The Nanny Diaries opened at the end of last week. While this might seem like a late and lame attempt to be timely, when you consider that I, like gazillions of other parents, won't see it until it is moved from the New Releases section of Netflix into its appropriate category banishment, I am really quite ahead of schedule. And although I didn't quite get around to reading the book it is based on either, I am curious to see if there is any magic reality written into the relationship of mother and nanny.
I admit, I have a vested interest since I have been a nanny -- not for a family of ridiculously wealthy self-obsessed hidden-cameraing and couture shopping folks but rather, for one of those Pacific Northwest types with the organic garden and bagel store in town. They were good parents and good people with no idea how to treat someone who was doing more than spreading cream cheese for them. My pay was mediocre, my hours were long and I regularly arrived at 7 a.m. on my bike to find that there were no diapers or milk for the day. I kept coming back because I loved the child deeply and I still wonder if the parents got that. The job ended in an unfortunate tax dispute and I dreamed about the baby for over a year.
The nanny and mommy relationship, at least as portrayed in Hollywood from Mary Poppins to The Hand That Rocks the Cradle to Uncle Buck and now to The Nanny Diaries, is dissected in a great read by The Boston Globe's Joanna Weiss. She has many thoughtful observations on the roles written to extricate this delicate relationship between caregiver by blood and caregiver by hire, including the conveniently dead mother, the over-sexualized nanny, the desexualized and thus non-threatening nanny, and (gasp) the working mother. In the end, she says (and I paraphrase), no matter how fabulous and spoonful of sugaring the nanny is, it always comes back to the kid needing her mommy. This is good and right, of course. But for the nanny, it is hard and heartbreaking. Today, I understand it a bit from both sides.
I have no idea if this movie is worth your twenty dollars in tickets and forty dollars in popcorn, sodas and sugary goodness you wouldn't dare let your kids eat in the theater, or if it will be worth the four bucks it costs to rent and the eight dollars in overdue fees I will inevitably fork over. But I do know that it is good to see and imagine and write and discuss the relationship between mother and nanny more and not leave it to silver screen stereotypes to define.
