Our house is a bit like Downton Abbey. There is an upstairs and a downstairs. And although there are no aristocrats or servants wearing gloves while shining my silverware, the prospects of the people who live and work in my house are as different as a basement suite and a penthouse.
I found my nanny on Craigslist, a place where I have also bought slightly stained used couches. The furniture was worse than it appeared. My nanny is much, much better than I ever could have dreamed.
On her first visit to our house for the job interview, it was only a matter of minutes before she was sitting on the floor, playing with my kids, hiding toys behind her back, and then revealing them to delighted squeals. She moved into our basement three weeks later, put up pictures of Jesus on her bedroom wall and took care of my kids with the patience and love of a saint.
When I head out to work every morning, I carry a lunchbox full of fruit and a heart heavy with guilt. Although my self-esteem is buoyed by the challenges of working in a busy office, if I could afford to stay at home with my children, I would.
In an ideal world, my days would be spent building sandcastles with my daughter and then watching her younger brother smash them down. My son is the leading playground expert on destruction and laughter. My daughter is teaching the world to hug, one tired grown-up at a time.
But I am not a member of an aristocratic family, so do I have to earn my living outside the home. And when it comes time to wave goodbye to my children each morning, the nanny makes it a little easier to leave. Not only are they playing and laughing when I depart, they are reading and tickling when I return nine hours later.
And when I come in the front door, my nanny doesn’t run away like a cashier who is clocking out at Walmart. Sometimes she even sticks around to watch an episode of The Muppets, giggling quietly at the overblown jealousy of Miss Piggy.
But my nanny is not only a nanny. She is also a mother. Only her children don’t sleep at the other end of the hallway. They eat, learn and play nearly 10,000 kilometres away, a giant gaping ocean turning Canada and the Philippines into the oddly matched bookends of her life.
My nanny is helping her children by taking care of my children. After spending several years working as a caregiver in Canada, she intends to bring her children here. They will have access to an education and career unimaginable in the Philippines. And as if separation from her family is not enough, my nanny has had a crisis in her life almost every month. Her husband needed an operation; her son had dengue fever. And of course, there was the devastating typhoon in November.
I am not wealthy. I am using my savings to pay for the nanny. My kids can’t go to regular daycare because they have life-threatening allergies. But despite the financial strain, I am aware of how incredibly rich with luck my life is. That I was born in Canada, that I get to experience the slow evolution of my childrens’ shoes being too big and then too small.
I feel guilty for what seems like taking advantage of another person’s misfortune. The fact that the best way my nanny can help her children is by leaving them. Sometimes I don’t know if by giving my nanny a job, I am a good person.
And through all of this, my nanny has the happiest, kindest, most generous disposition. She cuddles and reads stories to my children. She roars at the other moms in the play group when they try to share allergenic foods that could stop my kids from breathing.
And although she lives in my basement and comes from a developing nation, my nanny is a monarch of motherhood. Like a philanthropic aristocrat who has a bottomless reserve of love, rather than money, she takes care of my children while making such profound sacrifices for her own.
Jean Paetkau is a Victoria journalist.
