The End of the Affair

I knew on some level the moment we lay eyes on each other.

I have never believed in love at first sight, but until we met, everybody else had been so…wrong.

It was the little things, the way it always is at first. The “tells.” When she came in, she asked immediately where she could find the sink to wash her hands. “The subway,” she explained with a grimace, and I felt my heart swell. “May I hold her?” she asked, which nobody else had bothered to do. And the way she took her in her arms—my firstborn, this extension of me, the love of my life—was reassuring. Not a thrill, no. But “just right” enough.

And the first few weeks, the honeymoon phase, were amazing. Suddenly, I had my life back. I was my old self again, but better—more nuanced and well rounded, filled with a sense of possibility. I could do this, be a mother and a writer, or even—my secret real concern—a mother and a functioning member of society, capable of showering before noon.

We were both so polite, at the beginning, so eager to impress. I brushed my hair, was dressed when she arrived. She made me cups of tea, complimented my curtains. We were like newlyweds who had never lived together, bumping shoulders awkwardly in the kitchen, always saying “Excuse me,” with shy, grateful smiles. When the baby cried, we both started toward her. It took me a while to step back. And then I had to. I wasn’t home.

For a long time, everything ran like clockwork. I was able to work, she was able to work; it just worked. “Did she…” I would start, as I walked in the door at the end of the day. “…from 1 to 3,” she would say. We were finishing each other’s sentences. It was that good. She anticipated my needs. I would leave in the morning anxious about the towers of stained baby clothes and return to find each item scrubbed, soaked, and hanging to dry from the towel rods. She made chamomile tea for the baby when she fussed. This worked too.

At some point, as is its wont, reality set in. The seven-year itch, perhaps, but at about two years instead: a condensed version of the marital arc. When she arrived in the mornings I was bleary-eyed and still in pajamas, the little one barely diapered, banana in my unbrushed hair. She didn’t always change into her slippers anymore, the ones she’d so thoughtfully bought to avoid tracking in dirt from the street. She talked on the phone too much. I knew; I was paying the bill.

Disillusionment: it’s especially hard to track when you spend so much time apart. The cracks become wider. Wedges, in the form of white lies and bickering, find room. Irritation, disillusionment’s even less appealing cousin, joins the party. In our case, we both started eyeing the competition. I kept track of which of her competitors read books using different voices for the characters, played games as mind-numbingly dull as Candyland, went to museums the children liked instead of the Barnes and Noble nanny hangout. She mentioned mutual acquaintances who earned more, worked less. I wondered if she was moonlighting. I thought about a change, let myself imagine it. She, I’m sure, did too.

And then: Old Marrieds. We settled into each other’s foibles. If I forgot to go to the bank, she sighed but accepted with a shrug. If she was on the phone when I got home, I sighed, cleared my throat loudly until she hung up, but accepted as well. Our routine was ingrained, and although there were occasional flare-ups—a doctor’s appointment poorly timed on purpose, a late arrival on my part at the end of a very long day—we knew what we were dealing with, and in many ways it seemed vastly preferable to the other couples—or rather triangles—we saw out there. Even the arrival of the second baby didn’t faze us. We were in it for the long haul.

Except. Except of course we weren’t. True love may last forever, but nanny jobs do not.

The truth is: there was no infidelity, no blow-out fight, no fireworks upon a shocking discovery. As is true of most divorces, it was impossible to pinpoint precisely when we knew it would end. There were warnings signs; there always are. I had more help than I needed, could pay for in the moment. My older girl was soon to be in school all day. She needed more work, more pay. She has two girls herself, rising rent, expenses. The economy had soured. The timing was suddenly off. Our fortunes had been inextricably linked for four years; could we go our separate ways? We had to. I put off telling her as long as I could, and then I did. She nodded, somberly. My eyes filled with tears. Hers did not. It is always harder to be the person asked to leave.

Like finding a spouse, finding a nanny is about compatibility, yes, but also about biting the bullet and making a choice. Any parent worth his salt enters the relationship thinking: This is the one. And yet. We all know the marriage statistics; the nanny statistics are worse. Everyone I know has fired one; everyone I know has been quit on, too. The relationship between you and your children’s caregiver is unlike any other employer/employee relationship in the world. If ever a job was not just a job it is this.

The defining characteristic of the nanny job, however, is its finite nature. This is unspoken, but implicit in every second of every hour of every day. Nobody's nanny is forever; everybody's children grow up. Thus the illusion, the temporary lie: You are helping me raise my children; you are helping me survive. But someday, when I no longer need you, you will go. I will spend every minute when we are together pretending this is not so, but we both know it. You may like me, you may love my children—the best we can hope for—but not as much as I do. You, and not I, are expendable.

From the very beginning, as woman after woman filed into our home to be checked out, knowing it was too much of a luxury to reciprocate, I knew this relationship, once embarked upon, was going to be challenging for me. To be honest, I don’t even like the word “nanny.” I never called her that or even referred to her by the term when she wasn’t around. It seems dopey to me, both old-fashioned and demeaning, although most people I know, employers and nannies alike, look at me with furrowed brows when I express this point of view.

When a romantic relationship, duration: years, comes to an end, there is inevitably a mess. “A blessing they don’t have kids,” people always say, when the couple in question does not, in fact, have kids. But even a childless couple endures the heartbreak of the division of commingled possessions, the parceling out of friends, the decision of who will stay and who will have to find another home. A nanny break-up is so clean, in a way. There are no shared possessions, no furniture to be divvied up, no wedding gifts or photo albums to serve as mementoes of a happier time.

But there are children. My children, who loved her but love me more. At least I think they loved her, although I realize one day, a week after she is gone, that the older one will barely remember her soon; I have so few memories of my life before four. The younger one never will. She will become a character in a period of our shared past, a smiling figure in a handful of photographs, a person we will keep in touch with for a while, send holiday cards to, but who will move on herself, to another family, another woman to whom she will present nothing less than her life back, the chance to try to do it all.

Today, I am rummaging in the closet by the front door for something when I spot the slippers, the ones she bought early on to keep from tracking in dirt with her outdoor shoes. I pick up one and consider it. I put it back, gently. After all, not as clean a break as I’d thought.