But right then my place was at an old-fashioned desk. The seat was attached to a wooden tabletop, the kind I remembered from third grade with hearts and initials carved all over. Fourteen other girls and women sat all around me in the neat rows. At the front of the room stood the teacher, a middle-aged woman who introduced herself as Carolyn. I stared at an enormous blackboard next to her desk, where the following was written:
A Professionally Trained Nanny Is:
Not a maid
Prepared for the unexpected
Always conducting herself in a professional manner
Truly committed to the profession
Underneath there was an outline of some of the course material:
Today’s Subjects:
Etiquette—Table Manners
Grooming—Hygiene
Family Dynamics—Husband and Wife as Parents
First Aid/CPR
I was pleasantly surprised at the scope of material we would be covering. I would later learn that there are very few programs offering official training or certification as a professional nanny. NNI was one of the first of its kind. Carolyn and her partner, Linda, had started the nanny school just a year earlier, and, as with many start-up businesses, they did it all. Sometimes during our lessons they would have to interrupt class to take phone calls.
“NNI. May I help you?” they would say brightly.
“Yes. Uh, yes.”
“No, we don’t do pet-sitting.”
“Well, uh, yes, sometimes our nannies do work for families that have pets.”
“Uh, no, we don’t offer a dog-walking service.”
“Yes, I realize there are similarities between babies and puppies.”
“Perhaps your vet would have a referral?”
“No, once again, sir, just human beings, not schnauzers …”
Nannies were still a new concept in Oregon.
I studied the other nannies-in-training. Most of the others were fresh out of high school, just like me. I found out that one girl had just graduated at the top of a class of fifteen, and several others were from tiny towns in rural areas. There were also a few older women in the class, divorced with grown children, who had never worked outside the home but were quite practiced in raising kids.
For the rest of the morning we went over our syllabus. In the months ahead, we would also be covering household management, health and safety, the physical and cognitive development of children, résumés and interviewing techniques, career planning, and employment contracts. But it wasn’t all textbook work. We were also given a practicum family—literally a practice family—that we would work for during our training. And Carolyn explained that a mother would be bringing in a newborn to show us how to give an infant a bath.
I had a lot of questions. And I asked them all. First, why would we be discussing personal hygiene? Second, exactly what kind of grooming did she mean? And finally, isn’t it probably best not to go into the childcare profession if you’ve never even given a baby a bath?
Carolyn asked me to stay after class to speak with her privately. Oops.
During our after-school meeting, she explained, “Not all of our students share your privileged background,” as if my last name was Kennedy. But after peering at those around me more closely the next day, I realized that what Carolyn had said was true. I was judgmental—just like my mother had always been telling me.
Carolyn’s words reminded me of my first babysitting job when I was in the fourth grade. I’ll never know what possessed my mother to think that I was responsible enough to oversee a child only two years younger than me, but Mom had blithely promised my services to our Avon lady. She needed someone to watch her four children, ages one to seven, for an evening because she had an important date. I wondered who she was dating. And who was the father to the four she already had? But my mother had said I wasn’t supposed to criticize people unless I’d walked a mile in their shoes, a concept she had explained to me more than once.
When I arrived, the Avon lady informed me that there had been recent reports of a prowler in the area and that I should call the police if anything suspicious happened. I turned on every light in the house and spent the entire night peeping out from behind the curtains. How could anyone let me, a nine-year-old who still played with Barbies and was scared of the witch in The Wizard of Oz, take care of her children in the face of such imminent danger? I wanted to call my mom. But the prospect of a paying job convinced me to tough it out.
At NNI I could now see that my very first adventure in babysitting had truly been an early indication of things to come. My talent as a busybody, my propensity to psychoanalyze people and their relationships, my alternating confidence and self-doubt, and my willingness to face the unknown, be it possible prowlers or shady strip malls. I was ready. Bring on the kids!
But there was more school. We were taught the definition of a nanny, to wit: “A nanny’s role is to provide support to the family by serving as a loving, nurturing, and trustworthy companion to the children. A nanny has special childcare skills and a deep love for and understanding of children. A nanny offers the family convenient, high-quality care to meet each child’s physical, emotional, social, and intellectual needs.”
Our teachers urged us to remember that a nanny isn’t a maid or a cook. Carolyn and Linda were experienced enough to know that there would indeed be families that were looking for a nanny to perform housework, such as doing laundry, washing dishes, or making dinner. They told of one family that even required their nanny to shovel snow from their Chicago sidewalk each morning; apparently the dad had a bad back. I learned that a lot of nannies were taken advantage of. But I thought I had the perfect plan. I would work for a family that had a maid and a cook, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about scrubbing the floor and whipping up dinner. Why were all these other girls such pushovers? That wasn’t going to be me.
Carolyn laid out a few more basic rules:
Don’t wear suggestive clothing.
When you’re out to dinner with the family, don’t order the most expensive item on the menu.
