When the winter gets way too long, I can't help but think about summer, and often that leads to the three summers in the late 90s I spent living and working as a nanny on Cape Cod while I was in college, as they were pretty formative for me. I did keep diaries, but I didn't write a best selling book. ;) But I probably learned more there that has been useful in life than in any other time/place (and not just how to sail and eat a lobster). It was more of an education than a job really, thanks to the many people I met there. The job broadly was carting kids to golf, tennis, sailing and swimming lessons and then laying on the beach, enjoying Nantucket Sound. Rough, I know. And now that I'm a mom, I look back at all of it in even a new light...
The first summer, I moved there to work for/live with a family (I'll call them the Potters), who lived in Wellesley Hills (near where I was going to college) but "summered" in Hyannis Port, a summer haven to the Kennedys for nearly a century, while the husband stayed back home and worked during the week. They were my age now, with a daughter and son, who were seven and four the first summer I spent with them.
Lori had listed their position with the college, and I answered it when I determined I didn't have the resources, easy connections, or honestly the burning desire (can you say burnout?), to support a high powered professional internship all summer, but I would need to work, as I always had, to come up with my required contribution to my second year's college expenses, which were substantial. I had no desire to go back home to WI to work for the summer, as I had before, so I figured a job that included room and board out East would be a good idea, and I had years of babysitting experience and awesome references.
Plus, I thought it sounded fun to spend the summer on the Cape, which I'd only visited once, and a welcome respite from my very busy schedule at school. I was then in my first year attempting (to varying levels of success) to balance being a lab science major, with rowing crew competitively for the first time, working on campus (and in the '96 NH primary) and trying to have some sort of social life at a women's college. Don't laugh.
Rowing on the Charles
Lori and I hit it off right away when I went to their cozy white colonial near campus to meet for the first time. They'd just bought their sprawling Cape home two years before (after she'd nearly died of meningitis) and their much loved previous summer nanny had apparently moved on. Her husband, Ron, who was as big and blond as she was petite and brunette (she's a doppelganger for Jenny Sanford, he for a sober Ron White), and as being a hockey player would suggest, and since he worked very successfully in medical equipment sales around Boston, she left her "good job" and focused on being a traditional SAHW/M to their two adorable kids. They'd originally planned a large family, she was the youngest (and a twin) of six, but she'd had difficult sickly pregnancies, so they'd packed it in after two.
Allie is now a BC grad, and works at an ad agency in Boston (sound familiar?). Corey is finishing up at St. Lawrence...
Where does the time go...
Lori cooked and cleaned and sewed liked a fiend (I don't think she had help other than a summer nanny, which for her was as much about status as anything, and why she didn't have an au pair like nearly every other family there) and loved to throw herself into photography, decorating, and her extended daily work outs, even more than parenting really (the kids often complained about how little time they got to spend with both their parents). They were basically right out of central casting and The Preppy Handbook (a copy of which she kept in my room).
The very first day I spent on the Cape, after driving down with the three of them (and their yellow lab) in their old school/woody Jeep Grand Wagoneer (above from TH), included lunch at "the golf club" (where JFK and Jackie had their engagement party) and a stop at "the beach club", where that day I met the scion (and Potter friend) who would later become my first serious boyfriend, and first proposal.
HP harbor from his porch
Early during that first summer, I also met the Croydens (also not their real name) at "the yacht club", which is really just the simple town pier (above) that you see in just about every Kennedy picture ever taken in HP (this is where the razis would hang out every weekend, all summer to get a glimpse of someone, back in that day usually JFK Jr. (may he RIP) or the Arnold, going sailing).
Forget Taylor Swift, '96-'98 were the Carolyn years, here w/Friday the dog
Shannon "Croyden" had gone to Smith (so we were both of the seven sisters) and met her husband, Drew, a Stanford swimmer, when they were at BC Law. Shannon was a few years younger than Lori, and unlike her had grown up summering in HP, like many, if not most, families there. Shannon's family started and runs a MA based food company, which started to sell salad dressing from the family's steak house in Framingham, to now bottling for Newman's Own and having a huge retail and food service business. There's a lot of money in salad dressing apparently.
