You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again: The True Adventures of a Hollywood Nanny by Suzanne Hansen Page A
Authors: Suzanne Hansen
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would become one of the only friends I would have in a very foreign land. She would, one day, save my sanity.
Sitting in that classroom on the dingy side of Portland, I didn’t fully grasp the possibility of nightmarish nanny scenarios. Sure, I listened to stories like that of a British nanny who went to work for the royal family in Saudi Arabia. The girls she watched grew obese from being force-fed—to get them “strong” for childbearing. One seven-year-old child weighed 165 pounds. The nanny was freaked out by such strange practices and was scared by the police who stopped her for some wayward blond hair poking out of her headscarf. She eventually ran to the British embassy to get escorted out of the country. It sounded awful, but awfully different from how I pictured my job. Surely in the United States everyone had the same sort of basic ideas about raising kids. Didn’t they?
A few weeks into class, Mary, the family dynamics teacher, asked me to help take care of her own two girls and the special-needs foster children she cared for. She told me that, after careful consideration, she had chosen me from all the girls in class because of my maturity. I’d always felt I was the most responsible among my peers. As Jeff Foxworthy says, I was usually elected as the “spokesperson” to answer the door at our high school parties when the cops showed up. And what else could explain the fact that I had been chosen as the head of the fire-drill exercises in second grade and as the attendance-taker in the third grade?
I wasn’t, however, nominated for a home-ec medal. Though we weren’t expected to cook as nannies, Carolyn and Linda knew there would be exceptions. So we were required to prepare a meal, a personal favorite, for one of our practicum families to see if we could buy the groceries and make a dinner while caring for the kids at the same time. My personal favorite at the time was also the
only one
I knew how to make,unless you counted bologna boats. It was a casserole, with broccoli, cheddar cheese, a can of Campbell’s cream of chicken soup, mashed potatoes, two cubes of butter, and a pint of half-and-half. This was all layered over a couple of pounds of fried hamburger. My grandmother used to make it for me every Sunday night. But somehow I had never noticed how long she slaved in the kitchen. I felt great nanny guilt for sticking my practicum children in front of the TV (educational programming, of course) while I stood over the stove. It took hours to assemble, but I thought it turned out great.
The six-year-old refused to eat it. He said it looked like throw up.
My four months of schooling went quickly, and by December I had graduated. I’d logged more than four hundred hours in classroom and practicum training and had passed my certification test with flying colors. I was now a highly trained and qualified childcare professional. I figured I could do that anywhere in the world—children are children, after all. So I set my sights on Southern California, the land of milk, honey, sunshine, and money. To my surprise, within a week I had several interviews lined up through a domestic placement agency in Santa Monica.
There was no doubt in my mind that it was time to leave the northwest. I knew that I’d miss my parents, my two sisters, and all my friends, but I had adjusted to life in a big city—well, Portland. It was time for bigger things. And there was no romance anchoring me in Oregon, anyway. Okay, there was my first love, Ryan, and our intense on-again, off-again relationship, but it was off now, and I suspected he probably couldn’t wait for me to disappear so he could start dating the homecoming queen. I had never before made it three entire months without running back to Ryan. But now I felt strong and confident. I was ready for a new life.
Good-bye, covered-bridge capital of America.
I was off to the film capital of the world.
My friends who are actresses and who have babies are with
Sitting in that classroom on the dingy side of Portland, I didn’t fully grasp the possibility of nightmarish nanny scenarios. Sure, I listened to stories like that of a British nanny who went to work for the royal family in Saudi Arabia. The girls she watched grew obese from being force-fed—to get them “strong” for childbearing. One seven-year-old child weighed 165 pounds. The nanny was freaked out by such strange practices and was scared by the police who stopped her for some wayward blond hair poking out of her headscarf. She eventually ran to the British embassy to get escorted out of the country. It sounded awful, but awfully different from how I pictured my job. Surely in the United States everyone had the same sort of basic ideas about raising kids. Didn’t they?
A few weeks into class, Mary, the family dynamics teacher, asked me to help take care of her own two girls and the special-needs foster children she cared for. She told me that, after careful consideration, she had chosen me from all the girls in class because of my maturity. I’d always felt I was the most responsible among my peers. As Jeff Foxworthy says, I was usually elected as the “spokesperson” to answer the door at our high school parties when the cops showed up. And what else could explain the fact that I had been chosen as the head of the fire-drill exercises in second grade and as the attendance-taker in the third grade?
I wasn’t, however, nominated for a home-ec medal. Though we weren’t expected to cook as nannies, Carolyn and Linda knew there would be exceptions. So we were required to prepare a meal, a personal favorite, for one of our practicum families to see if we could buy the groceries and make a dinner while caring for the kids at the same time. My personal favorite at the time was also the
only one
I knew how to make,unless you counted bologna boats. It was a casserole, with broccoli, cheddar cheese, a can of Campbell’s cream of chicken soup, mashed potatoes, two cubes of butter, and a pint of half-and-half. This was all layered over a couple of pounds of fried hamburger. My grandmother used to make it for me every Sunday night. But somehow I had never noticed how long she slaved in the kitchen. I felt great nanny guilt for sticking my practicum children in front of the TV (educational programming, of course) while I stood over the stove. It took hours to assemble, but I thought it turned out great.
The six-year-old refused to eat it. He said it looked like throw up.
My four months of schooling went quickly, and by December I had graduated. I’d logged more than four hundred hours in classroom and practicum training and had passed my certification test with flying colors. I was now a highly trained and qualified childcare professional. I figured I could do that anywhere in the world—children are children, after all. So I set my sights on Southern California, the land of milk, honey, sunshine, and money. To my surprise, within a week I had several interviews lined up through a domestic placement agency in Santa Monica.
There was no doubt in my mind that it was time to leave the northwest. I knew that I’d miss my parents, my two sisters, and all my friends, but I had adjusted to life in a big city—well, Portland. It was time for bigger things. And there was no romance anchoring me in Oregon, anyway. Okay, there was my first love, Ryan, and our intense on-again, off-again relationship, but it was off now, and I suspected he probably couldn’t wait for me to disappear so he could start dating the homecoming queen. I had never before made it three entire months without running back to Ryan. But now I felt strong and confident. I was ready for a new life.
Good-bye, covered-bridge capital of America.
I was off to the film capital of the world.
My friends who are actresses and who have babies are with
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