On Accepting Help (Not The Shame That Comes with It)
The story of a French au pair, an Australian nanny in New York, and the guy at the farmers' market.
“There are only four kinds of people in the world: Those who have been caregivers. Those who are currently caregivers. Those who will be caregivers, and those who will need a caregiver.” – Rosalyn Carter
Last December we knew it would be an adventure. We had invited a teenage stranger from France to live with us for a year, and she would be arriving in January. As our au pair, she would be helping us at home with the kids, doing their laundry, unloading the dishwasher, tidying up and taking the baby out for walks in the stroller while I worked. With extended family in France and my parents spending more and more time there, I loved the idea of having a native French speaker in the house, imagining that I would be able to practice my rough-around-the-edges French, eat blue cheese with her1 and that perhaps the kids would learn a few French words too: “bonjour, au revoir, de rien.”
Walking around the farmers market one Sunday before she arrived, I bumped into a parent of one of Jules’ preschool friends. He asked how everything was going. “Great!” I responded, “we have an au pair from France joining us soon.” I expected the people I told this to would be curious, interested, possibly inspired, maybe at the very least courteous. But instead he laughed and said, “oh wow, you just had the baby and now ‘here you go!’”, and mimed handing her off to someone else. Every pore in my body contracted like the aperture on a camera. I laughed along with he and my husband, brushing it off whilst shoving strong feelings deeper into my chest, eventually going our separate ways and deciding never to talk to him again. It was an incredibly insensitive comment, and it got me wondering, why is accepting help so taboo?
When I lived in Manhattan in my early twenties, I had been granted an O1 modeling visa, but just as soon after, I quit. This meant I couldn’t legally work unless it was for cash. I didn’t mind, I just wanted to be in America. To earn my keep I had two options: waitressing, or nannying. Luckily in Manhattan, there are an infinite number of both restaurants and parents in constant rotation. I didn’t know how to “get” a job outside of my modeling agents, so my boyfriend at the time told me to “just print my resume” and take it by hand to the local cafes. I found this to be absolutely tortuous, but I did it anyway. I talked to the manager of a small breakfast cafe on 2nd Avenue between 4th and 5th I frequented regularly, and after a quick conversation he pointed me across the street to a Moroccan restaurant called Nomad.
I worked there for six weeks, making a total of $800 in mostly twenty, five and one dollar bills. I couldn’t stand the job, though the chef was very sweet to me, and the regular who stayed late at large tables with the owner always said things that took my breath away. "You’re a writer, aren’t you.” (I could never figure out how to hold all the plates in one arm like the pros did.) “How do you know?” I asked, surprised. “Your fingers,” he said. “You have the hands of a writer.” I felt like Santiago in The Alchemist and he was the King at the fountain, dressed in everyday clothes concealing a bejeweled breastplate. Eventually I realized waitressing was not for me. I got things wrong, made mistakes, made customers wait and lost money. The night I quit, one of the other waiters, about a foot shorter than me, shoved his tongue into my mouth outside the subway entrance late at night and I decided I’d never work in that environment again.
Instead, I became a nanny.
After sifting through Craigslist ads in our exposed-brick apartment on Rivington, I found an Australian family who needed help. I met them on a Sunday and their oldest girl chose me because I was a writer (she was seven and loved writing too.) I began work the next day, sitting on the floor with the three year old and her plastic unicorns while mom worked in the nearby home office. I made pre-packaged rice pilafs and tofu for dinner. I picked the girls up from school and we rode scooters to the playground. I ran the bath and played Barbies and read them bedtime stories in the dark. I lay on the floor beside their beds and told them stories from my imagination, stories they loved more than anything because I’d create strange, fantastical, nonsensical worlds that made them laugh and me cry with surprise at the magic pouring out of me.
