Month: January 2007

Trust Betrayed

~ Laura ~ 9 Comments

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.

The article is quiet and somber, like a grey day in Dublin. It also goes against what we tend to expect in these sorts of tales. We expect one of two stories: 1. the nanny is innocent and wrongly accused or 2. she’s really done some very, very bad things.  In this age of Dateline NBC, I expect a crazed nurse to bump off a good number of people and then hide the bodies somewhere.  A crazed nanny must whip the children or abuse them terribly.  Since this nurse/nanny wasn’t accused of anything that drastic, I expected the first morality tale.  And we were nudged into this hope, by Belkin who herself was hoping that the nanny had been innocent. 
Maybe this article fell flat and hasn’t gotten much buzz, because we have been trained to expect either the wrongly accused or horribly guilty ending.  Belkin doesn’t give us that.  Instead, we get the author’s disappointment, the accused on welfare, but not in jail, and an explanation for the nanny’s missteps.  Mild tragedy in all quarters.  In some way, this is a very ordinary tale and one that we don’t expect to find on the front page of the magazine.  But as the week is going on, I’m still thinking about it.