Nannygate In A Vacuum
In case any of you have even the semblance of an actual life, then you haven't been following the fast-moving public evisceration of Helaine Olen. For those of you who hate clicking on links, I'll say that Olen wrote a piece in the Sunday style section of The New York Times yesterday about how she had to fire her nanny after her nanny revealed that she was doing a blog. This blog was a little about being a nanny but a lot about the extremely common experience of being young and overeducated in New York. Olen then, in the piece, admitted jealousy of this nanny named Tessy and now the whole thing has sprialled into one of those only-in-2005-stories.
Anyone who's trying to frame this incident as a scene from the class struggle is wrong. Tessy-nanny is not a person without options. If she blogs, that means she has education and access to technology. And it also means that she has access to a potential book contract. If she's in graduate school, that means that nannying is a means to an end, not the only way she can support herself. The odds are high that she is, at least originally, more or less of the same social class as her employer, just at a different point in life. She could be the first person from her remote Appalachian mountain village to go to graduate school, but I would doubt that.
The piece in the Times was dippy and poorly written. Perhaps the family was wrong to fire the nanny. But I've recently been raked hard over the coals for trying to write honestly about my family life, and I know that a lot of the criticism is unfair and unfounded, based on limited information. It is hard to give up your social life when you have kids. It is sobering to know that your days of sexual adventure are on the wane. It's not easy to face aging and mortality. This was by no means the best expression of these feelings. In fact, it was one of the worst. I would recommend a fine and challenging novel, We Have To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, book number 31 on my list, if you want a subtler and more detailed look at these issues. But just because a woman admits that she was sexually jealous of her nanny doesn't mean she's a class criminal, or a thought criminal, or any kind of a criminal.
These are shit times to have a kid, even if you're supposedly "doing well." I earn more than my father did at my age, yet he somehow managed to put three kids through college and also raise them in one of the best neighborhoods in the country. I'm struggling to raise one kid in a neighborhood two blocks from the Interstate and one block from a day-labor center on a street that serves mainly as a cut-through for beer trucks making delivieries to the several liquor stores within walking distance to my house. This isn't because I have trouble managing my money. It's because there is no support for middle-class families in this country, no health-care support, no child-care support, certainly no tax relief, and a housing market that's creating rapid downward mobility.
I wish I had problems as salacious and hilarious as having to fire my hot nanny because she was blogging about her underwear. I wish I could afford a nanny, or even a Saturday-night babysitter, at all. But this story (and the ludicrously voluminous response it brought about, including this post) is another snapshot from the wearying battleground that child-rearing has become in this country.