Mary Poppins Doesn't Exist: What Twenty-Two Au Pairs Taught Me About America's Care Crisis

With wit and unflinching candor, she pulls back the curtain on the realities of the au pair system, the cultural clashes, the absurd expectations placed on working mothers, and the messy, often chaotic, truth of trying to "have it all." From teenage nannies with questionable motives to den mothers with hidden agendas, from sage-burning governesses to voodoo dolls left behind in a bedroom - this book is an unfiltered look at what happens when idealized childcare fantasies meet the real world.

For anyone who has ever struggled with the weight of motherhood, juggled impossible expectations, or simply wondered why Mary Poppins never showed up at their door, this book is a must-read. Hilarious, raw, and refreshingly relatable, Mary Poppin Doesn't Exist is a story of survival, sacrifice, and the truth about raising kids in modern America.

Preface

There is a moment whenever I mention that as a mother, I have employed "over 22 child caregivers over the last tenish years, most of them au pairs," that I get a strange look. I imagine you are making one now, silently judging me, maybe wondering why you picked up this book. After this look, there usually comes a question, "Why so many?"

Growing up with films like Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music can give you the idea that to raise kids, all you need is one exceptional caregiver who will come in and fix everything, and she looks a lot like Julie Andrews. Unfortunately, I am here to tell you that this is a fantasy. As American women, we are asked to believe a lot of fantasies. The biggest one is that we can easily have it all. I add the word "easily" to this third-wave rallying cry because, in some ways, I do "have it all," or at least I "do it all."

I am a mom of three. I have a career as an OBGYN. I am a Black woman in America with several professional degrees. I have a husband who, most days, I love. However, it's not easy. Every working mom knows that it's a balancing act, especially in America. I have a feeling that many of the readers of this book will be working moms, but for the uninitiated or the fabulously rich, America hates working mothers.

Once you are a mom, if you take more than your federally mandated 12 weeks unpaid leave, you start to fall behind. You get passed over for promotions. Bosses begin to worry that you might take more time off or, God forbid, get pregnant again. If you jump right back into work, you start getting questions, "How can you bear being apart from your kids?" "Who is watching them?" "Are you a bad mother?" Ok, maybe that last one is a stretch, but not a far one.

Our family started using caregivers and, specifically, the au pair program because we needed help.

"Help" is a dirty word for mothers in America. Many expect the modern mom to be an octopus with one arm rocking the baby, another cooking over a stove, an arm for cleaning, one for giving your husband a neck massage, and more recently, in our culture, another arm typing into a computer because this woman is also the VP of sales at a tech startup. It's an impossible situation but one that is also normalized. While I never dreamed of being a stay-at-home mom, the option is quickly disappearing from American culture.

The cost of raising a family in this country is on the rise, and most families can't survive on one income. The dream of the "stay-at-home mom" is dead. However, the expectations of motherhood haven't shifted.

There is an "African proverb" that gets thrown around a lot: "It takes a village to raise a child." I put "African proverb" in quotes because where in Africa? It turns out no one knows. In 2016, NPR tried to find the origin of this saying but couldn't. Some suggest it comes from the Swahili saying, "Whomsoever is not taught by the mother will be taught with the world."

While I don't love the maybe appropriation and maybe exotification of "it takes a village," it seems less judgy than its likely origin. I doubt the original saying is supposed to be taken as judgmental, but as an American mother, you aren't allowed to let the world teach your child. You are expected to be there. Needing "a village" reeks of weakness, and outside of nudist colonies and the occasional cult, collective child-rearing isn't part of our nation's plan for mothers.

This was a long answer to a short question. Why did I hire so many child caregivers over ten years? Well, I have to work (and I like to work), and I live in America. But it's more than that. Seventeen of those 22ish caregivers were au pairs.

