Andrei Codrescu
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com -- I met a nanny on the Greyhound who gave me the lowdown on the nanny business in the 21st century. She had been flown a thousand of miles from her home for an interview with a family in a ritzy 'burb of New Jersey. This family had interviewed one hundred prospective nannies for their two children, and, after carefully screening them, had flown seven prospects to their home.
It was a huge house, the nanny said, not far from a discreet little town where the parents both worked as doctors. The parents introduced her to the children, took her to a restaurant, and grilled her systematically for two days about the entirety of her life, which at the age of twenty-one, she hadn't yet had much of.
I asked her if she thought she'd get the job. "I don't know," she said.
"They are going to call me after the FBI check." Then you should be OK," I said, "if they don't find out about the string of robberies you committed when you were in Junior High."
It's no joke," she said, "they even fingerprinted me. I sure hope that I don't have an FBI file."
"Everybody has an FBI file," I reassured her.
All her life, she told me, she wanted to be a nanny. She worked in a daycare center, loved children, and on weekends she led a discussion group about children's issues at her church. Still, she was worried, because, as she put it, "the FBI might turn up somebody with the same name, born on the same date, who is really a criminal." She had a friend who'd been in trouble with creditors because he had the same name and birth date as a deadbeat.
"That rarely happens," I said, "but these nanny-seekers are sure paranoid."
"Oh, they have video-surveillance cameras all over the house."
"Doesn't that make you feel icky?"
"Well, sure, but I understand. After that terrible thing with the British aupair and the dead baby, nobody trusts a stranger with their children. As long as they don't have a camera in the bathroom."
"I'm sure they do," I said. "That's where most crimes take place."
Despite my lame attempts at humor, this was a determined young woman. She was proud of her chosen profession. "So few people care about children these days," she said. "Nannies and teachers are an endangered and underpaid species."
I whole-heartedly agreed with her. I also found it ironic and troubling that highly-paid, nerve-wracked, news-rattled yuppies needed to fly a prospective nanny across a continent. What happened to the kind older people next door who used to moonlight as baby-sitters? Or the traditional teenagers? Or even the foreign au-pairs who were so much in vogue before the tax-scandals and the English nanny?
What happened is that people who plan their children the way they plan their KEOGHs and IRAs, are wracked by guilt. They would sooner work themselves to death than deal with the scary fact that what they made are human beings not ornamental ponds they can deduct from their taxes. So they'll pay as much as it takes to hand their kids over to FBI-checked, video-surveyed, church-going girls from the Deep South where there are still "family values."
The nanny was a sweet person. I didn't want to burden her with my feeling
that she was the tool of a sick setup. I hope she gets the
JWR contributor Andrei Codrescu is the author, most recently, of Casanova in Bohemia. Comment by clicking here.
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