The Nanny

By Emmanuelle

A prophet, when asked to talk about work, said: “Work is love made visible. If you cannot work without love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and take alms from those who work with joy.”

 

Let me tell you a true, untold story:

 

Susana was an orphan; she never had a complete family to call her own. Her grandparents brought her up. When they too passed on, an aunt took over. Raising Susie was not an easy job. She was a sprightly and terribly opinionated little girl; she would rather run with the wind than sit patiently in class. When she thought she had enough of the basics of the alphabet and arithmetic at third grade, she skipped. Permanently. She was not mentally or psychologically impaired. She just had a mind of her own under the unruly crop of dark, frizzy hair and behind those night-black eyes fringed by thick, naturally curled eyelashes.

 

 Her aunt found employment as housekeeper to better-off relatives in the city. Susie unwillingly tagged along, mindful of not losing touch with her only living guardian. Being a tag-along maid didn’t work well with headstrong Susie. Maybe this had nothing to do with it, but the mistress-of-the-house had a medical history of contracting a full-blown typhoid   fever in her youth. It was understood Susie’s tag-along employment was over when the mistress chased her with a loaded gun around the yard and out to the street.      

 

To survive, Susie worked as helper to relatives one after the other until the nurse-sister of her gun-totting former mistress found her after years of search. The nurse knew Susie was a gem when she first saw Susie in her sister’s employ; she wanted Susie, and no other, to be nanny to her five children who still reside outside the city. Susie jumped at the chance to leave the city; also, she had always found this sister as kind and very perceptive. Susie would stay with this Pangasinense family for thirty-five years; not because she had no other choice, but because she learned to love this family as the family she never had.

 

Susie became not only the nanny, but also surrogate mother to the five kids. She took care of them from el ementary to high school. She even accompanied them to college in Manila where they rented a house. When two of them turned activists, Susie requested them to conduct their “secret” activities in the house rather than in some unknown, unsafe place. She would pick-up compromising materials left strewn about, stack all beneath her bed, and sleep over these. She would closely watch news on TV when rallies were held, ever fearful that the faces of her precious wards would be caught live on screen. One day, she recognized one of her wards right there on footage. As the network camera panned a scene of students fleeing from a commotion, Susie recognized her ward as she tripped and disappeared under the bodies of other tripped, fleeing students. No need to phone Susie; she was right there at the door with tincture and bandages when her bloodied ward came home.

 

When her wards started to have families of their own, Susie chose to live in Dagupan with the brightest, the funniest but with the saddest life of them all. Again, not because Susie had no other choice, but because she felt this one needed her most. This ward entered into a union that was a mistake from the beginning. Susie was there when her ward and her two kids locked themselves in the bedroom; she placed her body between the door and the enraged, drunken husband.

 

When things got worse, Susie packed and shooed her ward and the kids to a far and safer city. Then she hitched high her ageing shoulders and bravely stayed on at the house not really to take care of her ward’s husband, but to make sure he left his unfortunate family alone.

 

When the two kids graduated from the University of the Philippines, Susie was there – both times – holding hands with the kid’s mother (Susie’s ward), and the kid’s widowed grandmother (the nurse). It was university practice for a graduate to offer a token to the parents in gratitude and in recognition of a job well done. A few years before, the older sibling offered not one bouquet but three bouquets of sweet-smelling roses and wild mountain flowers to three most wonderful women – the grandmother, the mother, and the nanny. Years later, the younger one did the same.     

 

To all such nannies of this world – thank you.

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