I’m gearing up to teach again in the fall. I’ve gotten desk copies of books, handed in my book order form, and filled out the W2s. Next week I have to get my parking pass and faculty ID. I also have to hire people to watch my kid and to pick up some of the slack with the housecleaning.

Let’s get this straight. I have to hire two people, so that I can do one job that will probably not cover the expenses of hiring those two people. Makes sense, right? So, the housecleaner probably won’t happen, but the babysitter is a must.

I’ve got to get this all set up now, so that Ian doesn’t have any problems in September. Daycare is out of the question, because Ian can’t deal with too many people in tight spaces. We tried at-home daycare last week, but it was a disaster. He cried for two hours, and the woman made me take him home. On Friday, I put up signs at ShopRite and Starbucks for a babysitter in my home. I have someone coming for an interview at 1:30. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

I am not thrilled with returning to the babysitter/nanny lifestyle. In the past, I had a couple different women watch the kids when I was adjuncting. It was only for a handful of hours, but the whole arrangement made me very uncomfortable. It’s not like an office job, where you are delegating some paperwork and where there are very public and well known rules to moderate behavior. There’s all the fuzzy questions. Do you feed the babysitter lunch? Do you pay her during holidays? Is she allowed to yell at your kid? What if she asks for money? How do you fire someone? What if you haven’t left for work yet, and the baby poops? Who changes the diaper?

I suppose some people are more used to these servant arrangements. Belle said that her family had long employed staff, so having a maid wasn’t such a foreign experience.

My family is Northern, urban, immigrant. We have never hired servants. In fact, my family was often serving rich people as cashiers, garment specialists, and waiters. They had nothing but contempt for the objects of their labors. My grandfather, the Maitre D at the Waldorf, would tell stories about the cheap, the stupid, and the picky. He hated them, but served them with a smile. After he returned to the kitchen, the staff would spit on the steaks. They would pick up chicken that had fallen to the ground and re-plate it. How odd that his granddaughter would now be the one giving orders.

In June’s Atlantic Monthly, Flanagan comes back to the nannies. In the article, she explains to the critics how she came to employ a nanny and her own history with being a sitter. She discusses a new nanny tell all book, You’ll Never Nanny in This Town Again : The True Adventures of a Hollywood Nanny.

Flanagan said the servant problem, formerly only a rich person problem, has now become a middle-class problem, too. After she became pregnant with twins, everyone advised her to get help.

At the time, I was living in a cramped duplex apartment beside a construction site, here in Los Angeles, lacking many of the accoutrements — dishwasher, dining room, off-street parking — that normally signify middle-class life. Until fairly recently in America, this would not have been considered an ideal time to begin employing servants. But the vast and apparently untrammeled arrival of immigrants to this country—combined with our yawning need for child care and the stubborn human tendency toward laziness—has allowed a massive new servant culture to spring up in less than two decades. It is a culture in which people with no experience of having staff in their homes are becoming the employers of small retinues of servants—the nanny, the once-a-week housecleaner, the cheap “mow, blow, and go” gardener with his truckload of day workers. It is also a culture in which the servants oftentimes have no previous experience of a life in service (many were factory or agricultural workers in their native countries; many are educated). They are, moreover, cowed not only by their employer’s power over them but also by the fact that they are quite often in this country illegally and thus loath to make waves. It is a system that lends itself to extraordinary acts of generosity: I have known women who have immediately taken a deep interest in the lives and families of their nannies, finding jobs for husbands, straightening out bewildering immigration problems, sending children to their own pediatricians—and paying the bill—when a troubling symptom turns up. And, too, it is a system rife with the possibility of exploitation and virtual human bondage: all over this city there are upper-middle-class households in which a back bedroom is occupied by a female illegal immigrant who is terrified of being deported, who is paid almost nothing, and who is on duty twenty-four hours a day.

In the course of the article, Flanagan gives certain rules to guiding a successful nanny/family relationship. Don’t hire them too young. They shouldn’t eat separately from the family. They should get paid during holidays. Belle was also full of advice last week.

Ultimately, Flanagan is pessimistic about whether the nanny thing can ever work out, even if one has the best of manners.

In hiring a nanny, they’re asking—if you’ll forgive the pun—a relative stranger to love (and tolerate, and indulge, and tend to) their children as the children’s own mother or father would, for money. In short, they’re trying to purchase what ultimately can’t be bought. Furthermore, this love train is expected to travel only select routes. For instance, how many parents—while asking an employee to love them and their children like family—can promise the employee that they will be there for her in her old age, just as they would be for actual family members?

These are tricky waters that I’m wading into. I would much rather do everything myself, but the laws governing space and time prevent that from happening. Yes, physics is conspiring against me. So, the interviews begin today.