I’ve been chatting with a friend about Lisa Belkin’s Times Magazine cover story about her nanny. The friend noted that there has been very little buzz about the article in the blogosphere and elsewhere, and we’ve been discussing why that’s the fact.
Belkin writes about one of her former babysitters, who was accused of being involved in the death of two patients in Ireland, after she had gotten her nursing degree.
James Joyce whose spirit is everywhere in Dublin, once said, “In the particular is contained the universal.” This is about child care only in its particulars. It is not a tale of evil nannies lurking around every corner, or a declaration that children are not safe with anyone other than their mothers. More universally, it is about trust, and the harsh reality that as well as you ever know anyone, you can know only what he or she allows you to see.
We know this, and yet we trust. We trust strangers not to poison our food in their restaurants, not to drive drunk when we board their buses. We trust loved ones, even though each year brings news stories of husbands leading double lives, wives whose hidden demons cause them to kill. We hire office workers after a few hours of interviews, at best, and trust them not to steal or destroy all that we have built. We go to a doctor based only on the fact that our neighbor seems to like him. We hand employers our Social Security numbers, and valets our car keys, and bank tellers our balances, and nannies our children.
Apt. 11d 
I also read the Belkin piece and, like Laura, found it only mildly disturbing at the time. But, also like Laura, it’s sticking with me.
I was very struck by the author repeatedly saying, I saw this sign that there might be trouble, and I disregarded it. How many of us haven’t looked the other way, hoping our misgivings were unfounded? After all, you desperately want the babysitter/boyfriend/new employee/whatever it is to work out. The fact that Belkin walked away from her sitter merely because the sitter commented that “kids lie” … that turned out to be a complete judgment call based more on instinct than anything else. Yet in the end Belkin was right. I’m not sure what I would have done in that situation. There’s a certain element of “there but for the grace of God go I” to this story.
As to why it’s not generating buzz, I wonder if the world has no appetite for gray areas at the moment. We’re all overwhelmed by complex, nebulous situations with no good outcome. (Iraq, anyone?) And no one has enough time to get the information they need to feel good about their decisions. We’re in search of clear-cut things these days — good decisions we can feel confident of, based on 3 minutes of reading.
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What’s interesting to me is that Belkin employed her babysitter for five years without realizing how disturbed she was.
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Yes, it sticks with us precisely because of the ambiguity. You can’t tuck it away in a predefined area that you have a ready-made judgement about: you have to actually think about it.
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I guess that one way of looking at it is that this story would not rise to the level of the NYT mag if it happened to anyone but an NYT mag writer. The story was obviously more compelling to her than it was to us. But I think she did a good job with it and, in the process, exposed her own judgment for not picking up on this woman’s shortcomings sooner.
Do we definitely assume that a woman who would mistreat elderly patients would alsi mistreat kids? I don’t, which kind of reduces the relevance of the story.
As for ambiguity: thanks goodness for the true ambiguity in this story. I was worried it was going to be the faux ambiguity that was offered up to so much acclaim by Andrew Jareki in Capturing the Freidmans, where he told viewers to “decide for yourself” but then withheld much of the evidence of guilt!
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I disliked this article and added it to the list of Lisa Belkin articles I disliked. I felt it was not worthy of being the cover story in the NYTimes magazine. I didn’t like the way she manipulated this woman, essentially, for her journalistic purposes. Its too bad no one was there to tell the nanny to stay away from her former employer, who had it out for her. I was very uncomfortable with this, nearly as much as the woman who admitted she fired her nanny over what she read on her blog: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/fashion/sundaystyles/17LOVE.html
was this Lisa Belkin’s way of getting back at her former nanny?
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I felt like Jen, specially when Belkin details travelling to Ireland to talk to her former babysitter. I stopped reading at that point, when I felt like Belkin was a sleazy journalist going after a potentially sellable story. I could almost see her writing the book proposal in her head when she saw the newspaper article about her ex-nanny (i.e. people are freaked out about nannies anyway, and I knew this woman). I don’t think it’s getting buzz because those bones were just too obvious.
In terms of betrayal of trust, I think people vastly over-estimate their ability to estimate people’s true natures, in every situations. I for example have known a convicted murderer and convicted rapist (not well, but known). In both cases, I could have easily stood on a witness stand and said there is no way that I could ever have imagined that the folks would have committed such actions. But, I don’t take this to mean they were innocent, or that I am worse than others at evaluating people. We’re all abysmal at it.
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yeah, I also had moments when Belkin’s motives grossed me out. I mean she has also betrayed her nanny’s trust in her by writing this story. At first the nanny concented to be interviewed, because she thought that Belkin was on her side. This nanny/nurse’s relative minor crime became a front page story. Her life is much worse, because Belkin gave it such publicity on this side of the Atlantic. Also, I’m not sure that the nanny did anything horrific to her kids other than ignoring them in the afternoon. That doesn’t seem any different from every other nanny I’ve observed in the playground.
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Let me suggest something uncharitable. The whole article smacked of, “Let me make a big fucking deal out of something relatively trivial in order to maximize the value of my professional-class angst over something that is not such a big fucking deal in the rest of the world”. E.g., people who work as nannies in the context that Belkin describes *always* have something that has made them “fit” into that labor niche. They don’t just do it because, omigod, they love teh kids sooo much. Now there’s a zillion and one cases where the “something” is wholly innocuous–older person, person who is trying to pick up a bit of income on the side, person who has had one experience in childcare that has been very positive and why the hell not do it again, but sometimes it’s someone like Belkin’s nanny.
And you know, when you read about what she might have done to Belkin’s kids–like, basically, yelled at them, I think to myself, “and you think that wasn’t happening? For that matter, don’t you yell at your kids sometimes?” Which, of course, she’s trying to acknowledge that I will think, but in such a way that she makes it all complicated and grapply-grapply rather than, well, banal, which I think it is.
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In the beginning of the article, Belkin insists this isn’t a hysterical nanny story. She says that this was an issue about trust, just as we trust that our doctor isn’t on crack and the valet parking isn’t doing a Ferris Bueller with our car when we go into a restaurant. She didn’t moralize about nannies in general or make pronouncements about a mother’s love, so I believed her.
One of the interesting parts of the article was her involvement in the story. She was a character in the piece and I think she presents a “warts and all” picture of herself. I was turned off by the fact that she used her relationship with the nanny to sell a story to the Times. Maybe Belkin’s self-exposure was unintensional. I don’t know.
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