It takes a village to raise a child according to an African proverb. I have heard it probably dozens of times, both before and after I had a child of my own, but over time, the village has certainly changed.

I started babysitting when I was about 13—being fully responsible for other people’s children, including infants. If I recall correctly, I made about $2 an hour to start with, depending on the parent, sometimes for multiple children. And you got more babysitting jobs through word of mouth. If you were reliable and trustworthy for one parent, they often recommended you to another. I didn’t do a ton of babysitting, but it was a good way to make a little bit of money, even into college when I babysat for a professor’s four kids on occasion.

There were no babysitting classes when I was a teenager. You didn’t learn CPR. No cell phones or iPads or computers meant that you had to either watch age-appropriate television or actually interact with the kids you were watching. (What a concept, huh?) Sometimes you had to feed them dinner, bathe them, and get them ready for and into bed. And once all the kids were in bed, you were there alone, the oldest person in someone else’s house and the person responsible in an emergency. It was great practice for when I became a mom myself, and as I look back as a classic Gen-Xer, I realize how many things could actually have gone wrong. 😮

My daughter, at 16, has never had an interest in babysitting. She has every intention of being a mom one day, but she doesn’t want anything to do with being responsible for another person’s tiny human. When I retell the time when she was an infant and threw up on me three times in one night, she scrunches up her face in disgust and says, “You’re welcome.” I know that it makes a difference when it’s your own kid, but she has a long way to go before she’s ready for motherhood. She gets grossed out touching raw chicken. I can’t imagine her changing a dirty diaper. 💩

When Corinne was a baby, Dennis and I moved to be closer to my parents so that they could take care of her while we were working. If she was going to spend more of her waking hours with someone other than us, I wanted it to be a relative, not a stranger we found online or in a phone book. Dennis and I rarely went out without Corinne, but if we did, she stayed with my parents or my best friend Stephanie came to watch her. That was it. When she started preschool, I must have called a dozen different places around us to find one that had the schedule I wanted, the location I wanted, the teaching I wanted…and all for a not-too-exorbitant price.

Many of the friends Corinne made in preschool are still friends today, and their parents have become my core group of friends. They are parents who I wouldn’t hesitate to leave Corinne with because I know that they will watch her just as closely as they watch their own kids…just like I do with their kids. We share the same values. We think the same way about safety and how much freedom is too much for a teenager. When we get together with the kids, we know that they are smarter with each other about their surroundings than they might be with other kids, so they have a little more freedom to walk through the neighborhood (together) while we stay at home.

They are my village.

I can’t imagine how difficult it is to find a nanny you can trust to leave your kids with. You can get all the references you want, but at the end of the day, that nanny goes home, and you have no idea really what their life is outside of your little circle…not at first anyway. What an amazing amount of faith it must take to hand over your child to a virtual stranger, especially when you have an infant who can’t tell you if something is wrong.

I know there are great nannies and babysitters and daycare providers in the world. There must be or it wouldn’t be such a booming business. I believe that all of my friends can trust me with their kids and that I can trust them with mine. But that first time you let go and hand them over…it can feel kind of gut-wrenching because you really can’t be certain. I mean, if there weren’t bad nannies, nanny cams wouldn’t be a thing, would they?

I recently finished an advance copy of a book being released this month about a relationship between a nanny and the child she cared for. It makes me feel justified in making sure Corinne spent her most formative years with the people who raised me. Just sayin’. 😑

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Book Review

⭐⭐⭐½
3.5 Stars for Nanny Dearest by Flora Collins

336 pages
Publisher: Harlequin/MIRA
Publication Date: November 30, 2021
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Harlequin/MIRA in exchange for an honest review.

Publisher’s Description

Sue Keller is lost. When her father dies suddenly, she’s orphaned in her mid-20s, her mother already long gone. Then Sue meets Annie. It’s been 20 years, but Annie could never forget that face. She was Sue’s live-in nanny at their big house upstate, and she loved Sue like she was her own.

Craving connection and mothering, Sue is only too eager to welcome Annie back into her life; but as they become inseparable once again, Sue starts to uncover the truth about Annie’s unsettling time in the Keller house all those years ago, particularly the manner of her departure—or dismissal. At the same time, she begins to grow increasingly alarmed for the safety of the two new charges currently in Annie’s care.

Told in alternating points of views—Annie in the mid-’90s and Sue in the present day—this taut novel of suspense will keep readers turning the pages right up to the shocking end.

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Main Characters:

• Sue Keller (Suzy) – an aspiring artist in her mid-20s, lost her mother to cancer as a young child and her father in a car accident a year before
• Anneliese Whitaker (Annie) – Sue’s former nanny, currently living with her sister and taking care of her niece and nephew
• Beth – Sue’s best friend since they were five years old, when Sue’s father moved himself and Sue to New York City from upstate

Flora Collins’ debut novel, based loosely on a babysitter her family used when she was a child according to her, pulled me in at the beginning and had me waffling between 3 and 4 stars. I landed on 3.5.

Sue Keller has spent her past year wallowing in depression after the sudden death of her father in a car accident. He has been her only parent after the death of Sue’s mother, having moved them out of their upstate New York home when Sue was only five. Sue doesn’t remember much of her time upstate until she happens to run into her former nanny Anneliese who has recently moved in with her sister to watch her niece and nephew. Anneliese recognizes Sue immediately and convinces Sue to stay in touch.

In the alternating chapters from Sue’s POV now and Anneliese’s POV 20 years ago, we learn how their relationship developed, how Anneliese came to love Sue in what was her first nannying job. I made plenty of notes about my suspicions along the way—thinking that Anneliese had ulterior motives regarding money, that maybe it wasn’t really her, that she was a stalker who had spent her life looking for Sue, even that she had been romantically involved with Sue’s father or even killed her mother to “replace” her. In an effort to avoid any big spoilers, I won’t tell you if any of these are true or not. 😉 They’re just the things I thought of as I was reading the book.

Throughout the story, we see Sue and Anneliese becoming more and more intertwined in each other’s lives. Sue begins to take an active interest in Anneliese’s niece and nephew, she begins to come out of her depression, she begins to paint again (something she had stopped doing after losing her dad). Anneliese’s presence allows her to remember some of her childhood and talk about her mom. But I never stopped being suspicious of Anneliese’s motives, which is what kept me reading.

I have always heard that the most formative years for a child are birth to age 5. It is easy to believe the influence that Anneliese has over Sue in the present day because of her presence in Sue’s life when she was just a toddler and lost her mother. Having lost my husband just over a year ago (and with a then-15-year-old daughter who had lost her dad) and my mother just over six months ago, I know that grief and depression can wreak havoc on your life, so Sue’s demeanor and interactions with her friends are completely believable.

I kept reading this story to see which, if any, of my suspicions were correct. I kept reading to figure out what was finally going to happen between Sue and Anneliese. Would Sue learn enough about their past to figure out why Anneliese disappeared from her life 20 years before?

I rooted for Sue, I was thrilled for Sue at the end, and then I was disappointed. I don’t want to give away the ending because it IS unexpected, but I just didn’t believe that it would get to the point it did. Despite the grief and the depression combined with the information that Sue turned up, her actions were a bit of a letdown for me.

Reviews have been mixed on this one. Some reviewers have hated it, others gave it 5 stars. I’m going with 3.5 because it doesn’t strike me as being on par with other novels I have rated 4 stars, but I don’t think 3 would do it justice. This is a solid debut by a young author who deserves a chance. I’ll be looking for her next book.

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