When Nanny's Heart Breaks: Loving Kids Not Your Own
There's a saying that often gets written on crafts and cards in the nanny groups on Facebook: "You may hold my hand for a while, but you will hold my heart forever." That may sound sweet, but it's painfully true, and it hurts like a sonofabitch.
As a nanny, you know that every position ends, but some transitions are more painful than others. The best outcome you can hope for is that the kids get older and the parents simply don't need you anymore. Then they give you good references, say you can come by any time, and you keep in touch enough to see your kiddos grow up happy and healthy. Worst-case scenario would be something like, say, you're a live-in nanny for a stay-at-home mom who also happens to be an addict who emotionally abuses and manipulates you, and after taking it for a year you give your two weeks notice in a professional manner, get convinced to stay longer because you love the children, request that your boss not take your only battery-operated light out of your apartment when the power is out for a week, get completely ignored for four months, and then end up walking out of a coffee shop after your boss accuses *you* of being the unstable one and says you are no longer allowed to be in the kids' lives, even though she's the one who has passed out drunk in the nursery practically once a month and had you managing her medications. Oh, and then they refuse to renew your lease and kick you out.
I bet you can see where this is going.
I met the twins when they were 13 months old. The boy was funny and sensitive and very loud; the girl was quiet, focused, and dead stubborn. To protect the innocent, I'm going to call them Jack and Molly. Mom Boss (MB) told me she was looking for some extra help because she had postpartum depression and Dad Boss (DB) was working out of town for a few weeks. We became close fairly quickly. I knew what it was like to be depressed and was happy to help out wherever I could.
I also fell in love with the kids. Jack was always busy, testing the limits of his abilities, making up games, and doing anything he could think of to get a laugh. His energy was exhausting at times, and he kept me busy, pulling out drawers to make stairs up to the counter and breaking the child locks on the kitchen cupboards with nothing but determination and sheer brute force. He was interested in everything and never met a stranger. As he got older, we discovered we shared a love of music, especially Meghan Trainor, as well as cuddles, dancing, selfies, long naps, messy art, and general shenanigans and wanton destruction.
Molly was more of an inch-wide-but-mile-deep kinda girl. While Jack tore through the house, park, museum, mall, or store in a pretty much constant state of chaos and recklessness, Molly preferred to stick with what was familiar. She was a big fan of cheese, my cats, and swings, collecting things like hats, cups, and flash cards, and putting anything in her pockets that would fit. However, she was greatly opposed to socks, shoes, most clothes, people messing with her hair, baths, naps, and strangers. As she got older, a more adventurous side came out, and she was the one who would go down the slide first or show Jack that it was okay to pet animals at the fair. She also threw very impressive tantrums and developed a unique sense of style that usually included wearing her brother's clothes and a combination of accessories ranging from weather-inappropriate headgear and shoes to any jewelry she could get her hands on, and, for a couple of days, her Halloween monkey costume over her favorite swimsuit. She was a lot harder to win over than Jack, but once she liked you, you had a friend for life.
(She also eventually let me do her hair if I gave her enough cheese.)
The three of us had a lot of fun together. MB would often make herself scarce and we were free to come and go as we pleased. We went to the children's museum downtown, to parks and splash pads, the mall and McDonald's play places in winter, pet shops, fairs, and restaurants. Although I eventually got set hours from 1-6 weekdays, I often started early or stayed late while DB worked and MB went to appointments, slept, got high in the basement, got drunk, or simply disappeared. The first time I found her passed out was about a week into the job, when she had asked me to watch the twins on a Sunday afternoon so she could go to a party. When I went upstairs she was unconscious on the floor with both toddlers crying and trying to wake her up. I didn't know what to do, so after unsuccessfully trying to wake her up about four times I took the kids down to my room and called her husband, who sent her mother over. The next day, MB told me she had accidentally taken a Valium instead of her antidepressant. It took me maybe a month to figure out she had serious substance abuse problems, which everyone else seemed content to ignore.
Over the next few months I did everything I could to contribute to a healthy home. I don't remember how it started, but pretty soon I was in control of making sure that MB took the right medications and vitamins every day. I had three alarms on my phone and if we were out of the house I would text or call to make sure she had taken her pills. After one incident where she almost fell down the stairs while carrying Molly, I told her she was banished to her room if she was going to drink. I still don't know how she could get so drunk off of one glass of wine, but it was pretty impressive.
