If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother

by Julia Sweeney

  Eventually I felt like a Mom de Sade, trolling for ideas of how to create rewards and penalties. Once I was driving and Mulan was in the backseat, holding a doll close to her, smiling and saying, “Mommy, I love my doll, I love my doll so much.” My first thought was, Oh you do, do you? Uh, huh. Good to know. Good. To. Know.

  I was horrified. I said to my friend Chris, father of two children, “I’m a dreadful person. I’ve begun to think like a devious manipulator. I hate the carrot-and-stick parenting approach.” Chris said to me, “No, no, don’t think of it like that. It’s not punishments and rewards. It’s incentives and disincentives.”

  Instantly I felt much better, just from the word substitutions. I was merely creating situations where my child was incentivized and disincentivized! I was doing what any person would do in an intensely interactive relationship that was constantly evolving, hierarchical, loaded, often claustrophobic and highly emotional. One in which I was temporarily bigger and smarter.

  Maybe smarter.

  Well, now I’ve been home a week all by myself. I’m still basking in the empty house, and that muscle has released somewhere deep inside. I’ve relaxed.

  You’d think I might have begun to miss my family. But I don’t. Really, I don’t. I do walk into Mulan’s room a couple of times a day, not because I yearn for her presence, but because it just seems proper. I have to make sure her room is still there, and didn’t evaporate because no one’s sleeping in the bed.

  I forgot to mention that I’m still an active parent while everyone is gone. And my young charges are in the middle of quite a makeover. You see, our dining room has been set up as a monarch butterfly nursery. Michael has grown milkweed in our backyard to attract them. When he’s in town, he occasionally inspects the leaves for eggs. He brings them into the house, still attached to their leaf and stem. He puts these branches, with the eggs, in a vase. Then he puts the whole thing inside a mesh butterfly habitat that sits on the dining room table. The eggs hatch into teeny caterpillars, and then they begin to eat. They munch and munch. The leaves become skeletons; only their spines remain, the chubby larva bending until they look like green-striped candy canes. Because Michael is gone, it’s my job to keep the caterpillars flush in fresh leaves. They chomp like there’s no tomorrow.

  Last night I figured I’d join them for dinner. I brought the salad I picked up from Panera into the dining room and sat with them. Just the eight of us, with our salads. I guess because of the salads, I think they’re all female. Sometimes the caterpillars take a big bite of leaf and then, after chewing frantically, they take a moment before they dig into the next bite as if to savor the taste, or recover from the effort. I took a mindfulness eating class this year, and I have to say, those larva appear to be postgraduates. Impressive, I thought as I tried to savor my own leaves.

  One of the seven caterpillars has already formed her chrysalis, and she’s hung from the ceiling of the mesh cage for a few days now. Monarch chrysalises become translucent in their final days, and I could see the orange and black stripes on her wings.

  This morning I was greeted by a new butterfly, freshly emerged from her pupa. When the butterflies emerge they fill their wings with a fluid that causes them to stretch and enlarge. The extra fluid from last night’s birth has dripped onto the newsprint we have lining the floor of the cage. A New York Times article describing a transportation bill that the U.S. Congress passed after a long political fight is now wet with monarch amniotic fluid. I imagine the butterfly thinking, Transportation bill! I’ll show you transportation! She could fly all the way to Mexico. Tonight, after I write this, I’m going to take her out of her cage carefully, holding her wings together the way Michael showed me (cue Rachmaninoff’s dramatic piano concerto #2 here) and I will let her go.

  Her future is wide open. She could fly a very long way, or get eaten by a bird within the hour. The extreme humidity is going to reduce her chances. As for myself, I’ll go into my comfy, cool, air-conditioned house.

  But I won’t think about her. Really, I won’t.

  WEEK TWO

  Independence

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Three Chinese Nannies

  When their mother had gone, Jane and Michael edged toward Mary Poppins, who stood still as a post, with her hands folded in front of her.

