Episode 02: [other]Mothers

One of the first questions to emerge from this oral history project was how to refer to the narrator’s profession, which is also my own. Are we nannies, babysitters, domestic workers, caretakers? The discomfort in this question, I soon discovered, was mostly held by outsiders, somes who who employ nannies, and some who just look away from us on sidewalks. I choose not to share this discomfort. Nanny is my preferred term, and also the one used by nearly all the women that I interviewed. The second most used term was Mother. Othermothers is a collection of stories about the many mothers in early lives of nannies. Over the course of collecting these oral histories, I learned that in many communities in New York, and around the world, a mother is a much more flexible and generous term. A mother is not only a physical presence– she can be the one who does the soothing and the holding but she is also the one whose sacrifice can span miles and years. She is a breadwinner. She is a grandmother. Most often, she is many women.