Only Those With ‘Capacity to Love’ Need Apply

I have been calling up strangers from classified newspaper ads who say they can get me “a lady” to care for my children. These strangers say there are lots of ladies available, for whenever I’d like.

They ask me what I want, how much I can pay, whether English is important or not. They say maybe I can try one out and if she’s not right, I can send her back. Free replacements are part of the deals.

Hanging up the telephone, I need to remind myself that the commodities we are talking about are human beings--”theirs” and “mine.” The ladies will get paid for a job that most people do not want. My daughters will have no choice at all. Their lives will be managed by an outsider while their parents work.

I try not to pause too long on all of this because then my sadness only grows.

My husband and I have always called ourselves lucky; friends and relatives say this too. Our balancing act, much more stable than most, usually holds.

One woman, hardly a stranger anymore, has lived with us for nearly six years. She takes care of our children, she cleans and she cooks. She fills in all sorts of gaps.

We hired her when I was pregnant with our first child. She stayed through the second and when she’d joke about staying on with us through her old age, I’d realize that a part of me just assumed that she would.

Now she is leaving. She hopes to return, she says, but her mother is ill. The needs of her “real” family come first. That is why she hired her nurturing out.

It is the unspoken deal between us, the deal that was salve to her conscience and to my own.

Ours is a problem of the privileged, I realize. Or maybe it is the trap.

Two careers, two kids and a weekend of only two days. There is never enough time; no solutions are problem-free. The price of our compromises is exhaustion and guilt. For now.

“That’s the problem with having an industrial revolution,” says a friend of mine at work, and this is not meant as a joke.

This friend is a little younger than I and he doesn’t have any children. He and his wife talk about the prospect of parenthood, then they decide to wait some more. Now their careers are calling the shots.

More and more, however, the children of America are having their say back. Not directly, but through their parents’ concerns. We worry, “Are we doing right by our kids?” We talk about it with colleagues and even with the boss. Business publications now routinely compile lists (never long enough) of companies that are most generous to employees’ family needs.

Which, to me, really brings this whole issue home. The line between family and work is getting thinner all the time. In this neo-industrial age, child-rearing for working couples has really become a business too. Only we are uncomfortable with that. It doesn’t seem right .

It makes me cringe.

Not long ago, I read an article in a business newsletter that analyzed the relationship between working parents and the people they employ to care for their kids.

The parents, quite successful and confident on the job, seemed to abandon their management skills when dealing with their employee at home. Mostly, they just let the transgressions slide. They were afraid that the care giver would quit or that she would “take it out on the child.”

The message of the article was that this was not good. Be confident, parents! Remember, you are paying these people to do a job!

This sounds good on paper, and it certainly makes good business sense, but it points up the unease that many working parents feel.

Yes. This is a business, but isn’t it easier on our conscience to pretend that it is not? While interviewing “ladies” to care for my daughters, I want to ask them point blank, “Can you love them as your own?”

I don’t, of course. Or I haven’t yet. What would they tell me, yes or no? And would I believe them either way? Or maybe they’d just end the interview right there, figuring I’m probably a kook. Since when does “capacity to love” figure as a business skill?

No outsider can love a child in the same way that their own parent can. I know this, and I’ve almost come to terms with it as well. But I still haven’t hired anybody new to care for my daughters while I choose not to be there.

I will, though. I have to. That is how businesses are run.