Taboo
Why West Indian sitters never use the word "nanny."
by Victoria G. Brown
August 27, 2007
Every magazine I open these days has an article about nannies. In the last two
years, I've read about the good nanny, the thieving nanny, the shared nanny,
the nanny from heaven and the one from hell. I love my nanny, I fear my nanny.
Introducing the manny. Nanny, nanny, nanny.
The word makes my skin crawl. And I'm not alone. When I use it recently
on the playground, Marcia, a babysitter, starts shaking her head like she
just tasted something sour. She holds up her hand and says to me, "That
word sets my teeth on edge. I can't even stand to hear it said out loud." Another
sitter, Susan, who like me is from Trinidad, looks at me like I've forgotten
my native tongue. "Are you crazy?" she wants to know, "Na— I
can't bring myself to say the word. Don't you know what a nanny
is?"
Of course I know. In Trinidad, "nanny" is slang for vagina.
When I was working as a caregiver, I chafed anytime I was referred to
as that, which was often and almost always with a bit of smug satisfaction.
In the early 1990s, I was a bona fide full-time, live-in, stroller-wielding
New York nanny, familiar with slides and sprinklers from Union Square to Carl
Schultz Park and familiar, too, with both the mommies and the momzillas. I did
this work for about four years before making the decision to get off the nanny
track and pursue my own version of the American dream — which didn't
include caring for other people's children.Parents don't know that they're referring to the women charged with the care of their children as sexual organs.
Now I'm a college lecturer and have my own daughter, Helen. We live
in the heart of Breeder Brooklyn (which, according to my own unscientific study,
is populated by more nannies than any other place on earth), and at times I
feel like a double agent, playing a kind of social hopscotch between the other
moms and the mostly West Indian women who mind children for a living. The two
groups eye each other warily.
With my mom friends, I talk about retuning to work and husbands and second
children and daycare versus nannies. With the caregivers, our talk is of moving
back to the Caribbean, husbands, spoiled children and their even more spoiled
parents, who antagonize their employees in myriad ways, including repeated
use of the na-word. The two groups are so separate and in many ways, so distrustful
of each other, that it's not surprising that the parents don't
know that they're referring to the women charged with the care of their
children as sexual organs.
©2007 Victoria G. Brown and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Victoria G. Brown writes and teaches English at a local community college. She's finishing up her first novel (yay!), and lives in
Brooklyn with her husband and their absolutely amazing, what's-a-
nap daughter, Ms. Helen Dekker 'coco-bean' Thornberry. |
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