The Real Nanny Diaries

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/books/the-real-nanny-diaries.html

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“His name is No-No, so I didn’t think I needed an explanation of his character.”

Claire, who asked that her last name not be used, is discussing a contrarian goat that’s the protagonist of a children’s story she has written. Like the dozen other women gathered in a back corner of the public library in Brooklyn Heights, she is part of a fairy-tale writing workshop for nannies, creating stories for the youngsters in their charge.

The workshop is the brainchild of Jakab Orsos, the library’s vice president of arts and culture, who previously established a similar creative writing program for domestic workers and cabdrivers at PEN America, the nonprofit literary and advocacy group. “When I was hired by the library, I noticed all these nannies coming through,” he said, “and I thought it would be interesting to start working with them in this way.”

The workshops are conducted in both Spanish and English. The latter is led by Fadwa Abbas, a writer and teacher who immigrated to the United States at age 14 from Sudan, where her father was a political prisoner. Bringing what she calls “radical thinking” to the classroom drives her curriculum for the nannies. “The idea is for them to go off and write something that sounds deceptively light but is actually deeper,” she said, “something that addresses what we’re trying to raise children to be. One woman wrote about a mermaid who was on a quest to clean up the trash in the ocean.”

Claire, 54, is from Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), and writing in English is a challenge. But she carries a notebook with her even while she’s on duty for two boys, aged 5 and 10. “Sometimes while they’re playing, I’m writing,” she said. “Inspiration comes at any time.”

Occasionally some resentment or frustration about raising other women’s children is evident in the nannies’ stories. “We talk about moving the writing from the stage of therapy to the stage of craft,” said Ms. Abbas, “rather than something that comes out of you because it has to come out. The women may use the workshop as an opportunity to let go of complicated feelings they have about their position.”

Some of the nannies do not reveal their participation to their employers. “You want to keep your private life private,” said Carol Ottley, a 57-year-old nanny from Trinidad and Tobago. “When you try to educate yourself, your employers might think you’re going to leave, rather than take care of their children all your life.”

But it was actually the mother of the three children in Ruta Miniotas’s care who suggested that she take the workshop. Originally from Lithuania, she grew up in a small town in upstate New York and felt like “kind of a freak.” Her fairy tale was about two mother birds who adopt an odd-looking egg. “It was a bit of commentary on how people gossip and judge other people’s choices,” said Ms. Miniotas, 30, who has purple hair, partly shaved. “I identify as a queer person and have friends in nontraditional family structures. A lot of my friends would be gossiped about.”

Ms. Abbas encourages a gentle criticism of each story in development — engendering lively conversations that are enthusiastically welcomed. “It doesn’t make you feel like you’re doing a horrible job, as opposed to having an employer saying that you didn’t zip the Ziploc bag of snacks tightly enough,” said Stacey-Ann Douglas, 40, originally from Trinidad and Tobago, who has worked as a nanny for 15 years. “In high school, my literature teacher would encourage me to write, but I didn’t become a legal resident in this country until a few years ago, so I couldn’t further my education. This workshop brings out a part of me, like critical thinking, that I didn’t know I had.”

There are some interlopers — women not currently employed as nannies but caring for children in their own families, like Erica Razook, 38, who until two years ago was a lawyer for a large nonprofit, doing anticorruption litigation. “I’d been in that field for over ten years, fighting bad guys,” she said, “and yearned to do something positive. Around the same time, both of my sisters had a bunch of kids, and it was a moment to take some time off with my family. I spent most of that year off in the library and saw the flyer about the nanny workshop. I wasn’t the target audience, but it’s a profound opportunity to explain the world to the next generation.” Ms. Razook wrote a poem about two dots and a spot. “The spot keeps trying to fit in, in these tortuous ways,” she said. “Really I was writing about power and greed, about trying to keep up with the bigger forces in life.”

For Ms. Abbas, the camaraderie that develops is the most important aspect of the workshop. “It’s one of those beautiful experiences showing that groups of people are not a monolith,” she said. “We had one woman who spoke no English and a twentysomething white woman from Texas. Norma wrote her stories in Spanish, and Riley translated them.”

Riley Rennhack is from a conservative small Texas town. “I was never allowed to watch TV, but I could read anything,” she said. “Only the really scary people are scared of books. And the library was a space that was not centered on religion or moralizing.” When she moved to Brooklyn and discovered the workshop while looking after a 3-year-old, she wrote a story about the concept of home, about trying to live in a different place where everything is new and confusing.

“It’s hard for a nanny to have a community,” said Ms. Rennhack. “You work in somebody else’s house, you don’t have co-workers, and you feel like part of the family but you’re really not. The workshop works because there’s a lot of patience and wisdom and empathy in that room. I’m only 25, one of the really young girls in the class, and those women are what one writer I like calls the many-gendered mothers of my heart. I’m a white girl from Texas, and I got invited to Kwanzaa.”

At the end of the “semester,” many of the nannies invited the children in their care plus extended families to a celebration at the Brooklyn Central Library in Grand Army Plaza, where they read the stories they’d written. “What they do is not a small undertaking,” said Mr. Orsos. “They’re often writing about the nadirs and zeniths of their lives, camouflaging their experiences with metaphors — some of them are so cheeky and funny. It makes me hugely emotional because they get out of their own reality, and it’s quite liberating. When they start, they’re shy, but even their posture changes as they continue.”

Support and appreciation from the library is highly valued, but something else is even more important. “We’re sitting around and respecting each other as writers,” said Ms. Rennhack. “What an audacious thing.”