Wanted: Toddler's Personal Assistant: How Nannying for the 1% Taught Me about the Myths of Equality, Motherhood, and Upward Mobility in America

by Stephanie Kiser

The fact was, Americans supported working wives, so long as the women still did all the things they’d done when they didn’t work. By the time I was an adult on the Upper East Side, I’d find that the evidence spoke for itself. Women in America were fucked. Poor, minority, and uneducated women in America were doubly fucked.

I realize then that Sasha’s type of motherhood requires a selflessness that I fear I don’t possess. It makes me think that perhaps the responsibility of having a child is not for everyone.

I made the decision to go to college so that I would not find myself like my parents: uneducated, broke, and out of options, but I was just as trapped as they ever were. Our debts were proportionate to the money we earned, but I was no better off than they had ever been.

Giving a student a scholarship doesn’t even the playing field; it simply puts them in the same arena.

The first child seems so dependent and fragile that it’s hard to believe they will ever be anything other than terrifying. Then comes the second child, and maybe a third, and suddenly you have this acute understanding that it is unlikely you will kill the children. In fact, it’s far more likely that the children are going to kill you.

Was I actually doing well, or had people who had far more than I did just tricked me into believing I was?

What Devon was experiencing was the same as what my mother experienced throughout my childhood: pressure, demands, and, above all, unequal parenting responsibilities. Women of all shapes, sizes, and colors had it harder when it came to domestic life than men. COVID-19 did not start this. It brought it to light.

While their bosses hid in their country estates, these women went back to their apartments in Harlem and Flushing and wondered how they’d survive. Some employers, like Sasha, chose to leave their help behind to stay with their own families when they fled. They paid them every cent of their salary anyway. But there weren’t enough Sashas. There never are.

growing up is hard, and accepting people for who they are is even harder.

Why do people with so much often choose to treat those who work for them as so little?

Respect. I had been so desperate for people to give me that, but how could I seek it from others when I refused to give it to myself?

Life for me had been like starting a game of Monopoly with half a dice and five one-dollar bills. My opponents, like the ones whose homes I had worked in, had begun the game with six properties and a hundred thousand dollars. The only miracle for them would be if they didn’t end up successful.