The Mothers We Pay

In a meeting of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, the psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott remarked, “with heat,” that “there is no such thing as a baby,” an observation he later qualified by saying that, although the infant’s existence is not itself in question, it is inescapably unindividuated—always dependent, always relational. “If you show me a baby,” he continued, “you certainly show me also someone caring for the baby, or at least a pram with someone’s eyes and ears glued to it.” Diverging from the Freudian understanding of selfhood, Winnicott insisted that the analytic unit was not the individual but the “nursing couple,” a psychically soupy dyad in which mommy’s and baby’s identities collapse into and become indistinguishable from each other, until baby progresses to transitional objects and, eventually, independent play.

Successful adult outcomes, Winnicott believed, are not the result of irreplaceable blood bonds but of consistent and well-managed care. Thus, his oft-cited figure of the “good-enough mother” was “not necessarily the infant’s own.” Winnicott saw his own childhood as one held together by an entire assemblage of women, among them his biological mother, two sisters, a governess, a nanny, and a house full of maids. Despite a spectral father (who “left me too much to all my mothers”), Winnicott—according to his second wife, Clare—considered his youth basically a happy one, marred by neither hampering nor neglect. It takes a village, we’re told, and Winnicott understood his own care to have benefitted from a bustling cluster of good-enough mothers.

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But what of these other kinds of women, the intermediary mothers paid to occupy or accompany the role; do they, too, collapse into the nursing couple? When it’s an au pair’s eyes or a day-care employee’s ears glued to the pram, where does the rest of that woman go? Modern fictions of motherhood—Rachel Yoder’s “Nightbitch,” Torrey Peters’s “Detransition, Baby,” Kate Zambreno’s “Drifts,” and Olga Ravn’s “My Work” come to mind—are often energized by ambivalence about the decision to become a mother, fear of pregnancy’s bodily disturbances, and the eradication of ego inside the securities and satisfactions of maternal domesticity. Two débuts—Courtney Bush’s “Learning” and K Chiucarello’s “Nanny Nanny”—intervene in this canon by focussing, instead, on adrift young women who come to inhabit the not-mother mother role.

“Learning” tracks the events of a single Monday in a private Harlem day care, where thirtysomething Courtney manages a pack of four-year-olds. After her childhood best friend’s death and a divorce from a man she now hates, Courtney is surfacing from a “light nervous breakdown,” one that leaves her susceptible to, and even eager for, a surrender of self inside the demands of caretaking. On this morning, she lies in bed after her alarm sounds, lingering in “the few moments where I wasn’t yet anybody. Then came the parts of myself, the articulable variables that made up my life.” Echoing a scene from Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway”—an unmistakable, wondrous antecedent—Courtney resists and then surrenders to what Clarissa Dalloway identifies as the “call on her to be her self,” “composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond.”

Much of the day that follows is perfectly ordinary. Together, the children chant their daily itinerary: “Drop-off, Circle, Work Time, Bathroom,” and so on. The novel stretches time—granting notice, and so dignity, to what Woolf calls the “nondescript cotton wool” of experience, those routinized moments of “non-being” which make up everyday life. For Bush as for Woolf, identity is not a metaphysical fact but a style of attention or a social accumulation. This is, in part, what children’s education also works to engineer, and a process that “Learning” scrutinizes: assimilable personhood.

Against the backdrop of her unsettled connection with the past, Courtney experiences the job’s mandate of selflessness as a tool with which to establish her own center. In an almost Buddhist manner, she finds that escaping individual identity recalibrates her capacity to be in the world and with others. In the classroom, she imagines her role like that of the angels of Rilke’s “Duino Elegies,” “there to observe, to witness, to testify,” but exiled from “the experience of the humans.” For Courtney, the children, too, are angels—not blushing cherubs but Biblical seraphim, “armored beings covered in eyeballs . . . learning at a rate that is impossible to describe in something as structural as language.” The characterization of children in “Learning” is uncommonly complex; they are neither props nor narrative addenda but, rather, odd little people in perpetual motion, sensorily and imaginatively porous, “eating information with their entire beings.” Courtney is attuned to the singularity of each, their vocal tics and fixations and privacies, their fledgling channels of desire and uncanny knowledge of beauty. A petulant changeling girl, Quinn, refuses to say anything besides “mert”; hyperactive Sammy makes wild messes; Theo’s alienating intelligence keeps him friendless.

