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

Sasha pulls her daughter into an adoring hug before asking her about her day. It’s strange, constantly witnessing a family’s most intimate moments, and the scene often makes me long for moments in my own life that do not exist.

The more money I’m exposed to, the more I want, and the more I make, the more I spend. I’m on a financial Ferris wheel and the only thing I know for sure is that I am no longer the ten-year-old once easily pleased with a single pair of new Skechers. New York City is a playground, each bar a slide I have to try, every restaurant a swing waiting for me to take a seat.

A few years later, my Papa left my grandmother for another woman, and my aunt’s husband became schizophrenic. In each case I watched women I thought were strong morph into shells of themselves, and the lessons I took from all this were complicated: you could not trust a man to be there indefinitely, and you couldn’t allow yourself to need one. My grandmother was the strongest woman I had known until a man took her money, her pride, and her heart. The thing I would later come to realize is that women needing validation from men is a universal problem that affects every class.

He lands with a thud into the coffee table. I do my best to soothe him, but he wants his mother. In moments of extreme stress, Hunter always wants his mother. It’s a feeling I wish I could identify with.

If a student couldn’t afford the tuition, chances were they couldn’t afford the two-hundred-dollar calculator. Giving a student a scholarship doesn’t even the playing field; it simply puts them in the same arena.

My behavior has been self-sabotaging, and before I can admit it to anyone else, I need to admit it to myself. So I do. The only way over pain is through it. I stop relying on things that momentarily numb my emotions, and I face them head-on. This feels awful, later difficult, and then eventually so simple, I wish I had the sense to have done it this way all along.

It takes every last bit of my hope for me to reach this conclusion, and I am not sure where the inner voice comes from, telling me I need to pick myself back up. It feels like a supernatural phenomenon, this sudden clarity, but maybe there is nothing miraculous about it. Maybe this is what growing up without safety nets creates: someone scrappy. Just like I had seen my father do repeatedly throughout my childhood, I get knocked down and then get back up. My childhood was a how-to guide on ways to keep going. The one thing I had that most of the children on the Upper East Side would never have was grit.

Over her few months here I had observed her with unwavering interest. Her confidence, her candor, her ability to demand respect and boundaries without hesitation. Initially, I believed the reason for Esther’s arrogance was cliché: she’s just a bitch. But after weeks of watching her, I come to the conclusion that Esther isn’t a shrew at all. She sees her place in this world in a way I have yet to see myself. Esther might be hired to help, but she treats herself like an equal, and as a result, everyone else treats her that way too.

I nail the rest of the brief interview using an important lesson I learned at Lincoln School for Girls: how to convince a rich person I belong in the same room as them.

Web. In many ways, I have made it, but I’m still paying a thousand dollars a month on a student loan that never seems to get smaller. I’ll be questioning if I can afford children because I’d opted to have a good education. I have a lingering bill from a hospital emergency visit from a period when I couldn’t access healthcare, despite how much and how hard I worked.