  “How did you come?” Jane asked. “It looked just as if the wind blew you here.”

  “It did,” said Mary Poppins, briefly.

  —P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins

  I had to hire a nanny.

  I was forty-two and had lived alone for most of twenty-one years, and even when I did live with someone, it wasn’t a baby.

  Well . . .

  Okay, let’s not go there now.

  First, you should know that I’m a terrible boss. Maybe one reason is that I feel uncomfortable being in a position of authority. A more insightful observer might say I have a childish need for approval. I want people to like me, most of the time. I think this character defect makes it difficult to maintain authority over those I’ve hired to do work for me. The bottom line is this: I do not like to manage a staff.

  Also, in a group, I find myself focusing on the one person who annoys me the most and then staring at this person in frozen disbelief. While I appear to be stupefied, I am actually conducting a rich inner monologue about their annoying personality. This is a counterproductive method for getting the most out of your employees.

  I also tend to overthink everything to the point of existential paralysis. For example, I’ll picture a task, and then I’ll wonder—for a very long time—if I really couldn’t just do this task myself, which leads to me wonder why I’ve hired someone and why I’m their boss at all, and why aren’t they my boss? And what is the essential nature of the boss-employee relationship? What is the sine qua non of employeeness? Or of boss(y)ness? Eventually, I’ll notice the clock and realize it’s too late to address the task at all.

  I also get confused about how much personal sharing is appropriate, especially if someone works in my home, where, by definition, everything is personal. I had a few personal assistants over the years and we always drifted into murky territory. When I would explain to them about a certain tricky personal relationship, one they would have to be aware of in order to handle it appropriately, I would then feel confused about how much I needed to know about their uncle Paul’s emphysema. Is there a quid pro quo for listening?

  My friend Kathy, who’s had many long-term, happily employed assistants over the years, once told me that when she hires someone she tells them: “Here are two tips for keeping your job: 1) Sharing. I may come in the door from time to time and tell a funny story. I will tell you a funny story about say, a salesperson, and you will listen. When I’m done, this does not mean that you can tell me your funny story about a salesperson. I’m your boss and that means I’m the one who tells funny stories. And 2) the more I know about your personal life, the sooner your job will come to an end. This is true even if I ask you about it, which I will, because I will become curious. Just keep that in mind.”

  Wow, that’s advanced boss behavior. I don’t think I could ever go that far.

  The most important reason I’m reluctant to hire someone is that I have found that you have to be very organized to be a boss. This means that while an employee can relieve you of work, they also make work for you. For example, the employee will probably, eventually want to know what it is, exactly, that you hired them to do.

  However, even in view of all this, I was initially optimistic about hiring a nanny. For one thing, the nature of the job was clear: take care of the kid. Second, it seemed common for people to hire child caretakers who didn’t speak English as a first language, and maybe not even as a second language, and to me, this seemed ideal. I fantasized that my nanny and I would have very little interaction, seeing each other only when we punched in our time cards at shift change.

  On the trip to China I met other single professional women who were also adopting a
nd they had lined up nannies well in advance of traveling. I was in awe. I wondered how they knew the baby and the nanny would get along. While in China, I learned that there was a person in Los Angeles who specialized in placing Chinese nannies. I was told that this broker could even find nannies from the same province where your newly adopted baby had been born. I had toured Tian, the suburb of Guangzhou where my daughter had been found, and wondered if I should just bring a nanny home with me from China. In fact, it even occurred to me that Mulan’s biological mother might need a job. I teetered on the edge of another moral-philosophical wormhole.

  I wanted to have a Chinese nanny. I liked this idea because I wanted Mulan to learn to speak Chinese. In fact, she was probably already speaking Chinese. As she babbled in baby talk, I sometimes wondered if she was trying to tell me something important.

