged daughter because, ultimately, I am their employee. They can just find someone better on Care.com, someone more trustworthy. Someone who won’t rummage through the drawers of their life. 

Describing why wealthy people are fucked for thinking childcare workers are disposable is futile. I come from a rich history of nannies and babysitters who grow attached. I am a surrogate mother. At the end of each day, I surrender the life I nurtured back to its real mom. I learn to practice radical acceptance. I will only be in a family’s life as long as they want to pay me $20 per hour.

Today, Brian texted me for the first time in over a month. He told me Olivia misses me. He asked if I could babysit. I will have to check my calendar. 

I imagine the night I found her journal like that one Coldplay music video. The video is edited to be in reverse and Chris Martin learned to lip-sync all the words backward so that he could still sing along to the song. He walks backward to a car accident. He stays there for a while. 

Names and details have been changed. Please don’t sue me. I have $15 in my checking account.