'Au pair' is one of those words that sounds fancy. It conjures visions of the French Alps, maybe fondue. However, it really isn't. For those unfamiliar, an au pair is kind of like a short-term, foreign nanny. The federal au pair program allows young people (mostly women around the age of 18) to come to America for 1 to 2 years to study and live with a host family in exchange for providing up to 45 hours of childcare a week. Au pairs receive room and board, a federally mandated wage, and the chance to study and learn in a foreign country. And the family gets a live-in helper for up to two years. In an ideal world, this is great. However, in my experience (and I have now had a lot of experience), it doesn't work like that.

Maybe I should have realized earlier that inviting a teenager into your house and trusting them to watch your kids may not always be the best idea. When you think of a teenager, you usually think of chaos, moodiness, and a sink stained with hair dye. So why is the au pair program so popular?

Chapter 1 Where it all began

This story starts with me changing jobs. When you are a Black doctor, and especially a Black female doctor, sometimes you have to change jobs. This has happened a lot in my career. There is a point where you start to get passed over, where it all starts to stagnate. At this point, there are two options: either accept the glass ceiling you are sitting under or find a new job. Throughout my life, I have always chosen the latter.

This time, I was working at a medical practice in Chicago. Honestly, it just wasn't a great doctor's office. There was a lot of medical malpractice; however, the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back was when they decided not to make me a partner. When I joined the practice, they told me that they would make me a partner after a year. However, this was around 2009. The economy had tanked, so they sat me down and said that they "couldn't make me a partner at this time." I was a seasoned practitioner who deserved to be made a partner, so with gravitas and poise, I told them I was leaving.

I immediately walked out of the meeting and into the parking lot to hyperventilate. 'Who quits their job in the middle of a recession?' I called Tim from the lot in our blue Dodge caravan. He told me over and over that it was all going to be ok. So, who quits their job in the middle of a recession? Well, I do.

Job opportunities were tight. So, I looked at a four-hour driving radius from Chicago. I wanted to be able to drive and that felt like the limit. In my search, I was offered the role of being the only OBGYN for a college town of about ten thousand in rural Iowa. While it sounded like the start of a Hallmark movie, it was a great opportunity. Honestly, maybe it was a Hallmark movie. Everything was so Norman Rockwell. Kids went from house to house playing on the weekends. Everyone always had an open door. Children played outside and came home at dusk. If it got cold, people would bring out jackets to their yards to clothe the neighborhood kids. It was a town that took care of its own. I fell in love with Iowa, and they needed an OBGYN.

This is how I ended up in Grinnell, Iowa. However, this also created a problem. I already had two small children. I was pregnant with a third and my husband, Tim, had a job in Chicago.

This wasn't the first time Tim and I lived in different cities. We had met in medical school at the University of Illinois at Chicago. One of our professors was a former professional ballroom dancer and offered dance classes. I had my own past as a ballerina, so I pushed my friend Pedro to go with me. However, during warm-ups, Pedro and I found ourselves on opposite sides of the room when it was time to pair up. Someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to be his partner. And I still am.

We got married while we were still in med school, which meant signing up for a couples match. We came up with a list of 154 permutations of residency programs. It was a headache, to say the least, mapping out a perfect plan where we could be close and still practice. However, the night before it was due, I had a dream in which we both put our first choice in different cities. When I woke up, I thought, "We can do this."

The Chicago Union-Tribune interviewed us for a story on couples in med school, so we ended up opening our offers in front of a reporter. Tim's said, "The Mayo Clinic." Mine said, "Cornell." We had gotten our first choices, just like in my dream. It was a dream that included living apart from my husband for the first three years of our marriage. If we could do that, I could live in Grinnell, Iowa. I just needed a little help when it came to childcare.