  (A quick digression: At a Cantonese restaurant in San Francisco a few weeks after I adopted Mulan, a waitress told me that the sounds she was saying over and over again, sounds that I thought were cute Chinese versions of “ga-ga,” sounds to which I responded mostly by smiling and tickling her, was actually a phrase. The phrase was “I am hungry. I am so very, very hungry.” The waitress frowned at me and I strained through an “Oh, so that’s it. Okay, well, I guess we should get some food over here, then.” Followed by a nervous ho, ho, ho.)

  My real plan was to just stay at home with Mulan until I got a job that necessitated a nanny, which would force me into hiring someone. I figured I could probably get away with not working for three or four months. However, soon after I got home from China, I was offered an acting job on a TV pilot that I couldn’t turn down. Not only that, but it was going to be shot in Canada. I had to find someone quick, so I called the woman who specialized in Chinese nannies. She arranged a meeting with three different prospects over the course of one long evening.

  The first applicant spoke perfect English and Mandarin. She was about thirty. She was a medical doctor who had left China and couldn’t find work here. She answered phone calls in Mandarin twice during our interview, which I thought was bad form. I asked her if it was hard, as a trained medical doctor in China, and to be interviewing for nanny jobs here in the United States. She choked back tears. She told me then that she did not have a valid passport and was here illegally. This would be impossible, then, because I’d need her to fly out of the country with me. Her phone rang again, and she took it. A doctor is always on call.

  The next interview was with a Chinese-American couple. The husband said they would be doing the nanny job jointly. The wife didn’t speak at all. In fact, she wouldn’t even make eye contact with me. The husband was very stern and without emotion of any kind. He told me that he disagreed with the American way of raising children, that children should be raised to “have respect” for their elders. He wanted to assure me that my daughter would be raised to do as she was told and not be like other American kids, “always chewing gum and watching TV.” I waited for him to move on to the unsavory influences of Elvis and rock-and-roll music. I knew I couldn’t hire them. Though occasionally when I notice Mulan watching her thirtieth rerun of the same episode of The Suite Life of Zach & Cody while chewing gum and jumping up and down on the sofa after she has been advised repeatedly not to do so, I wonder if I made a mistake not considering those two.

  Lisa, the last applicant, was about fifty-five years old. She came from southern China, like Mulan. She spoke almost no English. But she spoke both Mandarin and Cantonese. Mulan began to cry during the interview. Lisa took her from me without any fanfare, and began to pat her back in this rhythmic way—firm yet comforting. Mulan immediately fell asleep in her arms. I offered her the job on the spot. She agreed. I said I’d pay her fifteen dollars an hour. She said she only needed ten an hour. I insisted on twenty dollars an hour. She said, okay, fifteen dollars an hour. That was it, I had my nanny.

  I. Lisa.

  Lisa barely spoke English. It was perfect. I knew nothing about her and her whole life was a mystery to me. I put five hundred dollars in a special wallet and gave it to Lisa for expenses for Mulan. She asked if I needed her to clean the house as well. I said, sure. Before I knew it, her husband was also accompanying her to work and he was scrubbing the kitchen floor. I asked Lisa what was happening. She said her husband loved to clean. I asked, “He loves to clean?” She said, “Yes, he loves to clean.”

  Lisa’s husband’s English made Lisa seem like a born-and-bred Los Angeleno. He literally did not speak one word of English. To make matters worse, he was not on speaking terms with Lisa. Lisa asked me to write out a list of what I wanted done around the house and then she would translate it into Chinese. She asked me many questions about my list and then spent time translating it meticulously. This took a lot of time, sometimes an absurd amount. But I figured we were all on a steep learning curve that would eventually flatten out.

  In my house in L.A., I have a little writing office in the backyard, detached from the house. One day I was in my office writing. I looked out the window and saw Lisa, her husband, and Mulan all dancing in a little circle singing a Chinese children’s song.

  I had adopted an entire Chinese family. First I got a baby. Then I got parents for the baby. This was simultaneously disturbing and fantastic.