The twins started to feel like my own children. DB was home for breakfast and sometimes dinner, but other than that I was in charge. I did snacks, lunch, naps, and dinner, as well as bedtime when DB was out of town. I had my own car seats, diaper bag, and baby monitors, and often paid for clothes, diapers, and meals for the children with my $200 weekly paycheck. When my car broke down, we rode the bus to parks and museums. I gave baths, trimmed finger and toenails, and taught the kids Spanish and baby sign. I knew what clothes Molly would wear, I could understand Jack's first words better than his parents, I knew what all the signs meant that they couldn't do quite right, how to get them to sleep, get them to eat; I knew more about them than their parents did. We had sleepovers in my full-size bed; they had their own dishes, toys, books, even bath toys and shampoo in my apartment. They knew my parents and my brother. They really were my family, and I loved them with all of my heart.
But dealing with MB was becoming really hard. One week she started taking a new medication that had her sleeping 18 hours a day and unable to drive. I was basically her personal assistant, driving her to doctors and waiting in the waiting room with the twins for hours, as well as cleaning the house, grocery shopping, and doing yard work. She said she would go to rehab but backed out. She eventually did stop drinking, but her pot use increased so much that I almost preferred the alcohol. We had gone out to dinner or parties together a few times, but I told her I wouldn't go with her alone anymore because she would get totally plastered and DB would have to carry her inside. She slept on the family room floor rather than attempt to walk down the stairs more than once. Every time I tried to create a boundary, she made me feel guilty. She constantly lost her phone so she used mine all the time. She told me she didn't want to pay me for when the twins were asleep and threatened to cut my pay when I told her I was not a housekeeper and was uncomfortable cleaning for two hours a day, especially when there was literal garbage strewn around her room (including a pregnancy test, which, on top of being super gross to be just lying on the floor, made me incredibly angry knowing she was at that time abusing alcohol and pills), rotting food on the counters and in the fridge, even vomit left in the bathroom sink. She purposefully created more work for me by never cleaning up after herself or the kids. One day I picked up the diaper bag only to realize that everything inside was covered with feces from a diaper she had put in it the previous day, and since she had already left it was up to me to clean it out. Their bathtub drain got clogged so she would take baths in my apartment and ask me to bathe the kids on my days off.
By this time we had moved into a bigger house and I was actually renting out an upstairs apartment. Their part of the house was so disgusting that the kids were basically living upstairs with me except between 6pm and 10am. They then went to daycare for three hours, so MB only spent about one hour alone with them a day, but still insisted that I was being unreasonable and that she was paying me too much. After the time I came in from watering all the plants one day and found her passed out in the nursery with a busted lip and both kids crying, I told DB that I couldn't take care of MB and twin two-year-olds, so he came home to deal with her and I had the kids with me for over 36 straight hours. One weekend I came home from seeing friends and the lady in the other apartment on my floor told me that MB had been knocking on my door while I was out and eventually just fell asleep on the floor in front of my apartment and was there for several hours. I wanted to be there for the kids, and I happily would have raised them, but I was exhausted and paranoid from MB's constant bullying and gaslighting and I was starting to buckle under the strain.
(After breakfast I made in my kitchen with food I bought, coloring with my markers, on my coffee table, in my apartment, freshly washed in my tub, wearing diapers I paid for...my kids?)
With the help of friends, I finally got the courage to put in my notice. Of course, MB had to use my phone that day, and while I was driving I saw her reading my texts, so she figured it out before I could turn in my written notice. At the time, MB and DB both promised I could see the kids anytime, and I agreed to take them for an hour every morning to keep up their Spanish. I got a new job, and for a few weeks things were better, although MB would still take advantage of me every chance she got, leaving the kids in dirty diapers and clothes because she knew I would change them and texting me constantly in the hour they were with me asking me to feed and bathe them, as well as getting annoyed when I brought them back at my end time even though she had brought them up late.
Then there was a huge windstorm that knocked out the power for a week. I was still prepared to have the kids the first two days, as MB and DB didn't bother telling me they were staying elsewhere. It was too cold to stay at the house, though, so I stayed with a friend the rest of the week, coming back every day to feed my cats in the dark. One night MB asked if she could cook dinner in my apartment because I had a gas stove. When I came back the next day, my only light was gone, my kitchen was covered in trash, there was a pan on the stove with leftover meat in it, and a note on my door saying to come ask for the light when I got back. Of course, they weren't home, so I got to wander around in the dark in a 20* apartment. Oh, and I had the goldfish that MB had sent me to buy with the kids and then promptly decided she didn't want, and was going to let him starve to death before I offered to take him. When the power came back on, I told DB I was too busy with my other job to keep doing Spanish in the mornings. MB was very cold to me after I texted asking for my light back, and, figuring that she didn't want to talk to me, I gave them some space, though I still left notes and presents for the twins often.