She and Lori weren't good friends, but the story goes she'd called Lori to get my number after the first summer, and I started babysitting for her growing brood in their Newton house during the school year. This apparently really annoyed Lori, though of course it was her doing and she didn't use me during the school year anyway. Though apparently it was not enough to not have me come back for a second summer (after I'd gone home for the summer, I then drove all the way from WI to HP to rescue her and her kids from my apparently mentally unstable and brief replacement).
***
I loved the Potters (even w/all her neuroses), and they were all big fans of mine, so I probably would have gone back to live with them for a third summer, but by then I'd transferred to BC, was taking summer school courses in Boston (to graduate on time due to said transfer), and had an apt., job, and BF in Boston. Not exactly condusive to a full time/live in arrangement. But I was working for the Croydens during the year a lot, she was not shy with help, and from the first summer she'd gone from one baby to three. She'd left her big firm job to stay home, had a young Mexican au pair live in to help, and whenever she went out, which was often and even sometimes when she didn't, I would help with her brood of tinies as the second sitter.
The third summer I actually ended up working/pinch hit parenting for the youngest of her four brothers, whose newly ex-wife had apparently had a life crisis and left their children to move to LA to find herself as an actress or something. Like many men in HP, her brother worked out of town during the week and wasn't exactly a hands-on parent. Their daughters were four and seven, and as I'm sure you can imagine, we're not in a great place emotionally after being "abandoned" by their SAHM.
"If you bungle raising your children, nothing else you do well matters very much..." -JBKO
Sailing off of HP
It was all very sad actually, I guess that is why I wanted to try to help them for as much of every week as I could get down to the Cape, usually at least 4-day weekends, while they had local girls fill in when I was back in the city. And Shannon thought I'd have extra insight since my parents were divorced when I was about their age, but there are some problems no amount of insight, help (and money) can solve. We all lived in her parents' summer house on the harbor in HP, until she bought the place across the street late that summer.
That was by far the most challenging summer, and by the end I'd lost a bunch of weight I really didn't need to, had come down with mono (the after effects still w/me 15 years later), had a cancer scare, and was growing tired of the Croyden clan. The last weekend of the summer, the extended family were all off to Nantucket for Doug Kennedy's wedding and Shannon left her au pair (who was soon returning home) with no money, no formula for the newest baby, and no way to get any (since she didn't drive). I, of course, helped her out with the money and a ride and then when I moved to a new place in Brighton at the end of the summer, I never looked back. Some people just have their priorities too messed up for me to deal with constructively...
Doug and Molly Kennedy getting married in Nantucket
(and not a hungry baby in sight...)
So sometimes I worry about becoming these kind of mothers. Not that I think I am now, but I don't ever want to ever be. So detached or otherwise consumed not even by work, but obsessed with what I consider nonsense (social climbing, your appearance, etc), as to forget that children are more than an accessory to some kind of greeting card life. Anyone else ever feel like this?
And having been a beloved nanny, it sets the bar really high for what I'd look for in someone for our family. Oh and there's the whole "I might be a little over-protective because I can't successfully conceive, carry, or birth my children without extreme measures and them nearly dying." Oh yeah, there might be that...
We've been through a lot together, the kids and me, that I'm having a hard time bringing an outside person into our little circle as much as I know I need to. I know I need to work (even more) on this, and I know they are only two, but I've given up most of my life (willingly) for them, and I think I want/need to try to reclaim a bit more of it. Finally.
But that means giving up some of the control that I lost in those three years waiting for them, that I've been reclaiming the last three in my complete undivided devotion to them. But the reality is, I don't know if they need me to be there as much I need/ed them to be. Know what I mean? Any tips on getting past the dread of dealing with help? I met a mom of triplets (plus one) recently who I could relate to when she said she skipped help so she wouldn't have another person to look after.
We've booked our Cape vacation and in looking for houses to rent, found that my friend (Australian au pair) Annette's cottage, well actually Lori's friend Julie's rented place, around the corner from her is
for rent. Ah, the cape life...
HP/1996