  One night I came home exhausted and collapsed on the couch next to Lisa. I’d been working twelve hours on something or other—I can’t remember now what it was—but in any case, I was beat. Lisa sat next to me and took great pains to tell me that Mulan had learned a new song. I was pleased, but I yearned for more information. I was sad that I hadn’t been there to witness it. I remember Lisa and I were sitting unusually close on the sofa. In my state of depletion, I had probably just plopped down too close, and Lisa was too polite to move over. There we were, smushed together, a perfectly odd couple. I thought, Is this what it has come down to? Is this the best intimate relationship for me, with an older Chinese woman who barely speaks English?

  Lisa said quietly that she had something to tell me. She took out a piece of paper; which was filled with handwritten Chinese characters. She said she loved working for me but had decided to open a day-care center with her daughter at her home. In fact, her whole family was going to run the day-care center, with the exception of her husband, whom she was divorcing. She told me I could bring Mulan to her house if I needed to. She’d need to stop working for me in two months’ time.

  I thanked her and then felt overcome with sorrow. Lisa asked me if she could ask one more question. In a quiet, small voice, she asked, “How come you didn’t have your own baby?” She looked deep into my eyes. She had this look of sad, confused concern, like, “You have good teeth. Why aren’t you married?”

  I said, “I can’t. I had a problem. Cancer, and an operation. I can’t have children.”

  “Oh . . . ,” she said, shaking her head. “So that is why you are not married.”

  I half-snorted, thinking about Joe #10. When Lisa left, after two years of working for me, she handed me the little wallet in which I’d given her the five hundred dollars for expenses for Mulan. During this time we had traveled together to Vancouver three times and to New York City probably five or six times. The wallet contained $405.50.

  Clearly Lisa was very good with money. I did end up driving Mulan out to her day-care center a few times, and Lisa continued to babysit for me when I was in a jam. Mulan, who was almost four years old by then, really loved her. Eventually she moved back to China, buying two houses in Kunming, the city that reminded me so much of San Francisco. She currently lives in one house and rents out the other. When I eventually take Mulan back to China for a visit, we will definitely see Lisa. In fact, I cannot wait to see her again with Mulan.

  II. The Manny

  I had to hire another nanny. Mulan was now old enough to start attending preschool a few hours a day. I decided I wanted to change my nanny style. I was ready to hire someone part-time who would be more like a mother’s helper than a full-on nanny.

&n
bsp; But this meant hiring a new-mode nanny. I needed someone to be around me more—my sidekick and co-caretaker—and be there when I needed to slip out and write, or even just to go to the gym for an hour. With Lisa, it was really a handoff kind of situation. We didn’t hang out with Mulan at the same time (unless you count me in my backyard office staring out at the window at the two of them while I was frozen in procrastination as “hanging out together”).

  Frankly, I really didn’t want to spend time with someone I’d hired. I felt self-conscious being around Mulan with another caretaker—a professional—right there. On the other hand, if they weren’t right there, easily accessible, there was no way to be with Mulan, and then to not be with Mulan, with the flexibility I required. I figured I could hire someone part-time, but I was still attached to the idea that Mulan could learn Chinese.

  And that’s how I wound up with the manny.

  Toby was about thirty years old, half Irish and half Chinese. He had worked here and there as an assistant and he loved children. He was handsome. He was straight. And he spoke Mandarin.

  During the interview, however, I found myself confused. Why did I find the idea of hiring this guy so weird? Did I have a bias, favoring women as the caretakers of babies? Did I have a bias that made me prefer that the men who took care of children be gay? Did I fear people would think I’d adopted a baby only to hire myself a handsome man to cart her around and be my companion? It seemed odd, but why was any of this stranger than having a female nanny running around with the baby and me?

  My initial internal reaction to him was a flat-out no. But I hated myself for that, because I really couldn’t think of a good reason not to hire this man. He had experience with children. He was smart and funny. I was not sexually attracted to him, in spite of his good looks—which was another good reason to hire him.