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your nanny hates you HAD TO ABANDON HER OWN. BY DEBBIE NATHAN | in El Paso, the Texas border town where I live, most people call them maids. In other places, they are usually called housekeepers or nannies -- more dignified words that their employers hope will smooth the relation between them and the Third World immigrant women who clean their houses and tend their kids. Don't count on it. Having lived for years in a city where domestic workers are de rigueur in middle-class homes, I know employers who swear by the "m" word, as well as others who make a point of using nicer versions. No matter; the problems are still the same. I learned about some of them a few years ago, when I was running a fledgling immigration civil rights advocacy group out of my home. While my two children were in day care and preschool, I did paper work and phone calls from my front porch. After a while the neighborhood Latina domestics -- sirvientas, they called themselves -- learned about the gringa señora who could help with their immigration papers or their complaints of being stopped by cops simply because they looked foreign. They'd drop by my porch and coffee klatches would ensue. The inevitable gossip followed, and I couldn't believe the upstairs/downstairs stories I heard, even when these women's employers said housekeeper or nanny instead of maid. Maribel* was one of my visitors. She was a live-in for Lee, a lawyer, his artist wife, Fran, and their two children, ages 1 and 6. Lee and Fran were rehabbing a dowager mansion on the corner, and I sometimes ran into Fran watering her flowers. According to her, things with Maribel were copacetic. "The house is so big that we're paying her $120 a week, more than she could get anywhere else around here," Fran said proudly. "Plus she's got her own room." Maribel told a different story. Though she was slow moving and had only a seventh-grade education, she was quick-witted and opinionated, a great conversationalist. The problem is that she was all these things in Spanish, and Fran and Lee spoke only English. Communication between Maribel and her employers was thus reduced to sign language and basic, household drudge vocabulary. This put her in the mansion five days a week, cooking, cleaning and baby-sitting from 7:30 in the morning to 10 at night, without any adult conversation except when she could stop by my porch for a few minutes. Chronically exhausted and lonely, Maribel resented how Fran took afternoon naps or lay in bed talking to friends on the phone. She was angry with Lee's demand that she iron his drip-dry shirts, and lately he wanted the sheets done too. Worst of all, she had to share her bedroom with the children's pet hamsters because no one in the family would feed them or clean the cage. Maribel had an absolute phobia about what she called "the rats." Some nights she would drift into nightmares. Even on calmer evenings, she cried herself to sleep, missing her son and daughter back in Mexico. That was the worst part, Maribel said -- leaving her own kids behind to take care of someone else's. Her plaint is practically universal among immigrant domestic workers I've talked with -- which is no surprise because women from poor countries usually come here in a valiant attempt to support family members, particularly their children. Often it's extremely hard to bring them to the United States, and more so, of course, when even the mother lacks immigration papers. So the kids stay behind, usually with the grandmother, and months or years go by between reunions. What this means is that the immigrant nanny, housekeeper or sirvienta is in the Catch-22 of having to leave her children in order to be a good mother. We, meanwhile, hire her to assume another oxymoronic role: loving our kids for pay. And pay that's generally pretty stingy, since she's supposed to be more interested in mothering than in unmotherly things such as wages, hours, raises or benefits. It's no wonder that domestic workers, parents and even their kids may spend much of their time feeling pretty uncomfortable. Conflicts abound even in the most civilized arrangements. Take the household that hired Catalina. A single mother, she was a bank secretary in Mexico until the 1994 peso devaluation. After that, Catalina says, she had a choice between eating and buying pantyhose for work, so she left her 9-year-old with her mother and immigrated illegally to El Paso. She quickly found a live-in job with Linda, who runs a boutique, her husband, Tony, an ambulance paramedic, their 6-year-old son, Hart, and Brook, their 5-year-old daughter. Linda and Tony have helped Catalina buy a car and encouraged her to take English classes at night. When Tony is home, he helps with cooking and cleaning. Unlike many domestic workers charged with child care, Catalina has free rein to discipline the kids when they misbehave. She feels respected, relatively independent and appreciative of her bosses. The feeling is mutual. In fact, Linda tells me, Catalina got the family's routine so shipshape that shortly after she arrived almost four years ago, Linda realized she could work even with a third child. So she got pregnant and Ashley, now 2 years old, spends almost all her time with Catalina. The brown-skinned Mexican woman and towheaded toddler are together from daybreak to evening. Ashley speaks more Spanish than English. At night, she wanders into Catalina's bed instead of her parents'. She calls Catalina "mamma." Some mothers get dismayed by this bonding, even jealous, but Linda seems nonchalant. It is Catalina who's uneasy. She tells me she's always kept an emotional distance from the older children: "Basically, I'm not a sweet person," she explains. But her explanation is belied by how tenderly she treats "la baby." The real contradiction, apparently, is