“Learning” extends recognition to all its characters, including even the day care’s “insane cunt” of a director, Elena, and her menacing, eventually violent boyfriend, the aptly named Mike Rott. Central to the novel’s buoyant, humane philosophy is a vision of the educational space as basically reparative, not particularly for the children—who have yet to make “bad” choices—but for the adults who enter its orbit, Courtney most of all. In the wake of tragedy and separation, she is lost, wary of the immensity and opacity of her desire; anger crouches inside her, too, a fact that her divorce made mercilessly clear to her. But her belief in the permeable and cumulative nature of identity enables Courtney to reckon with her mistakes as part of a process of learning, rather than immovable indicators of good or bad character. It’s a redemptive position, one that runs through Bush’s work. In a 2023 poetry collection, “I Love Information,” Bush writes that “the underworld / of learning which is not beautiful” is, instead, a “path of decimation,” one that veers between moments of embarrassment and revelation. In the novel, the children remind Courtney that learning is a “degrading experience,” one that requires “submission and humility and constantly admitting to yourself that you don’t know what the fuck” is going on.

This promise of redemption, we sense, is what draws Courtney to child care: not the desire to have a kid of her own, in any conventional manner, but a pull to the capaciousness and devotion that teaching asks of her. Courtney sees, without resentment or reservation, that to give love without anticipating any in return is the “fate of those of us who take care of other people’s children.” These children, she knows, will go on to other schools and other teachers; they will make bad decisions, and perhaps forget her. But it exhilarates her, this notion that care can be doled out without hope of repayment. “Unlike a parent,” she muses, “I do not cultivate the kind of love I want back later. I cultivate my own love, then pass it out like cut flowers.” Around the pleasures of self-sacrifice circles a perhaps familiar fear: What if she wakes one day to find that she’s given all her love away?

In “Learning” ’s conclusion, the peaceable kingdom of the school is interrupted by a sudden shock of violence, but brutality is the cornerstone of Chiucarello’s “Nanny Nanny.” The novel’s narrator is a career nanny whom we meet, like Courtney, in her mid-thirties and in the aftermath of a divorce. But she is on a rather different quest: to have a baby of her own. Though Chiucarello, like Bush, probes the labor politics and emotional weather of child care, “Nanny Nanny” presents, at its sharpest, a nauseating autopsy of marital abuse, one that likens the self-abandoning imperatives of parenthood to those that leave the narrator open to intimate harm. As is often true in such cases, a history of abuse precedes the marriage. The narrator, while navigating her father’s spells of anger and silence as a teen-ager, learned to coddle his moods, to seek approval—first from him, and later from everyone else. “It never occurred to me,” she confesses, “that one should not have to work to be loved.”

Indeed, for our narrator—who remains, notably, nameless—each subsequent relationship nestles into this groove, turning intimacy into a detachable skill set to be honed, and eventually, paid for. This malleability proves useful when easing into her employers’ families but contaminates the rhythms of her personal life. After a whirlwind courtship—“love-bombing,” we say now—the narrator weds Lucía, who, once infatuation has faded, mercilessly belittles, rapes, chokes, and hits her. For those of us familiar with domestic violence, the shape of their marriage appears unremarkable. Periods of paralyzing coldness are punctured by moments of passionate intensity; abject declarations of love and remorse follow savage explosions; then come the coercion, denials, gaslighting, and escalations. In a shocking exchange, Lucía commands the narrator to “consider the ways I had played a part in allowing her to rape me.” It’s classic abuser logic: to insist that the response to violence, and not the violence itself, is the problem at hand. But by repeatedly detailing the care with which the narrator tidies and disguises Lucía’s brutality—cleanups that bear uncanny resemblance to the tending she performs for the children she watches—both the narrator and novel refuse to flatly reject this logic. The narrator bristles against taxonomies of abuse that strip the victim’s capacity for agency: survivors are not, she thinks, merely dolls that “have things happen to them” but participants in their own lives.