I was 23 and kept working with them for several years, eventually becoming their Dad’s personal assistant and travel coordinator, a job I continued after getting married, quitting only a few weeks before giving birth to my own son. I still follow the girls on Instagram, surprised at how quickly they have grown, and at the strange naivety of my brain in thinking they would always be three feet tall dancing to Katy Perry in a living room in Greenwich. I loved being a nanny, and it was utterly exhausting. At the end of my working day I’d ride my bike home to Chinatown and spend the night reading or watching Fellini films before starting again tomorrow. I’d write in the mornings, and be a proxy-parent in the afternoons. It worked. We had fun. I’ll never forget them.
I understand what it takes to be a nanny, and I understand what it takes to be the sole caregiver of ones’ own children. It’s a formidable role, and for some reason we glorify the idea that mothers can do everything without cost: that we can be fully present, integrated parents and engage in meaningful work without harm to our physical, mental or marital health. I know in fact that we can’t have it all, but I believe that the pressure and expectation to do so hurts parents by keeping them in a people-pleasing paradox that deprives them not only of time, but nourishment, food, connection to self and others, and perhaps most importantly, dignity.
When my ten year old son was a toddler, I stayed at home and became mildly unhinged. My husband would commute to LA on Monday morning and return Thursday night. I wasn’t writing. I wasn’t eating enough. I couldn’t get my son to sleep without my nipple in his mouth. I was exhausted and not myself, and to be honest it’s a miracle we actually survived that season. So many don’t. So when the choice came to invite support into our home this second time around, we didn’t hesitate to explore options.
To give you a sense of the financial investment of a nanny or an au pair, we live in Southern California where the cost of living is incredibly high:
Most nannies charge $25-40/ hr, which meant to have full time help (8 hours a day, 40 hours a week), was going to cost us anywhere from $1000-1600 per week.
That's $4000-$6400 a month, which is more than we pay for our three mortgages combined.
By contrast, an au pair, who comes to live with you in your home as a family member, receives a stipend for food and housing, which ends up being about a 40% reduction of the local wage.
We would pay the au pair agency just north of $9000 to sort out her visa, fly her to New York and house her whilst she participated in a three day au pair training, and then we would pay her just $200 weekly, for up to 10 hours per day, or 45 hours of support each week.
That’s $800 a month, $9600 per year and a total of $18,600 for the au pair (including agency costs) as opposed to a whopping $48,000 per year (at the low end!) for a local nanny doing the same hours.
Our future au pair would also be living with us, sharing meal times and going on outings with us. She would be someone who cares for our children with the same love and affection that an older sister or an aunt would. She would be able to watch the kids at the drop of a stuffed animal if I had to run out to pick up tomato paste, or meet a friend last minute. She would receive health care through the agency, a phone that we would provide, access to our car and an immersive cultural exchange experience that would support her in learning a new language. Our kids would learn about other cultures and languages (hopefully realizing that the world doesn’t, in fact, revolve around the U.S.), expanding their horizons and giving them family friends they could even one day visit abroad.
The benefits were so clear to me, though as we started talking about this option, some people expressed concerns:
“I just couldn’t have someone else living in my house.” I get it. It can feel odd at first. But I promise you, the most incredible relationship starts to develop. For the 18 year old, I was like a surrogate mother, but we were also colleagues. We were a team who knew how to take care of this particular domestic domain together. Our au pair enjoyed her personal space, but would jump to join us for movie night. She was always there when we needed her.
“I don’t love the idea of having to cook for another person!” one of my relatives said recently, to which I responded, “Well, you’re cooking for a bunch of people right now, aren’t you?” The cooking isn’t so bad. And that’s coming from someone who had to make food for an 18 year old vegetarian, an adult male carnivore, a 9 year old who doesn’t like pasta or chicken, and a toddler who throws most things on the floor. Just add an extra cup of rice to the pot.
“I would totally do this but I don’t have the space,” some people have said. Listen, I shared a bedroom with my sister until I was 17, your kids can share a bedroom and you can give the au pair the third room if you have one. There are so many ways to do this! The only requirements are that she has to have a door that closes and a window that opens.