Maintain a professional decorum. Don’t make your employers your friends.
Do not be the wife’s confidante about her troubles with her husband.
Or, in some instances,
Don’t be the mistress’s confidante.
(And of course)
Don’t become the mistress.
(Was this rule really necessary? Wasn’t it just assumed that you shouldn’t sleep with your boss? Had this actually been a problem in the past?)
And right there on the board in big letters was written the cardinal rule, staring us in the face every day and stated and restated as often as possible:
Get a signed contract detailing pay, hours, and rate for overtime, and any other expectations before agreeing to the position.
Another student named Mandie and I became close friends. She was only two years older than me, and she had silky black shoulder-length hair and a warm smile that made her approachable. I grew very fond of her. It might have been my mothering instinct that drew me to her—I felt the urge to take her under my wing. She seemed so alone, having driven all the way from Montana by herself. Her father, a lawyer and a man of few words himself, had given her only one piece of advice as she started her journey: “Count to ten before you speak.” I didn’t know it at the time, but soon Mandie would become one of the only friends I would have in a very foreign land. She would, one day, save my sanity.
Sitting in that classroom on the dingy side of Portland, I didn’t fully grasp the possibility of nightmarish nanny scenarios. Sure, I listened to stories like that of a British nanny who went to work for the royal family in Saudi Arabia. The girls she watched grew obese from being force-fed—to get them “strong” for childbearing. One seven-year-old child weighed 165 pounds. The nanny was freaked out by such strange practices and was scared by the police who stopped her for some wayward blond hair poking out of her headscarf. She eventuall
y ran to the British embassy to get escorted out of the country. It sounded awful, but awfully different from how I pictured my job. Surely in the United States everyone had the same sort of basic ideas about raising kids. Didn’t they?
A few weeks into class, Mary, the family dynamics teacher, asked me to help take care of her own two girls and the special-needs foster children she cared for. She told me that, after careful consideration, she had chosen me from all the girls in class because of my maturity. I’d always felt I was the most responsible among my peers. As Jeff Foxworthy says, I was usually elected as the “spokesperson” to answer the door at our high school parties when the cops showed up. And what else could explain the fact that I had been chosen as the head of the fire-drill exercises in second grade and as the attendance-taker in the third grade?
I wasn’t, however, nominated for a home-ec medal. Though we weren’t expected to cook as nannies, Carolyn and Linda knew there would be exceptions. So we were required to prepare a meal, a personal favorite, for one of our practicum families to see if we could buy the groceries and make a dinner while caring for the kids at the same time. My personal favorite at the time was also the only one I knew how to make, unless you counted bologna boats. It was a casserole, with broccoli, cheddar cheese, a can of Campbell’s cream of chicken soup, mashed potatoes, two cubes of butter, and a pint of half-and-half. This was all layered over a couple of pounds of fried hamburger. My grandmother used to make it for me every Sunday night. But somehow I had never noticed how long she slaved in the kitchen. I felt great nanny guilt for sticking my practicum children in front of the TV (educational programming, of course) while I stood over the stove. It took hours to assemble, but I thought it turned out great.
The six-year-old refused to eat it. He said it looked like throw up.
My four months of schooling went quickly, and by December I had graduated. I’d logged more than four hundred hours in classroom and practicum training and had passed my certification test with flying colors. I was now a highly trained and qualified childcare professional. I figured I could do that anywhere in the world—children are children, after all. So I set my sights on Southern California, the land of milk, honey, sunshine, and money. To my surprise, within a week I had several interviews lined up through a domestic placement agency in Santa Monica.
There was no doubt in my mind that it was time to leave the northwest. I knew that I’d miss my parents, my two sisters, and all my friends, but I had adjusted to life in a big city—well, Portland. It was time for bigger things. And there was no romance anchoring me in Oregon, anyway. Okay, there was my first love, Ryan, and our intense on-again, off-again relationship, but it was off now, and I suspected he probably couldn’t wait for me to disappear so he could start dating the homecoming queen. I had never before made it three entire months without running back to Ryan. But now I felt strong and confident. I was ready for a new life.
Good-bye, covered-bridge capital of America.
I was off to the film capital of the world.
My friends who are actresses and who have babies are with them every day. You can work and still be totally involved with your baby.
—Jennifer Garner
chapter 4
hollywood or bust
Going from NNI to my marathon interviews in LA to my new job happened quite quickly, almost like one of those movie scenes in which a child grows up in the space of one well-chosen song. I returned to LA less than a week after the Ovitz family offered me the position. Josh Evans, who worked in the CAA mailroom, picked me up from the airport. He was a cute guy, just about my age. He seemed really nice, and we laughed a lot on the drive to my new home. Maybe we could date? I knew it was time to move beyond Ryan. I later learned that Josh was Ali MacGraw’s son with Robert Evans, who had once run Paramount Pictures and was now a notorious producer. It seemed strange that a celebrity child like Josh had to start in the mailroom at Michael’s company; I didn’t yet know that it was a time-honored tradition. Everyone in Hollywood, apparently, started in the mailroom—even Michael, who had started his career at the William Morris Agency before decamping to found CAA.
