She’s in your house almost every day; she bathes your children, she eats at your table, she knows your schedule. You are far more involved than roommates. And yet you may never know what your nanny’s life is really like or what she thinks of yours. But you may be able to catch a glimpse in Just Like Family: Inside the Lives of Nannies, the Parents They Work for, and the Children They Love, a new book by Tasha Blaine.
Blaine worked as a nanny after earning her MFA, thinking it would be an easy job that would leave her with time to write. She planned to be a nanny for a year. She only lasted six months. And now, five years later, her book condenses a wealth of research and investigation on the lives of professional caregivers into the tales of three different nannies: Claudia is a Carribbean immigrant working for a wealthy NYC couple, Kim is a wannabe-mom and divorcee in Texas who takes in a live-in gig that she soon has cause to regret, and Vivian is the highest of high-class nannies in Boston. Their travails form the backbone of the book: frustration over parents who don’t value their input or pile them with menial jobs, the difficulty of staying quiet when a parent is making decisions the nannies disagree with, personal problems that hijack the energies they need on the job.
Portraits of the parents they work for emerge through the nannys’ filters, but this is no Nanny Diaries-style slag on parents. All of Blaine’s characters are flawed and real; take, for instance, the lengths to which Claudia’s employers go to help her after an ex drains her bank account and she faces eviction. On the other hand, witness Vivian’s mother-like pain over her four-year-old twin charges readying to go to school, a pain callously ignored by her discomfited employers.
Anyone who’s been on either side of the nanny-parent relationship will find Just Like Family absorbing; a good, long look at this relationship that’s so complex, so guarded, so intimate and so important all at once.

