You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again: The True Adventures of a Hollywood Nanny (15 page)

I crossed the room toward him and the nurse said, “No, no. We’re not done yet. He was crying and I wanted to bring him out here to let him know you were still here. We have some more tests to do, and the
doctor wants to admit him.” And with that, she walked back through the swinging doors with Brandon’s cries echoing behind her. I tried to pull myself together as I sat in a heap, my face in my hands and Grandpa Ovitz’s arm around me.

I decided to call my old friend Mandie from nanny school. I’d probably be waking her up in Montana, but I really needed to hear a friendly voice. She did her best to reassure me that everything would turn out all right.

Grandpa Ovitz and I waited for what seemed like hours until another nurse came and escorted us to the children’s ICU ward. When we walked in, Brandon’s foot was all bandaged up with IV tubing, and he was lying in a horrible, cold, cagelike steel crib. The poor, sweet little guy. I asked if I could hold him, and they said yes, as long as I was careful with the IV line.

By then it was way past midnight, and I told Grandpa Ovitz to go home and wait for Michael and Judy; I would stay the night. I couldn’t stand the thought of little Brandon being alone in that awful place, in that awful crib, even if he fell asleep, which he didn’t do for another two hours. I held him on my lap with his chest on mine for the rest of the night.

I woke up at five in the morning, stiff from scrunching up in a chair like a cat curled on a small stool. I think I’d slept a couple of hours. Brandon was still sleeping on me when his parents arrived around eight o’clock. Judy rushed up to me and kneeled down in front of my chair, taking Brandon from my arms. I felt so bad for her because Brandon immediately squirmed around and began crying and reaching for me. Judy looked into my eyes with an expression I’d never seen on her face and gently handed him to me.

I wanted to cry all over again.

“Oh look, he wants Suzy,” she said quietly to Michael. “Why don’t you go home, Suzy. It’s been a long night, and we can stay with him now.” Her voice was gentle.

I rested my cheek on Brandon’s soft hair and cradled him against me until he stopped whimpering. When I looked up, she was still looking at us with soft eyes. In that moment, a wave of genuine compassion
and empathy filled the space between us. And it came from both directions.

Although I did not want to leave him, I knew I needed a break. I went home and slept most of the day. Judy said Carmen and Delma could watch the kids, and I was grateful. I had a new appreciation for being in my own bed. When I called the hospital and checked in around 5
P.M.
, Judy said they hadn’t gotten the test results back yet and that she had hired a private duty nurse to come in and take care of Brandon. My heart sank when she said that he had been crying a lot because he wasn’t used to the nurse.

The next morning when I returned to the hospital, I finally heard some good news: the test results showed that Brandon did not have viral meningitis, only a bacterial infection. His temperature had gone back down to 99 degrees, and they were getting ready to discharge him.

When I got home, there was a large bouquet of beautiful flowers sitting on the foyer table with a card addressed to me. I opened it immediately. It was from Mandie.

For about the fourth time in two days I broke down in tears. At about that moment, Michael came in and saw me sitting at the foot of the stairs, holding the flowers in my hands.

“Who are the flowers from?” he asked nonchalantly.

“From my friend Mandie.” I sniffed.

“What for?” His face showed no emotion.

“Because I’ve been having a hard time about Brandon,” I mumbled. I was actually a little embarrassed that I was so upset and he seemed to be taking it in stride.

Michael continued to look at me blankly.

Hello! This was traumatic for me!
I wanted to shout. Didn’t he get it? I loved his son. I couldn’t believe he didn’t know that this was difficult and that I had been very scared.

But he didn’t seem to understand. He paid me to take care of his kids but not to fall in love with them.

I did that on my own.

I’d been working for only a few days when Judy had commented, “I hate it when the baby wants to go to the nanny instead of me.” In the ensuing months, though, I saw that she managed to let this go. It seemed so sad to me that Judy accepted such events as the price one had to pay for having a nanny. She must have believed she had to give up some of the joys of motherhood just because she had the resources to hire help.