This trauma shadows the narrator’s quest to become a mother. “I am very good at children,” she explains. “I am so good at children that it would seem like a waste of talent if I weren’t to have any myself.” Care work appeals to her, we sense, as a way to rewrite self-dispossession as an art form. One wonders who the narrator is beneath her devotion, this giving over of herself to the care of others. She doesn’t seem to know, an opacity that the novel disquietingly insinuates leaves her permeable to ever-compounding harms. Indeed, both “Learning” and “Nanny Nanny” suggest that care labor wields a consuming power to efface those who perform it. Like Courtney, Chiucarello’s narrator arrives at her vocation like a penitent, seeking salvation in dissolution. If she has done bad things, or feels shame, or fails to behave authoritatively, she can sidestep those regrets—at least for a time—by disaffiliating from ego.

But nannying is not teaching: it’s round-the-clock work, emotionally and physically intimate. Nor are mothering and nannying identical, though the narrator at times appears more enmeshed in the nursing couple than the biological parents that she works for, and questions a neat division between the roles. “Was mother a solo identity that couldn’t be shared?” she wonders. Her desire for her own child implies that she believes it can’t be, that there is a sui-generis quality to motherhood that’s impossible to approximate. In her paid capacity nannying for families such as the Millets, who pay her six figures and fly her around the world, this belief yields an anxiety that she is undermining the children’s mother. After a stranger misidentifies her with her young wards and insists on taking a family portrait, the narrator admits that “I never showed the photo to the Millet mother, too scared of what my boss would think if she learned that nearly every passerby confused her children for my children.” But this, we later learn, betrays only her projected sense of motherhood as a singular identity, one that competes for primacy in a zero-sum framework. The Millet mother, in actuality, holds a humbler perspective, one that accepts the fact that no mother can provide all things for her children alone. “I hired you,” she tells the narrator, “because everything I admire about you is everything I’m not. . . . My kids, they need someone total.”

Like Sheila Heti’s 2018 autofictional novel “Motherhood,” “Nanny Nanny” positions maternity as a philosophical “wrestling place” in which a reproductively capable woman must reckon with that singular refrain: to have a baby or not? And, if so, why? Much of “Nanny Nanny” is structured around an elaborate motivational account of her desire for a child, which the narrator gives to two friends, over drinks, at a bar. Only at the end does she admit to the reader—and, it would seem, to herself—that “the actual reason, is to exact revenge on Lucía,” with whom children were once a possibility but who will never now be party to this aspect of the narrator’s life. Once this realization crystallizes, every other line of reasoning looks like a diversion from what is, in fact, a post-traumatic response mechanism: a way “to break a long line of violence,” and “to simply witness a beginning.” The appeal of mothering, it would seem, is the promise of futurity after violence, a way to stamp out the miseries of her history.

Recently, I told my therapist that the women I know tend to speak of their aspirations for motherhood in one of two ways: there are those of us (I include myself here) who want to be mothers, and those who want to have kids. The split seems to hinge on a gap between action and achievement, identity and possession: Does one see motherhood as an orientation toward others or an opportunity to cement something about oneself? In “Learning,” although Courtney has no investment in “actual” motherhood, she is dexterous with its gestures in no small part because she understands children to be people. For the narrator of “Nanny Nanny,” her yearning for motherhood is aligned with a real capacity for care, but it’s nevertheless rooted in a sense that children may be understood as extensions of our identities and desires, that their lives in some crucial fashion might solve the problems of our own. Though she is not yet a mother by the novel’s end, she’s nannying a baby from birth onward, a stopgap resolution that deepens her nearness to the mother role while keeping her nonetheless outside of it. And yet she seems to have found a kind of peace. “It is calm here,” she thinks. “I am stretching my legs out in a home that is not mine and am listening for a baby that sometimes is.” ♦