No mailroom for me, though. Just the playroom. But it didn’t take long to see that they were very similar.
You first had to realize who was boss.
My real bosses were less than three feet tall. And they had lungs of steel. Right away I learned that when charming, dimpled, three-year-old Amanda didn’t get her way, there would be hell to pay. Her temper tantrums were daily and lengthy. Her shrill screams reverberated like air-raid sirens. She would stomp and flail her arms as fat crocodile tears rolled down her cheeks, and the veins in her little neck would become engorged from shrieking. She carried on like a crazed Energizer bunny until she ran out of juice, which took a long, long time—up to two excruciating hours. Everyone had given up trying to stop her toddler fits.
I figured that with my institute-certified expertise, I could snap her out of it pretty quickly. But in all my experiences as a babysitter, I had never seen a child with such determination—or tonsil power. I had read every child development and parenting book that I could get my hands on, always wanting to be one step ahead of the kids. Sure, sometimes I had to hunt around for the solution—maybe a stern talk, a time-out, or chocolate ice cream. But in the end, something would work. This child, however, appeared immune to all of my maneuvers.
This was not the way I had planned to kick off my first job. But then again, I had planned to have all my stuff with me, too. Two days before I left Cottage Grove, I shipped my clothes and other belongings down to the house. I had the correct street address, but I assumed that my new home was in Brentwood, not Los Angeles. That naming nonsense again. Evidently, Brentwood was not its own city. As a result, all my earthly possessions ended up who knows where in California. It wasn’t until two weeks later that they finally arrived.
Looking back, that may have been an omen.
Yet I blithely carried on. As I tried to take a wiggling Amanda to her room for a time-out, I saw Judy watching, looking aghast and a little dazed. She walked away, shaking her head.
I was mystified. I thought disciplining the kids was part of my job. But I didn’t say anything.
Why didn’t I ask how she wanted me to handle problems? I didn’t have the nerve. Asking probably would have gotten me some answers, but at a price. Already I felt like a bull in a china shop. By the end of my first day I had come to dread Judy’s silent but oh-so-obvious disapproval when I did something she considered foolish, like walking out to fetch the mail in my socks. Or when I returned what I thought was a garage door opener to her car. (How did I not have the sense to know that the “opener” was a buzzer that belonged in the dining room—so the family could summon the staff when they had minor emergencies, like needing more pepper?) And after I chatted about Ryan and how I missed him, she explained in no uncertain terms that she thought it was ridiculous to even think about having a long-distance relationship. In her opinion, they never worked out.
I quickly sized up the household as tense and tight, not the happy, laughing, rough-and-tumble place I’d been picturing. (How had I not noticed this during my interview?) Judy expected me to know all the answers already, and fielding more queries exasperated her. I figured the only way to operate was to forge ahead and ask for forgiveness later. Well, not that I planned to do much of that. I vowed to be the perfect employee. If that meant reading the minds of my forbidding Hollywood bosses, then bring me the crystal ball.
I never did discover any rules regarding the children’s behavior. Apparently, they didn’t use time-outs, parenting with love and logic, attachment parenting, or any of the other concepts I had studied. So I tried to make up my own rules. But Judy didn’t seem pleased with any of them. She certainly hadn’t liked my giving a time-out, and candy or other food bribes were forbidden in this house (more on that shortly). I wasn’t sure what would please them; I didn’t see one parenting book in the entire house. But this
family did have rules about other things. Lots of them.
Even in the bathroom. On my second day, when I went to turn on the tap for Joshua’s nighttime bath, I noticed that the spout was covered with what looked like a giant condom. Now, why in the world would someone want to protect their faucet? No idea. I pulled it off. How else was I going to run the water?
As with most things in the house, there was a reason—it just wasn’t evident to me. After the tub was half-filled, I told Joshua to get in while I helped Amanda get undressed in the connecting bedroom. Within seconds there was a wailing that nearly rivaled Amanda’s shrieking hissy fits. Heart pounding, I turned to see Joshua sitting in the tub, clutching his head and screaming, “You idiot! You’re so stupid! I hate you!”
I realized that the cover had been placed there to protect the children, not the spout. Fortunately, the incident didn’t require stitches, but in Joshua’s six-year-old mind, I had committed an unpardonable sin.
Would I ever get the hang of this?
I decided to approach it like school. After all, I was getting tested constantly, so I might as well study. I began carrying a well-worn notebook, hastily scribbling every time I learned something new about their preferences, propensities, and peculiarities. I was not about to get caught without a smile on my face and a helpful attitude. I was determined to win their approval.
During the first week of my tour of duty, I added several major rules to my list:
You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again: The True Adventures of a Hollywood Nanny Page 5