Katie’s Beer

Lately, there have been lots of stories on blogs. They always catch my attention because this wasn’t true just six months ago. There are stories on people blogging at work, people getting fired because they blast their employers on their blogs, teens bloggings their private lives for the world (but not their parents) to read. Any of those articles catches my eye.

The Nanny Blog has been the talk of several radio shows that I haven’t managed to listen to very closely to this week. I heard the basics: mom hires nanny and discovers that she keeps a racy blog. Today I got a Google search hit for the story and decided to read the story for myself. Helaine Olen, a journalist living in Brooklyn, writes for the Modern Love column in the New York Times.

“She hadn’t been with us long when we found out about her online diary. All she’d revealed previously about her private life were the bare-bones details of the occasional date or argument with her landlord and her hopes of attending graduate school in the fall.

Yet within two months of my starting to read her entries our entire relationship unraveled. Not only were there things I didn’t want to know about the person who was watching my children, it turned out her online revelations brought feelings of mine to the surface I’d just as soon not have to face as well.”

I read with alarm the writings of a mother living a life very different from mine. At first, the blog seemed part of the story. I found myself thinking, “Why do such racy, personal blogs steal the spotlight from those of us who attempt to write something substantial?” Of course, even well-known political bloggers have written too much about their personal lives. I found myself wishing for another term for the kind of blog this nanny kept. Anyway, as I read further I realized that the core of the story really had nothing to do with a nanny or a blog. Ms. Olen, or the NYTimes, rightly titled the piece: The New Nanny Diaries are Online. This story was not at all about a blog; this woman was reading her nanny’s diary, albeit a diary foolishly and purposely posted for the world to view. She didn’t like what she read.

I told my friends about the blog, and even my childless acquaintances were riveted. They called, begging for more details…

But I was not as comfortable with the situation as I pretended…

Yet I did not confront her. In part I felt empathy and sadness for this younger version of myself. But I also feared she would judge my life and find it wanting.

As I read her words I was transported back to my own youth and those feelings of awkwardness, fear, false bravado and self-importance. I could have told her that I understood her life more than she realized, that I had not always been the boring hausfrau she must see…

But there was another element of her posts that unnerved me. Most parents don’t like to think the person watching their children is there for a salary. We often build up a mythology of friendship with our nannies, pretending the nanny admires us and loves our children so much that she would continue to visit even without pay.

When our nanny referred to our house on her blog as work in a seemingly sarcastic fashion, she broke the covenant. The more she posted, the more life in our household deteriorated.

I can appreciate the candor with which Ms. Olen writes as she examines her life and finds herself wanting. We all have moments in our life like hers when we are confronted by the differences between what we believe about ourselves and what is actually true about us. What someone would write in a diary about us? What we do at those gifts of moments determines our ability to live in peace and in thankfulness for the hope of our salvation from our earthly condition.

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