Fresh out of college, you take a job as a nanny in a foreign country, so you can learn the language while making a little money. You’re living with an American family at the U.S. embassy, taking care of their one-year-old daughter. You spend your free time roaming the streets of the exotic capital city where the family is based.
The girl – let’s call her Allie – is cheerful and easy to care for. Her father spends long hours at work, but he shares your fascination with the country and is generally easy-going. Her mother, by contrast, is prickly, intense. She’s also not too keen on living in this particular country, a repressive Communist state with freezing weather and an indecipherable language.
The mother – let’s call her Darla – is tightly wound. She insists that you put the peanut butter back into the cupboard with the label facing outward, and constantly straightens the shoes lined up by the front door. She schedules Allie’s days down to the minute – TV time, naptime, play time, walk time. If she comes home unexpectedly and finds you engaged in a non-scheduled activity with Allie, she is peeved. “Why are you playing with the blocks right now?” she will say. “She’s supposed to be watching her Swan Lake video.”
You grew up in a more relaxed family environment. You feel constrained by the pervasive cloud of Darla’s stress that settles over the apartment. You think, This is no way to raise a kid. Shouldn’t Allie be allowed to enjoy unstructured time? To nap when she wants? To make a mess? You keep your mouth shut, certain that Darla would not appreciate parenting advice from the 21-year-old nanny. There’s already tension in the air, and you want to avoid making it worse.
One autumn afternoon a couple months into your nannying gig, your new friend Mary comes over. You and she relax in your room, sprawled out on the floor with Allie sitting contentedly between you. Both Allie’s parents are out.
You’ve just received a care package from your parents – a book, some chocolate, a few newspaper clippings, a little box of Christmas ornaments. Allie is picking up each item, looking in wonderment, her chubby fingers clasping and unclasping each object. You and Mary chat, with Allie nestled comfortably between your legs, facing Mary.
After a moment, Mary says, “Is that glass in her mouth?”
Your heart stops. You turn Allie around and look down at her hands, where she clutches a broken ornament in her fingers. You hurriedly pry her mouth open to peer in, and there are a few bits of broken ornament on her tongue.
You swab her mouth out with a finger, getting all the bits you can see and feel. Allie, who has been sitting happily, starts to cry. “It’s okay,” you tell her. But then you wonder. It’s ornament glass, the paper-thin kind that looks like smooth aluminum foil, not glass glass. It’s got pointed edges, sure, but it couldn’t really hurt her, even if she swallowed it. Or could it?
You wipe Allie’s tears – the fear in your eyes had scared her – and she calms down again. You take away the ornaments but let her keep playing with the other items in the package. Mary says, “Do you think she’s okay?”
You say, “I think so. She didn’t swallow any, did she?”
Mary says, “I didn’t see, but she might have. Do you think it would hurt her?”
You say, “I don’t think so. She seems okay. I’m sure she’s fine.” You say this with more confidence than you feel.
Later that afternoon, Allie’s parents come home. You say nothing about the ornament. Allie has been fine since she stopped crying, and she shows no signs of anything amiss; she’s as happy and gurgly as ever. You’re still a little nervous, but relieved that everything seems normal. You go out that evening with friends, and sleep well that night. Allie does too, not waking up once.
The next morning, you head to the kitchen for breakfast. Darla is there, with Allie in her high chair. Darla looks troubled.
“Is there something wrong with Allie?” she says. You feel a stab of fear. “She doesn’t want to eat anything this morning. Did she seem okay when you watched her yesterday?”
“She seemed fine,” you manage to squeak as your heart begins to palpitate.
“It’s strange,” says Darla. “She keeps crying, and she doesn’t want her breakfast. It’s like her stomach is upset, or hurts or something.”
You stand there, paralyzed. Your heart and brain are racing. Through a haze of fear, with not a millisecond to spare, you assess your options.
