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

Once, a first-generation college student and, now, just a toddler’s personal assistant.

I’ve clawed my way out of a chaotic childhood.

The fact that I somehow ended up in this place—with this job—is hard for me to comprehend.

For these women education is not an economic necessity, it’s a social status.

wanted a career, not just a job, and this hardly qualifies as either.

Was little Katherine a uniquely fast learner or is this what you get for five hundred dollars an hour? I begin to think maybe I hadn’t been slow after all. Maybe I had just been born into the wrong class.

But it’s different for me. The more I take, the more I must not have. The more they take, the more they will have.

wonder for a moment if that’s true. Perhaps if Elissa and I work hard enough, make enough, we too could one day be real guests at this event. But most of the guests here are under age twelve. They didn’t earn a spot on this guest list. They were born on it.

for someone whose family often relied on dollar scratch tickets to afford gas, it feels like I’ve amassed a small fortune.

I’m finding is that there is a much bigger world out there than the one I grew up in.

Where I come from, a yard with dozens of cars in it screams poverty.

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.

The thing I would later come to realize is that women needing validation from men is a universal problem that affects every class.

women, regardless of their age, race, or tax bracket, were overshadowed by the men they were associated with.

Americans supported working wives, so long as the women still did all the things they’d done when they didn’t work.

Women in America were fucked. Poor, minority, and uneducated women in America were doubly fucked.

My father had done what many dream of doing. He’d jumped social classes.

privileged people are still just people.

I’m surrounded by families with more money than they could ever need, and they’re being served by people who are likely just as capable as them but who simply weren’t fortunate enough to inherit millions at birth. I’m starting to question if I’ll ever be a writer or, better yet, if I’m good enough to be anything of significance.

Jumping classes is one thing: navigating the new one is something entirely different.

I had been under the impression that in America college was for anyone, but student debt was nothing more than tax on the poor.

I may have been in a place of high class, but I brought my classless roots with me.

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

the art of being the poorest person in a wealthy room.

this is what growing up without safety nets creates: someone scrappy.

My father had come from a family and a neighborhood that was plagued with substance abuse and mental illness, but these are the exact places where the subject is most taboo. In Manhattan, having a therapist is a mark of success, wealth, and awareness. In a poor neighborhood, it can mean only one thing: you’re crazy.

What I could not understand was that, similar to my father, the people posting these things were the same ones who would have benefited most from Hillary’s policies. I told my New York friends it made absolutely no sense to me, but that was a lie because just a few years earlier I would have been echoing them.

To them, I was a traitor. A stuck-up city brat who had become too materialistic to remember where she came from. To me, they were closed-minded, unaware, and uninformed. Everything I was trying to run from.

I scrolled through comments that generalized the very people who had raised me, noticing repeated words: racist, stupid, incompetent, idiots.

The thing was, I had never felt like I deserved to be here, and I was beginning to realize I probably never would.

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

It was the first time I lived somewhere that we could be proud of.

People say that I am living proof you can climb the class ladder, do anything, become anyone.