Wanted: A Nanny With Style - Trish Smith

Wanted: A Nanny With Style

By Trish Smith.

Now that I have started working full-time, we have had to find someone else to take some of the responsibility for the upbringing of these children (that I brought into the world because I wanted more than anything to be a mother) because I have gone back to work (because in order to be a good mother I need a fulfilling career).   I’m not trying to start a debate with you all, I’m just pointing out that I could argue for either side of the SAHM/WOHM divide and so this is not what this is about.

So I paid a huge registration fee to advertise the position on the internet and also gain the right permissions to search the database of nanny/babysitters.  Within a few days I had found a potential Mini-Me, so I sent her an email and asked her if she’d be interested in applying.  Sorry, can’t do it, I just accepted a live-in nanny job in Forrest.
Darn-it.

I kept hoping that one of these would-be nannies would drop me an email and say they’d love to babysit my children, and even though I got a few nibbles there was nobody who had the right combination of First Aid Certificate, Own Car, Clear Police Record and Available Now.  Two months later I was starting to despair, when finally Susie and Amy answered the call and came over to meet us.

It’s a curious thing, interviewing a babysitter/nanny.  On the one hand you want to find somebody who is going to take care of your kids, who will feed them healthy snacks, maybe limit their time in front of the television and perhaps remember to grab them as they run out the front door of the house as it burns down.  On the other hand, you want to find someone who will take one look at you and your children and think “yes, I do believe I would like to work here” rather than “I need to get away from this place as soon as humanly possible.”

I had perused other people’s advertisements, trying to get a sense of the kind of family they might be and how I could write my advertisement to sound a lot more attractive.  There was an ad from a guy who needed someone every other week to look after his kids.  So right away you know he’s a single dad who shares custody.   You start to picture a lovely bloke, keen to maintain a strong relationship with his children despite the sad demise of his marriage.  I wondered what happened to them; perhaps she had an affair with her personal trainer.  Whatever.  The fact is that he’s a nice bloke in a difficult situation and he needs some help with the kids after school.

And then I read the rest of his ad, and I started to get a clearer picture:
...I need you to guide and discipline my children in a manner that is in keeping with my own parenting style.  I expect my children to finish their homework and their chores and it will be your responsibility to help them achieve those goals each afternoon.  I expect you to adhere to the moral code that we live by in this house, and to support my philosophy with regards to the children’s development...
So straight away you’re thinking it wouldn’t be much fun working in that family.  He’s probably got little web-cams hidden all over the house in anticipation of catching you feeding the children non-organic fruit. 

I decided that this man’s advertisement was not going to attract the kind of nanny I was after, so I went ahead and wrote my ad to reflect my own parenting philosophy in the hopes of attracting someone who shared my moral code.  My first draft may have taken things a little too far:
Wanted: A friendly, reliable young University student looking for some part-time work as nanny to my two adorable children.  You must have your own car, a clear police record, a first aid certificate and good references.  You must support our family’s approach to parenting which is pretty much to make it up as you go along, to banish them to their rooms if the argument over the remote control turns into an actual physical brawl, to make sure you’re at least within ear-shot of the bathroom when they’re in the tub so you can hear if somebody’s head goes under, and to not start drinking the chardonnay until after 5pm. 

The thing is, I’ve always had a pretty relaxed approach to parenting.  I have long since made peace with the fact that I don’t have a clue what I’m doing, but my husband and I are a formidable team and between us we’ve managed to raise two children who, their teachers assure us, are completely normal if not a little advanced for their ages in literacy.  When interviewing prospective nannies, I almost felt under-qualified in comparison.  The two applicants we interviewed were both well into their Bachelor of Early Childhood courses at University!  Geez, if I’d known there was a course I could take before I had these kids, I would have signed up!

So I rewrote my advertisement, leaving out everything after “have good references” and changing it to a long and sappy description of how gorgeous and low-maintenance my kids are.  I got a few inquiries and that’s how we met Susie and Amy.  Both of them seemed perfect for the job and not at all put off by my grey hair or Caitlin’s sudden-onset hyperactivity.  In the end we picked Susie because she seemed a better ‘fit.’  She was a bit younger than Amy, and not quite as experienced, but I felt most comfortable with her.  She was laid back, had a dry sense of humour, seemed to have quite a lot of patience but could straight away see that Caitlin would require her undivided attention whenever she was in the kitchen... in short, Susie was more like me than Amy was, and it was comforting to think that my parenting style, if you could call it that, would prevail even in my absence.

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