Every morning at 7.30, I climbed the stairs at Manhattan’s 86th Street subway station with a horde of others. Pushing past us down into the subway were kids in private-school uniforms and office types, all with their loafers and heels and buttery leather briefcases. Meanwhile, I followed the maids, the construction workers and the other nannies up to the street. The working class, I thought to myself, and the phrase buoyed me a little, waking me up after the long sleepy ride from Brooklyn. We were the invisible forces, the childcare workers and housekeepers, arriving just in time for our bosses to make their way to work. We were the foundation of that city.
As a first-generation college graduate, I had never been anything but working class. Every job I’d had involved some amount of waiting on people wealthier than I was, in restaurants, offices or their homes. On the Upper East Side, I’d been hired to take care of a toddler. She was 18 months old, walking and very verbal for her age. I’d already been nannying full-time for years, in other parts of the city, and I’d sworn that this time I wouldn’t get attached.
Over the next three years, my mind wandered in new ways as I cut crusts off of countless peanut butter sandwiches and repeatedly read Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. I found myself wondering what it would be like to live the way the families I worked for did – to have a washing machine, designer heels, a doorman, a bank account containing more than $50. Sometimes I played a little game in my head as I pushed my toddler charge around the city in my frayed winter coat and cheap boots: I imagined myself as her mother.
Though these fantasies filled me with guilt, I couldn’t escape them. I was reminded of Marcy Dermansky’s Bad Marie, where the eponymous nanny effectively kidnaps the two-year-old daughter of her employer, but proceeds to take quite good care of her.
I gobbled up books about nannies on my commute: from Lorrie Moore’s witty and touching A Gate at the Stairs to Leïla Slimani’s dark and propulsive Lullaby. I found myself drawn into things I would normally disregard. I binge-watched all six seasons of Gossip Girl. I read Primates of Park Avenue, and yes, even The Nanny Diaries. I was addicted to the outsider’s perspective.
The year before I began working for this family, I had graduated from Columbia University with a master’s in creative writing. Those two short years had been some of the best of my life, but left me $100,000 in debt. So I started nannying, because it paid marginally better than most of the copywriting jobs I was now qualified for, and I thought it would be less taxing, leaving me free to focus on my writing at night. In actuality, I was exhausted after long, often 10-hour days with children, and I still struggled to put aside enough money for my repayment plan. My student loans were growing every month and writing was slow and painful. I worried that it had all been a horrible mistake: school, my confidence in my artistic abilities, my hopes for a life that was entirely unlike the one I’d been born into.
“Life isn’t about money,” my dad told me. “Or your career. You’ll realise that when you have kids.”
It was a strange thing for him to say. My dad worked six days a week for my whole childhood, rarely taking vacations. I didn’t know how to respond. Having kids seemed like a privilege reserved only for the very wealthy.
“Nannying is good practice for when you have your own,” my employers said, but I was convinced that it was as close as I would ever get to motherhood. I was mourning what I assumed could never be mine from a very close distance, trying to understand it as if I were actually inside.
The little girl I watched on the Upper East Side used to call me her Madeline. “I have a mommy, a daddy, and a Madeline,” she’d say whenever anyone asked about her family. Once, picking her up from preschool, she waved a pink-and-purple splotched paper at me, exclaiming, “It’s you! It’s a picture of you and you’re walking to pick me up and you have your nails painted and you’re the cutest Madeline in the whole wide world!”
One day, the little girl’s mother had a morning off. She followed her daughter and me to a baby singalong that we had attended regularly, but never with her. As usual, I joined the other children on the rug in the centre of restaurant, holding the toddler’s hand as she danced to the guitar music while the mother stood back, unsure what to do. I glanced up and saw her stealthily wiping away tears. While I often felt out of place in the adult world, she must have felt the same way in this silly kid world where everyone sang and danced and drew.
The last family I worked for had one son, older than the babies and preschoolers I was used to. For his ninth birthday his mother bought him a new bike. She’d arranged to meet us at the bike shop after work, but as usual she was held up. We sat waiting until the employees felt sorry for this little boy, who couldn’t stay still for excitement. “He can take it,” they said. “He can ride it around.”
I watched as he pedalled down the street, looking gangly and uncertain on the bike, like a new baby deer. I watched him nervously brake for pedestrians, the wheels shaking a little, and my heart pounded when he approached the intersection, even though it wasn’t busy.
By the time his mom arrived, over an hour late, he was an old hand on the thing. He was bored and ready to leave; as she examined all the different features, he just said: “Yep.” She’d bought the bike, but missed the experience.
Stephanie Land’s memoir Maid explains the strange intimacy of working in someone else’s home. “I became a witness … I almost felt like I had the opportunity to get to know my clients better than any of their relatives did,” she writes. “I’d learn what they ate for breakfast, what shows they watched, if they’d been sick and for how long. I’d see them, even if they weren’t home, by the imprints lefts in their beds and tissues on the nightstand.”
I certainly knew the children I worked with better than their relatives. Sometimes, I felt I knew them better than their parents.
The families I worked for were privileged. They had private-school educations, college tuitions paid outright, big apartments in safe neighbourhoods. I often resented them as I struggled to afford groceries and hoped that small holes and stains on my clothes would go unnoticed. It was no surprise that when I began to write, in bursts on weekends and during nap times, I wrote about envy and resentment. Though the characters in my novel are not based on any of my employers, they are based on the attitudes I saw, and the peculiar intimacy I experienced. Because I didn’t know what to do with my resentment, I allowed my protagonist to let hers take the lead. I think this is why we are all so fascinated by the lives of the rich: we love to nurture our resentment, lust and jealousy, to hold it close and live inside it.
I spent seven years taking care of other people’s children. I still don’t know whether or not I’m destined for motherhood, but I miss the kids I worked with fiercely, though they no longer exist as I remember them. I saw the little girl from the Upper East Side twice after that job ended. The first time I met her and her mother at the Metropolitan Museum; she rubbed my arm against her cheek with her usual ridiculous affection, and I went home and cried. (Clearly I had become attached.) The second time, in a restaurant two years ago, she was bigger, missing teeth, more reserved. She told me she could ride a two-wheeler all by herself and whined to her dad that she was ready to leave. Now, she probably barely remembers me.
Children overturn our whole lives. We mourn them constantly as they grow, but for them, their early years stay fragmented and blurry. These parents’ memories of this period were also fragmented, lost forever when the nanny left. I’m not sure what do with all these memories of children that don’t belong to me. Though they don’t fit in my own life, I feel lucky to carry them around. This was my privilege. The parents got to have their children, but they also had to give them up.
• Devotion by Madeline Stevens is published by Faber & Faber on 15 August (£12.99).