But some things she didn’t want to give up. One morning I was feeding Brandon rice cereal after the older kids had gone to school. Judy walked in, took one long glare, hands on hips, and said, “What are you doing?”

I attempted an answer. “Uh, I’m feeding—”

“Don’t you think I should be informed that he is eating solid foods?”

I swallowed. “Um, when we were at the pediatrician’s office the doctor said Brandon could start on rice cereal mixed with formula.”

“Well, whatever. I am the one that should be feeding him his first bite.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, handing her the plastic bowl and baby spoon. I was scared to tell her that I’d been following the pediatrician’s orders for the past two weeks. Didn’t she already know that? But she was right, a
mother should be the one to give her child the first bite. I left the kitchen silently, feeling incredibly awkward, and went upstairs to change Brandon’s crib sheets.

When I came down the stairs with a basket of dirty laundry, I saw Judy’s Mercedes leave the driveway. I walked into the kitchen and found Carmen wiping cereal from Brandon’s face.

Did Judy feel left out of Brandon’s daily schedule? I didn’t know what to do. I knew she wanted to be involved in Brandon’s life, but I had always been responsible for feeding him. Maybe I didn’t see my job description the same way my employer did.

I sure could have used a Standard Operating Procedures manual.

I knew that Amanda and Joshua, like many other children with live-in nannies, had already experienced their fair share of caretakers before I arrived on the scene—the image of Leticia waiting in front of the gate flashed in my mind. By the time I joined the household, they had learned to protect their feelings: they didn’t want to lose another friend, so they did their best not to make one. But I hadn’t been prepared for them to treat the time they spent with me like a dentist visit. The kids I babysat in Oregon had seen it more like a trip to a toy store.

I knew Joshua and Amanda could be affectionate; I had seen their excitement when Kristi visited. Once I decided to kill two birds with one stone—I tried to emphasize the fun in making new friends like Kristi by getting the kids involved in an after-school activity. As a babysitter, games and art projects were my stock in trade, but I had found it hard to entice these kids away from the TV and the huge selection of videos. I set up the table in the family room with construction paper, glue, and glitter. They designed cards for Kristi while I wrote their words down in a letter. Despite a few skirmishes over the glitter, they had a great time. Josh loved to make rainbows, and Amanda lost herself in the glue sticks.

It wasn’t unprecedented for Amanda to have such fun. Sometimes we got along famously, dressing up in costumes as Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, or princesses and doing silly dances to Raffi tunes. We played “telephone” and “baby” and “guess what I think.” She was an adorable moppet. But often, right in the midst of our fun, some tiny thing would set her off. She wanted the kind of crackers she’d had at school; she
wanted to watch
Cinderella
instead of playing on the swings; she couldn’t find her Malibu Barbie. She would then scream and wail and throw things, both hers and mine, long past the point of exhaustion.

One day Amanda spun out of control because her mommy was leaving. She flew out of the house after her mother, kicking and screaming. She was three; she knew what she wanted, and she wasn’t getting it. There was no end to her frustration and fury. She screamed, she kicked, she cried huge gulping sobs. I started to carry her to her room, but she wiggled right out of my arms and almost fell down the stairs. I think she was scared that she wasn’t able to control her angry little body, and neither could I. So we just stopped there on the steps, and she sobbed more quietly. I finally sat down below her and looked up at her sad, wet face.

“Amanda, I am so sorry you’re upset and having such a hard time,” I told her. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said, for the very first time, and plopped her heaving body onto my lap.

A turning point? I hoped so. Amanda soon announced that she wished I was her mommy. I could have taken it as a sweet compliment if it hadn’t been during dinner when her actual mother was sitting
next
to me. I was mortified, and I figured Judy was, too. It was bad enough that Judy thought Brandon preferred me, but Amanda had
actually said it out loud
. NNI hadn’t provided a script for this situation. The best thing I could come up with was, “Oh, honey, I’m too young to be your mommy.”