Eventually I asked DB if I could have the twins for a weekend. He said yes, but then said that MB wanted to talk to me, which culminated in the restaurant scene. I tried to explain that she seemed like she didn't want to interact so I was trying not to intrude; she accused me of abandoning the twins and told me I was ridiculous for being frustrated that she trashed my kitchen and took my stuff "because it was an emergency." When she started yelling I got up and left.
The last time I saw the kids was a year and a half ago, when they happened to be playing in their yard as I drove by.
I still send cards and letters, though I don't know if they get them.
Loss is hard. Losing kids is very hard. It hurts to know that they probably won't remember my name (they called me Cha-Cha). They won't remember our special handshake (point, touch pointer fingers together, "boosch" and explosion), the songs I used to sing them to sleep (lots of Peter, Paul, and Mary), the long summer days outside, hot chocolate in the winter, our favorite book (it was Moo, Baa, La La La). They won't remember the nicknames I gave them, the cuddles, the holidays. They won't remember me kissing their owwies or riding the train at the amusement park. They won't remember me at all.
My shrink says that they will remember the love, even if they don't remember exactly how it came. She said that it's living inside them still, that feeling of being safe, and that it will be there when they need it, as they grow up in a home with an unpredictable, volatile mother, a distracted father, and literally no one else. I hope that's true. I hope they're okay. I hope Jack doesn't lose his optimism and I hope that Molly doesn't disappear inside herself. I hope, though I doubt, that MB got help and learned how to be a proper parent. I hope they know they are loved.
This is the shitty part. Non-death losses are their own special beast. As a nanny, I know that no family will need me forever. But I feel like Jack and Molly still needed me. I know I still needed them. Losing them is some of the worst pain I have ever felt. And I never got to say goodbye. I avoided MB after the wind storm because I knew she was capable of cutting me off from them, and in doing so I made that exact thing happen.
My loves, I am sorry. I wish I had done something differently. You loved me for a while. I will love you for the rest of my life. I will think of you when I listen to your favorite songs, when I accidentally sign animal names while I'm talking, when I sing lullabyes to my nephew, on my birthday, which is the anniversary of your baptism, when I pass our favorite places, and when this bed seems so big and empty without you curled up against me. Tienen mi corazón. You will always have my heart.
Happy birthday.
As a nanny, you know that every position ends, but some transitions are more painful than others. The best outcome you can hope for is that the kids get older and the parents simply don't need you anymore. Then they give you good references, say you can come by any time, and you keep in touch enough to see your kiddos grow up happy and healthy. Worst-case scenario would be something like, say, you're a live-in nanny for a stay-at-home mom who also happens to be an addict who emotionally abuses and manipulates you, and after taking it for a year you give your two weeks notice in a professional manner, get convinced to stay longer because you love the children, request that your boss not take your only battery-operated light out of your apartment when the power is out for a week, get completely ignored for four months, and then end up walking out of a coffee shop after your boss accuses *you* of being the unstable one and says you are no longer allowed to be in the kids' lives, even though she's the one who has passed out drunk in the nursery practically once a month and had you managing her medications. Oh, and then they refuse to renew your lease and kick you out.
I bet you can see where this is going.
I met the twins when they were 13 months old. The boy was funny and sensitive and very loud; the girl was quiet, focused, and dead stubborn. To protect the innocent, I'm going to call them Jack and Molly. Mom Boss (MB) told me she was looking for some extra help because she had postpartum depression and Dad Boss (DB) was working out of town for a few weeks. We became close fairly quickly. I knew what it was like to be depressed and was happy to help out wherever I could.
I also fell in love with the kids. Jack was always busy, testing the limits of his abilities, making up games, and doing anything he could think of to get a laugh. His energy was exhausting at times, and he kept me busy, pulling out drawers to make stairs up to the counter and breaking the child locks on the kitchen cupboards with nothing but determination and sheer brute force. He was interested in everything and never met a stranger. As he got older, we discovered we shared a love of music, especially Meghan Trainor, as well as cuddles, dancing, selfies, long naps, messy art, and general shenanigans and wanton destruction.