If you tell Darla about the ornament, she will completely freak out because (a) you fed her baby glass, and (b) you didn’t tell her immediately, but let it settle in Allie’s little abdomen overnight. In this scenario, it won’t even matter whether Allie was really in any medical danger; you will lose your nannying job and get thrown out of the country. Depending on how angry Darla is, you may even find yourself under physical threat.
If you don’t tell Darla, on the other hand, probably nothing will happen. The chances that a piece of ornament glass made it down Allie’s gullet and lacerated her stomach are minute. Aren’t they? Wouldn’t she have felt it last night? Wouldn’t that flimsy ornament glass just disintegrate? How tough is a baby’s stomach lining, anyway? God, you should have swallowed a piece yourself last night, just to see what would happen.
You think to yourself, I cannot tell Darla. She will kill me, even though Allie is fine. Then you think, What if Allie dies from a stomach infection because I am afraid of losing my job? You wonder what kind of freak-show selfish person you have become. But you cannot bring yourself to utter the words, “Well, Allie might have eaten some glass yesterday afternoon.”
What do you do?
Yikes!
What do you do
Swoon?
I totally recognize this situation and I get myself into similar predicaments way too frequently. Still have not figured out how to get out of them gracefully.
What do you do?
Here are your options, other than just fessing up or keeping mum.
(1) Distract Darla somehow for half the day and take Allie to the doctor, one who has never seen her before and never will again, so there’s less chance of Darla’s finding out.
(2) Feed the kid some Ipecac and hope the glass doesn’t do more damage coming up than it would have going out the other end. (Does anyone else think that “Ipecac” is one of the most onomatopoetic words in English? It sounds just like what happens when you take it.)
(3) Break all the rules for the next two days — peanut butter on the wrong shelf! wrong games at the wrong time! a walk during nap time! — to get Darla irritated with you. The glass will pass out of the kid’s system with little to do, which will be covered over by the spectacular series of misdeeds you perpetrate.
I’d probably call my mom for advice, even knowing what she’s gonna tell me, which is to tell Darla immediately, or better yet, tell the husband, and hope I don’t get fired.
Do tell- What did you end up doing?
(Hope the kid is/was alright!)
Two words: Plausible deniability. The baby was in her parents’ care for many hours in between “event” and “illness.” Best thing to do is turn attention to “what to do about symptoms rather than what happened.
Well, I’d follow a couple of worst-case scenarios — one, tell Darla, who fires the nanny immediately. Endure extreme discomfort for a few days. Oh well, lesson learned, get another job. Everyone’s still alive. Two, say nothing and see what happens. Maybe there are complications with interior bleeding and Allie has to spend some time in the hospital. That’s kind of rotten.
Thinking more optimistically, maybe Allie is just afraid of eating anything because she no longer trusts the safety of what she puts into her mouth. How do you help her get over that without revealing anything to mom? Maybe saying she “tried” to eat something that’s already in the home (not one of your objects) and you stopped her.
I don’t know. These situations always have me reaching for the remote (if only I could rewind to the part where I pull the ornaments out of the box…). Perhaps the nanny could just causally murmer, “oh, that could be trouble. I’d take her to the doctor if I were you.” Fiegn ignorance until the last possible moment — you could get away with it.
Anyway, I’m also eager to find out what really happened! Also feeling terrible about laughing out loud at the line “Is that glass in her mouth.”
I like Wager’s idea of taking her to the Dr on the QT.
What did end up happening? This is a fun post, but the nagging veracity gives it a twinge of real danger, especially if the kid like tore her esophagus or something. This post, it’s like “Choose Your Own Moral Adventure.”
I remember when I was younger, asking my dad what would happen if somebody ate broken glass. He told me how if it was broken up small enough, it would probably cut tiny little holes all throughout the guts, resulting in the person bleeding to death from inside. This scared me sufficiently.
I blame the friend Mary.
I love seeing the differing opinions on what to do!