“Amanda, it probably makes Suzy feel good to have you say that,” Judy said.

I almost fell off my chair.

This from the woman who treated me like an irritating pest. Her difficulty setting limits for the kids had led me to believe that she was simply lacking in parenting knowledge, but just when I stopped expecting anything from her, she would respond to her children or me in such a wise and caring way that I got my hopes up all over again.

But Joshua still wasn’t taking kindly to me, and he continued to be suspicious of my ability to actually care for him. I wished he would let down his guard and see that I was on his side. There were flashes of
hope; our best times seemed to happen each day just after he got out of kindergarten. We quickly worked out an understanding that I would not tolerate hearing him describe his classmates as stupid, mean, or ugly. Instead, we agreed to call them “characters,” with much lifting of the eyebrows, as in, “Suzy, Chantel was a real character today. She broke the wheel in the hamster’s cage.” Or, “Tayla dropped my project. What a character!” The way he’d ham it up was hilarious, and he loved being in on a joke.

He was an extremely bright child and a tightly wound perfectionist, very much like his father. When we sat down together to go over his homework, which he undertook with great concentration, he would get extremely frustrated over little mistakes, rubbing holes through the paper with his eraser. It couldn’t be easy living that way.

And Joshua was just old enough to begin emulating some of his father’s behavior, something he was doing more and more. When Michael wasn’t home, Joshua seemed to think he could control everyone in the house. I could see that his actions turned off all the employees—no wonder, considering that he threatened to have the staff fired, me included, on a weekly basis. It was hard to deal with his outwardly difficult and hostile behavior, even though I understood that he was just a six-year-old boy determined not to let anyone new into his life. Underneath the obnoxious protective layers, he was a loving child. That was obvious, given his devotion to Michael’s mother, “Nana.”

When we talked about her, Joshua corrected me regularly, telling me that I was not saying her name correctly. “It is ‘Non-uh,’ not ‘Nann-uh,’ ” he would say, rolling his eyes, asking why I couldn’t get it right. When this happened, I was more interested than irritated. At least he felt unreserved love for someone in his life other than his parents. I wished he would trust me, but I didn’t know how to make that happen. I tried to show him that I cared about him every day, especially because I knew the rest of the staff just tolerated him.

More than once when he was going off on one of his tirades, calling everyone on the staff “morons,” I remember Carmen saying to him in Spanish something that sounded like,
“Como say chingas.”
When Judy asked Delma what that meant, Delma told her, “Go in peace, little one.” The actual translation was, to put it mildly, a little harsher. But Judy was
never the wiser, and Carmen used it often, always with a peaceful smile on her face. This was her private little act of revenge for all the times Josh said she was stupid and a moron or that he didn’t have to listen to what she said.

He didn’t like listening to any of us, really. One day, when I was helping Joshua get dressed, he threw a fit because he couldn’t find his blue socks. He started his usual rant—calling Delma a stupid idiot moron and saying it was all her fault. I told him that it was
not
okay to call people names. Just then Judy walked into the bedroom, “Well, where are his socks? Those girls are always losing things and costing me money.” So much for trying to give a lesson on being respectful of adults.

But
my
lessons continued.

One morning I stepped out the front door as Judy was getting ready to take him to school. He was peeing on a tree.
Peeing on a tree
. Waiting until he’d finished his business, I approached him and reprimanded him for his behavior. I didn’t think twice about it. After all, he was in full public view in the front yard, which faced the street. “Mom said it’s okay!” he yelled back at me while trying to wipe the stray drops of urine from his loafers.

“I doubt your mother would want to see you peeing in the front yard,” I replied.

“Oh yeah, you don’t know anything! My mom said I could, and my mom is in charge of you,” he shrieked emphatically. “Annnnnddddddd … I can have my daddy fire you if I want to!” Again with the firing.