Molly was more of an inch-wide-but-mile-deep kinda girl. While Jack tore through the house, park, museum, mall, or store in a pretty much constant state of chaos and recklessness, Molly preferred to stick with what was familiar. She was a big fan of cheese, my cats, and swings, collecting things like hats, cups, and flash cards, and putting anything in her pockets that would fit. However, she was greatly opposed to socks, shoes, most clothes, people messing with her hair, baths, naps, and strangers. As she got older, a more adventurous side came out, and she was the one who would go down the slide first or show Jack that it was okay to pet animals at the fair. She also threw very impressive tantrums and developed a unique sense of style that usually included wearing her brother's clothes and a combination of accessories ranging from weather-inappropriate headgear and shoes to any jewelry she could get her hands on, and, for a couple of days, her Halloween monkey costume over her favorite swimsuit. She was a lot harder to win over than Jack, but once she liked you, you had a friend for life.
(She also eventually let me do her hair if I gave her enough cheese.)
The three of us had a lot of fun together. MB would often make herself scarce and we were free to come and go as we pleased. We went to the children's museum downtown, to parks and splash pads, the mall and McDonald's play places in winter, pet shops, fairs, and restaurants. Although I eventually got set hours from 1-6 weekdays, I often started early or stayed late while DB worked and MB went to appointments, slept, got high in the basement, got drunk, or simply disappeared. The first time I found her passed out was about a week into the job, when she had asked me to watch the twins on a Sunday afternoon so she could go to a party. When I went upstairs she was unconscious on the floor with both toddlers crying and trying to wake her up. I didn't know what to do, so after unsuccessfully trying to wake her up about four times I took the kids down to my room and called her husband, who sent her mother over. The next day, MB told me she had accidentally taken a Valium instead of her antidepressant. It took me maybe a month to figure out she had serious substance abuse problems, which everyone else seemed content to ignore.
Over the next few months I did everything I could to contribute to a healthy home. I don't remember how it started, but pretty soon I was in control of making sure that MB took the right medications and vitamins every day. I had three alarms on my phone and if we were out of the house I would text or call to make sure she had taken her pills. After one incident where she almost fell down the stairs while carrying Molly, I told her she was banished to her room if she was going to drink. I still don't know how she could get so drunk off of one glass of wine, but it was pretty impressive.
The twins started to feel like my own children. DB was home for breakfast and sometimes dinner, but other than that I was in charge. I did snacks, lunch, naps, and dinner, as well as bedtime when DB was out of town. I had my own car seats, diaper bag, and baby monitors, and often paid for clothes, diapers, and meals for the children with my $200 weekly paycheck. When my car broke down, we rode the bus to parks and museums. I gave baths, trimmed finger and toenails, and taught the kids Spanish and baby sign. I knew what clothes Molly would wear, I could understand Jack's first words better than his parents, I knew what all the signs meant that they couldn't do quite right, how to get them to sleep, get them to eat; I knew more about them than their parents did. We had sleepovers in my full-size bed; they had their own dishes, toys, books, even bath toys and shampoo in my apartment. They knew my parents and my brother. They really were my family, and I loved them with all of my heart.
(Jack hated having his nails trimmed, but he did love having them painted, so about once every two weeks we would sit down, get everyone all tidied up, and then I would give all three of us fancy fingers and toes.)
But dealing with MB was becoming really hard. One week she started taking a new medication that had her sleeping 18 hours a day and unable to drive. I was basically her personal assistant, driving her to doctors and waiting in the waiting room with the twins for hours, as well as cleaning the house, grocery shopping, and doing yard work. She said she would go to rehab but backed out. She eventually did stop drinking, but her pot use increased so much that I almost preferred the alcohol. We had gone out to dinner or parties together a few times, but I told her I wouldn't go with her alone anymore because she would get totally plastered and DB would have to carry her inside. She slept on the family room floor rather than attempt to walk down the stairs more than once. Every time I tried to create a boundary, she made me feel guilty. She constantly lost her phone so she used mine all the time. She told me she didn't want to pay me for when the twins were asleep and threatened to cut my pay when I told her I was not a housekeeper and was uncomfortable cleaning for two hours a day, especially when there was literal garbage strewn around her room (including a pregnancy test, which, on top of being super gross to be just lying on the floor, made me incredibly angry knowing she was at that time abusing alcohol and pills), rotting food on the counters and in the fridge, even vomit left in the bathroom sink. She purposefully created more work for me by never cleaning up after herself or the kids. One day I picked up the diaper bag only to realize that everything inside was covered with feces from a diaper she had put in it the previous day, and since she had already left it was up to me to clean it out. Their bathtub drain got clogged so she would take baths in my apartment and ask me to bathe the kids on my days off.