Catalina's mixed feelings about giving so much love to another person's child instead of to her own. A domestic worker in Houston named Maria explains the basis for these feelings. In 1980, Maria immigrated from El Salvador, leaving behind Luisa, her 11-month-old daughter. As a single, jobless mother, she felt she had no choice. "You cannot imagine how poor we were, all my life," Maria says of her family. "So poor that when I was 7 years old, I was farmed out as a kind of servant to the household of my godmother, who was fairly well off. They used to wake me for work early in the morning by throwing ice water on me. I was beaten regularly. And my mother couldn't do anything about it. She couldn't afford to." Desperate to make a better life for Luisa, Maria put her in the care of an aunt and set out for the United States. "I was still nursing when I left and my breasts were full of milk the whole time I was traveling," Maria remembers. "Leaving Luisa was terribly hard for both of us. She suffered a lot with me gone. I was told that she cried for a long time." In Houston, Maria found work as a nanny in the posh River Oaks neighborhood, caring for a newborn girl while the mother worked. Maria showered the baby with love, and soon the little girl was speaking in Spanish sentences and confusing Maria with her mother. Meanwhile, Maria's family in El Salvador had no phone, so she could not call Luisa. Nor could she return during holidays, since she had no immigration papers to get her back into the United States. Maria says the separation was bearable only because the money she could send home from her $300-a-week salary started making life much easier for her Salvadoran kin. When she finally managed a visit home, four years after leaving, Maria found that her mother had taken over the care of Luisa. Ironically, the grandmother now had the free time and economic security to nurture Luisa in a way she'd never been able to with Maria when she was a child. Maria felt emotionally paralyzed in the presence of 5-year-old Luisa. "It had hurt so much to leave her that I couldn't show her affection when I came back," she recalls. "I loved hugging and kissing the little girl in Houston, but I couldn't do it with my daughter." Over the next 12 years, Maria cared for other American children. During that time, she managed to get legalized, become a U.S. citizen, obtain immigration papers for Luisa and finally reunite with her. Luisa arrived in Houston earlier this year. Now 18 years old, she is a stranger to her mother, and the feeling is mutual. "Luisa has different values from mine," Maria says. "The biggest conflict is education: I want her to have a profession and for that she needs to get serious about learning English and studying. But she was raised with the idea that she would make a living on the street, selling papusas and watermelon slices. She gets angry when I tell her what to do. Even though she doesn't say, 'You're not my mother, you didn't raise me,' there is a lack of love. I've been to a psychologist and now we are both going to church together. There is a great need for healing because I feel terrible. I feel I've failed as a mother." Back in El Paso, Catalina avoids getting too close to the little girl she is raising in place of her child in Mexico. She wants to learn computers, get an apartment, save money and eventually return to her son. Yet she has no idea how to fulfill her goals, because she has no working papers, nor any prospect of getting them. Tony and Linda know this and tell her she can stay with them until Hart, Brook and Ashley are grown. They think they're being kind, but the offer scares Catalina. The last thing she wants is to end up like Maria and her daughter. Or worse, like Anita, who has been a sirvienta for more than half of her 62 years. Anita's life sounds like that of a Dickens character: a kind boss here, a cruel one there; this one gave her a bedroom and radio, that one fondled her while she was washing the dishes and made her sleep in an unheated garage. For nearly 20 years, she's had what she considers good employers. The parents are both teachers, and they have a boy, Chris, whose care has been Anita's main task since the day he was born. Anita surrendered her maternal soul to Chris. "My son," she calls him, and he calls her "mamma." The bureau in her tiny bedroom is jammed with Chris' discarded baby toys. The walls are covered with snapshots of him: as a baby, a toddler, a grade-schooler, a teenager. Now, his recent graduation from high school has precipitated the crisis all domestic workers dread. Chris is about to start college out of town and his parents have given Anita her walking papers. She is an aging woman with no family of her own, no immigration papers and no pension or social security. Worst of all, she is losing her child.
"I can't bear it," Anita says. "I know everything about Chris:
When he was small, I knew the meaning of every little tremble in his
body while he slept. I've hugged him, cooked for him, listened to
his problems. He treats me like his mother; he's never been away
from me for more than a week. I can't go to work for another family.
I'm too tired. I'm tired physically, and I don't have the emotional
energy to love another child. The only consolation I have is that I
did my job with this one well."
* Names and minor identifying details have been changed Debbie Nathan is the author of "Women and Other Aliens: Essays From the U.S.-Mexico Border" (Cinco Puntos) and co-author, with Michael Snedeker, of "Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Trial" (Basic Books). What do you think about the nanny dilemma? Are we isolating poor, immigrant women in our homes and pretending that mothering can be commodified into a job? Join the discussion in Table Talk. |
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