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

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.

On my walk across the yard, I look up at the cold April sky and wonder when it happened: when did so much of my life become no longer mine?

Elissa changed Katherine’s diapers, bandaged her scraped knees, and told her fairy tales until she drifted off to sleep. She missed precious moments with her own family in order to take care of someone else’s.

Maybe we would never have the bond I wished for, but her heart was there and her intentions were good. Her life hadn’t always been easy, and for the first time, I thought maybe she’d been doing the best she could all along. I felt sorry and ashamed that it had taken me this long to see that, but growing up is hard, and accepting people for who they are is even harder.

“I love you.” I love him too, but it doesn’t feel like enough.

I realized that’s how I’d felt throughout my entire twenties. Like I was doing things wrong. Maybe that’s how everyone feels.

Perhaps there was no “right way” to do things. Maybe I was doing okay after all.

When my time as a nanny concludes, there won’t be a big payoff. No higher salaries. No congratulatory celebrations. It’ll mean nothing. It will just be over.

It turned out that being an executive assistant was a lot like being a nanny. It required incredible amounts of patience, vigilance, and an abandonment of any sort of ego.

in order to be happy, I’d need a new job. I would have to make a little less to feel like more.

If wealth has taught me anything, it is that friendship holds more value than money ever will and that dignity has no price tag. The only thing truly precious in this world is having people who love you, and success and happiness often have no correlation whatsoever. If I know one thing, it is that the old saying rings true: Money can’t buy happiness. Though I can absolutely see why you’d be tempted to believe that it can get you pretty darned close.