So what’s the greatest benefit?
At the end of the day, I know that when I’m writing, working, sleeping well and doing what I love, I’m a thousand percent better parent. No question about it. I’m more authentically me, because I have a co-pilot during the hours my husband is at work, someone to help with the million tiny things that parenting and domesticity involves. I don’t have to justify or prove or hide or feel shame about taking a few hours away from my kids so I can recharge and feel like myself. I think it’s absurd that mothers are made to feel like failures or that they don’t love their kids if they decide to spend some time apart from them. Yes, guy at the farmers market, even much longed for IVF babies. If my fertility journey taught me anything, it’s that I can love myself despite immense challenges to my self-worth.
I love my children more than anything.
But I also love myself enough to take care of me.
Our au pair arrived on January 13th and we loved having her here. My son learned one French word, “epine” which means thorn.2 Marie Lou (aka ‘Malou’) was 18 and had left a boyfriend and her high school friends back at home before becoming incredibly homesick. She decided the program wasn’t for her3, leaving after three months (just two weeks ago), but even though her time here was short, life was radically different with her in the house. I was calmer, more integrated, happier, and more present with my children. I could go and see Freya any time I wanted or take Jules to the science museum, but I could also quite happily hide away in my office to work on the myriad responsibilities and commitments I had agreed to and enjoyed.
The morning Malou left for LAX, Jules and I sat on the couch by the window holding each other and sobbed. Her room was empty, the bed stripped bare. The welcome sign we’d made for her was still tacked to the door and there was a strange hole in the house. It took us a moment to adjust to having an au pair, but it also took us a moment to adjust to not having her. The empty place at the table. The quiet darkness of her room. On my first few days solo, I felt like I could handle it all without support, feeling superhumanly capable. But then my work load started piling up in psychic and tangible laundry baskets and I felt like I couldn’t breathe deeply enough.
Our new au pair arrives sometime in May. She’s 26 and from Argentina. It will be another rollercoaster to welcome someone new to our home, to get to know her energy and habits and communication style and to practice our Spanish. I wonder if she’ll set the table like Malou did, if she’ll take Freya to the beach or help Jules with his cookie company. She will travel with us and share Thanksgiving, Christmas and our birthdays. This time I thought about not telling people about our au pair experiences, just in case I ran into another farmers market-type guy, but that felt like more shame speaking. Now, I’m going to let people know that yes, I do have help, and no, I couldn’t be who I am or do what I love without it.
I know the kind of parent I want to be. She’s calm and happy. She loves her work and welcomes people from all over the world. She collaborates and communicates clearly. She goes on date nights with her husband, puts her children to bed and down for naps, is with them at bedtimes and first thing in the morning. She’s generous, but she’s also shameless. Did I know a woman like this growing up? Mostly I saw women who were stretched to breaking point and burning the candle at both ends. Do I want this for my daughter? I want her to see a woman doing what she loves, resting when she’s tired, honoring her artist self and running a business. But also, I want to be there kissing her before sleep, playing with her plastic unicorn toys and telling her unthinkably courageous stories so wild they make her laugh and us both cry over all the magic pouring out.
I know what it takes to be a caregiver, and I know what it takes to need it. Both beautiful sides of the same coin. Have you ever had an au pair, been an au pair (or a nanny) or thought about having an au pair? What would make you want to, and what would stop you?
I’d love to hear from you!
I learned quite quickly that my French au pair did not, in fact, like blue cheese. Or mussels, or oysters. Or drink red wine with dinner. She did however like anything Japanese or Italian.
Every night we’d share our ‘rose and thorn’ with each other. Marie Lou’s thorn was always her homesickness.
Loved this story, Sophie ❤️ I used to nanny 3 girls fulltime in Austin and absolutely loved it, reading your story made me think of how precious that time was and how I even miss it sometimes. I genuinely hope to hear about how the new girl from Argentina brings beauty into the home of your family.