leaving the kids (a nanny's nightmare)

(summer 2010)


I have a week left with the kids. Then I'll prepare to move to NYC and I won't be their nanny anymore. I've been with them two and a half years.

I had a nightmare two nights ago.  I was pregnant.  I knew it, but my anxiety about the birth grew with my belly, and soon I was feeling heels and head push on the walls of my uterus.  Sorrow, mourning, confusion washed over the dream, and time moved quickly.  Soon I was in a large, cold, marble-floored hospital, which felt much more like a museum than it should have.  Gold rails, gold elevators, like the ones at the museum where I take the kids. I had decided to give the child up for adoption, certain that it was just too soon in my life to raise one on my own. Somehow my sister was giving birth to the baby that had grown in my uterus and I wasn't there to meet it for the first moment of its life.  Frantically, searching through the hospital halls for an answer to where my baby might be, I ran into Ryan, my partner.  He knows where the child is. He is calm and confident about our decision.  My view jumps to the child, then back to me, desperately searching for the baby before it is handed over to its new family.  And I awaken.