#2: Unfortunately, taking the child to a doctor isn’t really an option — if you take her to the embassy medical clinic, they’ll alert the parents. if you take her to some random doctor outside the embassy, well, good luck with that.
Everything hinges on the flimsy ornament glass. Would it simply digest, if she did manage to swallow some? It doesn’t seem capable of really injuring anyone, though one must suppose it conceivably could. What if the chances are only 1% that anything might possibly be wrong? And how “wrong” is “wrong” — if she just felt ill for a couple hours, that’s different from bleeding internally.
I’ll reveal what the nanny did, but not quite yet. These responses are interesting…
Tell for sure! Who knows what it could do to the poor girl’s insides. Hopefully the parents understand it could have happened in their care just as easily. I would rather lose my job than put someone’s (especially a little child’s) life at risk because of my own selfishness or fear…
Take her to a Soviet Dr. who, with a hand-rolled cigarette perced on the edge of his lip, will tell you: “No-ting to worry bout. We feed baby glass all time in Soviet Union. It’s good to strengthen digestion.”
Say you found broken glass in Allie’s crib, deduce that there is a possibility she put the glass in her mouth and suggest going to the doctor?
Say you found broken glass in Allie’s crib
Devious! But why din’tcha tell Darla about it until just now? And should you smash a bottle and sprinkle the pieces around Allie’s crib before saying this, just to back yourself up?
#11 is the best. ‘In Russia, glass eats you!”
Seriously, I’m brought back to those tapes I listened to often as a kid. Each tape was a story that focused around some moral characteristic: Courage, Dependability, Self-Esteem. Honesty. I remember the kid in Honesty got so wrapped up in all the lies he told that he started forgetting what he told who, and how he covered this event with which lie…
It seems like the same situation here. If you take the kid in on the sly, you have to lie to the parents to tell them where you’ve been and lie to the doctor when she asks how the kid got ahold of glass in the first place. Then, if she actually does anything ,the bill will get sent to Darla’s house and she’ll want another explanation of why she has to pay for this.
If you tell the parents that you found it in the crib, the you’ll have to cover for yourself when they ask why in the world you didn’t see it and how you found out the glass was there and where you think it came from… In all of these plausible situations, I can see a web of lies that would take a huge amount of effort to keep up. I can also see the growing number of gaps that any number of people might find in your net that might leave you exposed and fired anyway.
I’d tell the truth at the first. Right there in the kitchen, when Darla says she’s not eating anything. As non-confrontational as I am, and quoting those tapes from my childhood: “I’d rather tell the truth.” And while I’m being up-front, knowing I’d probaby be fired about this anyway, I’d say something like, “And I didn’t tell you about it last night because I knew how uppity and obsessive you are, Darla. I don’t like you, and as I’ll probably get fired for this, I quit.”
This way, you have the least amount of bad characteristics piled up against you. You only have possible carelessness in the workplace against you. Not dishonesty or deviousness or anything else Darla can come up with.
On the edge of my seat, here, Parrish! When are you going to reveal what happened? Did “the nanny” turn out to be Goofus or Gallant?
The nanny said nothing. She surmised, correctly as it turned out, that there was some other reason Allie wasn’t feeling well. When she looks back on this situation, she thinks it was actually relatively clear, except for the panic factor, that Allie hadn’t swallowed anything. Still, when she remembers, she feels the same fear welling up again, and breathes a sigh of relief.
Phee-yew!
Pretty much the rule of thumb is to deny everything. Only way the nanny would get busted is if the baby poops out shards of glass. Actually, it’s pretty hard to dust that for prints, so she should still deny everything.
Doesn’t matter which country you’re in.
As you can see, Mark got all the humor jeans in the family. This morning as I read the post (which was super by-the-way), I was trying to think of something clever, obviously I couldn’t…
It WAS a really good post; it kept us on the edges of our seat. Thanks for the suspense, Lisa. It proves you’re a good writer.