We started with various caregivers, such as babysitters and part-time helpers. None of them really worked out. Some couldn't do more than a couple of hours, and others left for other jobs. However, I was very pregnant by this point and knew I needed something stable and fast. It was around then that I remembered that something called an au pair existed. This is going to make me sound like a bad mother, but honestly, it was because of the Louise Woodward Case. It was one of those awful stories that the media couldn't let go of: a young boy presents at a hospital with shaken baby syndrome after being left alone with an 18-year-old British au pair. In "Americans are obsessed with true crime" fashion, the case was spun into A&E documentaries and an episode of SVU and somehow filtered down into my brain. It wasn't the ideal way to start thinking about a childcare option, but certainly, they couldn't all be bad caregivers. Could they?

I started researching the au pair program. At the time there were 13 companies that connected foreign au pairs with US families. I called them one by one to ask if we could be considered for the program. Twelve said no. There was a reason for this. Now, everything is online, but back then, you had to be close to college. I argued that Grinnell did have a college, the liberal arts school of the same name, right in town. It was even a college town. However, the area was a hard sell. We were an hour away from Iowa City and an hour away from Des Moines. It simply wasn't the part of the county that young girls from Berlin wanted to explore on their gap year. I tried to make the point that this was really an "American experience," but au pairs tend to want to be placed in California or New York (or at very least on a coast.)

The twelfth company said no to our family. However, they mentioned, "Maybe Erin would do it." Erin was, what I have come to call, a den mother at the thirteenth company. I have a lot to say about au pair den mothers (and I will; there is a full chapter on it later,) but Erin was so helpful. She was a teacher with a child of her own. Maybe it was the fact that she was a working mother herself, but she helped place us with our first au pair.

I met our first au pair, Ada, in the hospital on the second day after having my third child, Greer. I was still bleeding and sore all over when Tim came in and introduced me to Ada. I was exhausted but tried to welcome her with a big smile. She had only gotten off the plane from Turkey several hours before, and I am sure it was a lot to take in. I stayed in the hospital; however, the rest of my family, including my mother, went to dinner with Ada. While I wasn't there, I must have heard this story hundreds of times from my mother. The way she tells it, they went out to a real meat-and-potatoes midwestern steak house. Ada ordered some kind of large cut of expensive Midwest beef. She didn't finish it nor get a take-out container. This is the part of the story where my mother loudly says, "Who wastes steak?"

Looking back, this is a cultural difference. Portion sizes are huge in America, and we tend to take them home when we have extra, but that isn't true in other countries. I don't blame her for wasting steak. However, it was almost a harbinger of what was to come. The next few weeks were terrible. She wasn't licensed to take care of babies, but she didn't seem to have any desire to take care of the other kids. My eldest, Xena, would play Wii all day as Ada stayed in her room with the door closed.

Ada had what the au pairs call a "cooking certificate," so she could theoretically cook and even passed a course certifying it in her home country. However, I don't think she cooked once over the first few weeks she lived with us. About a week into our time with Ada, I found myself doing her laundry. I just had a baby and was doing chores for a teenager I barely knew. I couldn't take the realization. I called Erin and told her I couldn't do this any longer. Erin always wanted to find solutions. She helped set us up with a performance improvement plan. I remember trying to explain to Ada what "initiative" meant. She couldn't understand it. She ended up looking it up in a dictionary. I am still not sure she ever really understood it. After two more weeks, she still wasn't helping. We told Erin that we needed a new match. Ada left and, years later, became an accountant. She never really wanted to work with kids; she just wanted to learn English, which I could understand.

I like to think I helped her a little on her English language journey. I introduced her to all of our neighbors. They were excited to meet her. Honestly, the community was my biggest help at this time. While I was trying to keep it all together postpartum, everyone wanted to bring something over to the house. It was like a never-ending potluck of stick-to-your-ribs food. These were true midwesterners. Maybe that's why Ada never cooked anything, though I would have been excited to switch it up. For a month, the only thing we ate was casserole. I can not tell you how many ham casseroles we had.

Erin took Ada away after about one month with us. And then there was Cebisa.

Excerpted from Mary Poppins Doesn't Exist: What Twenty-Two Au Pairs Taught Me About America's Care Crisis by Dr. Seanna Thompson.