SIX KIDS? AND YOU WORK? HOW DO YOU DO IT?
“Well, our oldest is away at college, so there are only five left at home” is how I usually deflect the astonishment from people I meet on the street. “And we have help.”
“Oh, you have
This is where the problem lies. Perhaps people assume that if I have help, then I must be rich, and hating rich people has become the latest American pastime, so they must hate me. Or perhaps because my life was made very public for a short time, during which I was nicknamed “Bad Mommy,” they think that this gives them the right to judge my choices.
In any case, people love to beat me up over the fact that I have help. Being raised with nannies doesn’t seem to have adversely affected my kids at all. In fact, all their therapists say they are very well adjusted.
In an otherwise innocuous interview for Parents.com, during which I spoke about how I juggle work and family, I mentioned the girls who help me with my children. In the South, where I come from, “girl” is a term of endearment. I call all women “girl,” regardless of age, race, or sometimes gender. This tidbit was buried in a five- screen click-through about style and girdles and whatnot, but for some reason Jezebel.com, a women’s website that is part of the Gawker group, linked to the article with a squib about how disrespectful it was of me to refer to professional child-care workers as girls. I’d been targeted by this particular website before, so I wasn’t taken aback by the hostility. What did surprise me was how many of Jezebel’s readers are stay-at-home moms, who actually have the time to read, post, and then have lengthy conversations among themselves about how bad I suck as a mom. Who’s watching their kids? The hatred spewed from keyboards all across America.
SuperSally: If you can’t take care of your kids without almost round the clock help from multiple individuals then WTF? Either you had too many damn kids and didn’t bother to think about it as you were popping them out or you are incompetent.
Experiencing the pain of childbirth does not make me love my children more; that’s why God invented epidurals. Changing every diaper, cooking every meal, and doing every pickup and drop-off will not make me love them more, either. Choosing not to do so hardly makes me incompetent.
And then there was this type:
Pureblarney: I cry inside every time I wait for the subway next to a child and his nanny. I will be raising my kids, thankyouverymuch, even if I have to pull teeth to keep any semblance of a career in tow.
Awww. You’ve got to love an idealist willing to perform unlicensed dental procedures for the sake of being with her kids. But would she rather see a totally stressed-out mom pushed to the brink of frustration? A dicey thing if said mom is standing on the edge of a subway platform.
Other comments were virulent—one reader even went so far as to post a testimonial saying she had seen me calmly sit by as my children terrorized an airport terminal. She included in her story the details that my kids were tackling and baiting each other, that I occasionally slung a curse at them, and that Peter was detached and “had completely given up on his family and quite possibly life itself.” She did go on to mention in a later comment that the boys were well behaved on the plane, but she never considered that perhaps I was operating from a plan.
Best (or maybe worst) of all, she accused me of dressing the boys in various hues of Polo Ralph Lauren shirts. I ask you, why would I ever spend good money on something like that when L. L. Bean features just as many colors for half the price? Doesn’t that nice lady know what kind of shoes I could buy with the difference?
Now I am certainly no stranger to angry comments. I take full responsibility for everything I say and the wrath that comes along with it; I just didn’t expect a website that once featured a blogger called Slut Machine to go so self-righteous and judgmental on a woman because she has help. I guess I should be thankful the folks at Jezebel aren’t calling me Sextomom.
Trust me, I’m not at the spa while someone else is raising my brood. Kids in New York need planned activities; they don’t just run out to the backyard or meet up with the neighborhood gang for a game of kick the can. There are music lessons and organized sports, pediatrician and orthodontist appointments, birthday parties, and playdates. Inevitably these events take place at different ends of Manhattan at the same time. It’s a complex matrix of times and places, requiring a team effort to make it happen.
If our household is a team, Alicia is the captain.
“Don’t forget to pick up Truman after your meeting because Nicole will be with Pierson at reading. I spoke to Peik. He is coming home on his own. I’ll take Larson to speech and meet you back here at four-thirty.”
Roger that. Dependable and organized, Alicia calls the plays by telling us all where we need to be on any given day. She expertly handles as many as ten speech and language sessions a week for Larson’s learning disability; she knows all the therapists’ names and has friended them on Facebook. I can count on one hand the days of work she has missed in the thirteen years she has been with our family. I think it’s wonderful that my children love this woman, who has cared for them since they were babies. And if she felt disrespected by being referred to as “girl,” would she still be here after so many years?
Alicia is a single mother to two boys, Warren and Christian, who have grown up alongside my boys. My philosophy is that if Alicia is happy, I am happy, so I attempt to make her life as stress-free as possible. Having her boys around where she can keep an eye on them makes life easier for all of us. Of course, this puts the boy count in the house at seven on most afternoons. Scan the loft and you will see scattered about the apartment glassy-eyed boys of various sizes and colors planted and staring into screens of some version of mind-sucking technology. Until, of course, they all decide it’s time for a game of monkey in the middle. Then they pound about until the downstairs neighbor starts beating on the pipes.
Alicia is petite, well spoken, and well dressed. She never hesitates to use her knowledge of style on me, saying things like “You’re not going to leave the house in that, are you? You look like Secretarial School Barbie.” Or “Explain to me why you are wearing a tuxedo at two o’clock in the afternoon.” Thanks to an addiction to exercise and fitness magazines, she is superfit. When she arrives at eight-thirty in the morning, she has already been to Boot Camp or kickboxing or on some other blood-rushing, muscle-building endeavor. She has a passion for designer handbags and can describe in detail the latest It bag. Once, when I was pitching a fashion game show to a network and needed a display of designer loot to demonstrate the game, I turned to Alicia to borrow what I needed.
“That Chloe bag is gorgeous,” said a network executive.
“I know, don’t you love it? I borrowed it from my nanny.”
“Your nanny? I want to be your nanny.”
“Oh, no you don’t.”
DESPITE HER QUIET DEPENDABILITY, ONE LOOK AT HER FACEBOOK profile photo gives you a clue that Alicia has a wild side. Wearing a wig and a fitted hot-pink dress, photographed from behind showing off her well- toned rear: this is the Alicia I see only occasionally.
“Is that Alicia?” a father asked me at a school Halloween party.
“Catwoman? Yeah, that’s her.” I smiled.
“That’s my sexy nanny!” Pierson added, proud to be there with the masked girl in the tight leather pants carrying a whip. Costume parties always bring out Alicia’s wild side. She tends to look like one of the girls on the Leg Avenue packages at Ricky’s. The sexy cigarette girl. The glamour gladiator. The dark angel. Every costume features Alicia’s hard-earned abs.
She doesn’t get mad often, but when she does she is capable of a crippling silent treatment, which renders me defenseless. The silent treatment is the worst for me. Yell at me, hit me, just get it over with. I have tried to convince her that keeping her anger in is unhealthy, and it would better and more cleansing for her to express why she is angry, but I think she knows I am just saying that because I can’t bear her torture.
Alicia has been a part of our family as long as Peik has. And when I say “a part” I don’t mean some organ we could live without if necessary, like the spleen. Not one of my sons knows a world without her. She knows everyone’s favorite snacks and makes sure they are stocked in the pantry. She is the softy in the house: the boys go to her when they feel unloved or in need of some extra attention. To be democratic, she refers to them all as “Boyfriend.” When Peik was a baby, he pronounced Alicia “Sheesha,” which has stuck so completely that even my friends and neighbors think that is her name.
“I called the house and spoke to Sheesha yesterday,” Larson’s class mother told me, “She is so lovely. She