By this time we had moved into a bigger house and I was actually renting out an upstairs apartment. Their part of the house was so disgusting that the kids were basically living upstairs with me except between 6pm and 10am. They then went to daycare for three hours, so MB only spent about one hour alone with them a day, but still insisted that I was being unreasonable and that she was paying me too much. After the time I came in from watering all the plants one day and found her passed out in the nursery with a busted lip and both kids crying, I told DB that I couldn't take care of MB and twin two-year-olds, so he came home to deal with her and I had the kids with me for over 36 straight hours. One weekend I came home from seeing friends and the lady in the other apartment on my floor told me that MB had been knocking on my door while I was out and eventually just fell asleep on the floor in front of my apartment and was there for several hours. I wanted to be there for the kids, and I happily would have raised them, but I was exhausted and paranoid from MB's constant bullying and gaslighting and I was starting to buckle under the strain.
With the help of friends, I finally got the courage to put in my notice. Of course, MB had to use my phone that day, and while I was driving I saw her reading my texts, so she figured it out before I could turn in my written notice. At the time, MB and DB both promised I could see the kids anytime, and I agreed to take them for an hour every morning to keep up their Spanish. I got a new job, and for a few weeks things were better, although MB would still take advantage of me every chance she got, leaving the kids in dirty diapers and clothes because she knew I would change them and texting me constantly in the hour they were with me asking me to feed and bathe them, as well as getting annoyed when I brought them back at my end time even though she had brought them up late.
Then there was a huge windstorm that knocked out the power for a week. I was still prepared to have the kids the first two days, as MB and DB didn't bother telling me they were staying elsewhere. It was too cold to stay at the house, though, so I stayed with a friend the rest of the week, coming back every day to feed my cats in the dark. One night MB asked if she could cook dinner in my apartment because I had a gas stove. When I came back the next day, my only light was gone, my kitchen was covered in trash, there was a pan on the stove with leftover meat in it, and a note on my door saying to come ask for the light when I got back. Of course, they weren't home, so I got to wander around in the dark in a 20* apartment. Oh, and I had the goldfish that MB had sent me to buy with the kids and then promptly decided she didn't want, and was going to let him starve to death before I offered to take him. When the power came back on, I told DB I was too busy with my other job to keep doing Spanish in the mornings. MB was very cold to me after I texted asking for my light back, and, figuring that she didn't want to talk to me, I gave them some space, though I still left notes and presents for the twins often.
Eventually I asked DB if I could have the twins for a weekend. He said yes, but then said that MB wanted to talk to me, which culminated in the restaurant scene. I tried to explain that she seemed like she didn't want to interact so I was trying not to intrude; she accused me of abandoning the twins and told me I was ridiculous for being frustrated that she trashed my kitchen and took my stuff "because it was an emergency." When she started yelling I got up and left.
The last time I saw the kids was a year and a half ago, when they happened to be playing in their yard as I drove by.
I still send cards and letters, though I don't know if they get them.
Loss is hard. Losing kids is very hard. It hurts to know that they probably won't remember my name (they called me Cha-Cha). They won't remember our special handshake (point, touch pointer fingers together, "boosch" and explosion), the songs I used to sing them to sleep (lots of Peter, Paul, and Mary), the long summer days outside, hot chocolate in the winter, our favorite book (it was Moo, Baa, La La La). They won't remember the nicknames I gave them, the cuddles, the holidays. They won't remember me kissing their owwies or riding the train at the amusement park. They won't remember me at all.
My shrink says that they will remember the love, even if they don't remember exactly how it came. She said that it's living inside them still, that feeling of being safe, and that it will be there when they need it, as they grow up in a home with an unpredictable, volatile mother, a distracted father, and literally no one else. I hope that's true. I hope they're okay. I hope Jack doesn't lose his optimism and I hope that Molly doesn't disappear inside herself. I hope, though I doubt, that MB got help and learned how to be a proper parent. I hope they know they are loved.
This is the shitty part. Non-death losses are their own special beast. As a nanny, I know that no family will need me forever. But I feel like Jack and Molly still needed me. I know I still needed them. Losing them is some of the worst pain I have ever felt. And I never got to say goodbye. I avoided MB after the wind storm because I knew she was capable of cutting me off from them, and in doing so I made that exact thing happen.
My loves, I am sorry. I wish I had done something differently. You loved me for a while. I will love you for the rest of my life. I will think of you when I listen to your favorite songs, when I accidentally sign animal names while I'm talking, when I sing lullabyes to my nephew, on my birthday, which is the anniversary of your baptism, when I pass our favorite places, and when this bed seems so big and empty without you curled up against me. Tienen mi corazón. You will always have my heart.
Happy birthday.
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