A/N: Short but sweet this time—with a bad case of back-to-school jitters. Thanks to Jan, Barbara, and Alison for their fine beta work.

Chapter 5

late November 2013

After their return from Artemis, Lizzy threw herself into getting ready to go back to work the following week. There were a million little things left to do on her list, and the list got longer the more she got into it.

On Sunday Lizzy tried on some of her work clothes and discovered that none of them fit except for a couple of skirts from midway through her pregnancy. Great! It was like she was four months pregnant again. She was still about 25 pounds heavier than her pre-pregnancy weight and thought that about 75% of that must be in her boobs. She couldn't quite figure out the math of how things had come to this. She had gained roughly 35 pounds during her pregnancy, and Emma weighed almost 9 pounds, and weren't you supposed to lose some weight from fluids and all that after delivery? It didn't add up, but there it was. Also, everything was a lot lower than it used to be, and various things that used to be big were small, and things that used to be small were big. It was a bit mystifying. But the bottom line was that she had to buy all new work clothes. And some new big nursing bras.

She called Jane, and they arranged to go clothes shopping at Macy's on Monday afternoon. Jane insisted that they hire a personal shopper. Lizzy resisted at first, but when she saw how much less time it made the whole agonizing process take, she was secretly happy they had done it.

Aiden played quietly in the corner until he got into the double stroller to take a nap, and Tyler slept in the stroller the entire time, while Jane held the squawking Emma.

The personal shopper rolled in rack after rack of suits and blouses until Lizzy finally found some things that would fit over her new belly and boobs and bottom and thighs. She also tried on new shoes to fit her wider feet, and bought loads of control-top pantyhose. She hated how she looked—like somebody's mother.

Which, she realized as she stared at herself in the mirror in the dressing room, was exactly what she was now. She was somebody's mother.

The next day, Lizzy went to the hair salon for her first haircut since Emma's birth. Emma nursed under the cape. At first the hairdresser didn't want to do it that way out of concern that she might accidentally stab a wiggling baby. Lizzy convinced her that Emma would be holding very still for half an hour and would probably fall asleep in her cozy little cave. It worked out fine, but the hairdresser told her that next time she'd need to leave the baby at home.

Another item on the to-do list was to make sure that there was enough breast milk stored up for Emma's daytime feedings while Lizzy was at work. Even though she knew she'd be bringing home new milk every day, the thought that Emma might be hungry and not have enough milk totally freaked her out. So she decided to pump as much as she could.

These days, every time Emma nursed, she fell asleep on Lizzy's lap for a half hour or so. So Lizzy took advantage of that to pump the breast Emma hadn't been nursing from. It didn't hurt, exactly, once she figured out how to turn the suction down, but the milk came out just a little bit at a time. It was frustrating to watch the milk container fill up so, so slowly. She suddenly had unexpected sympathy for cows. Once she knocked over a full container of that liquid gold on the coffee table, and she almost cried at the terrible waste.

Just to make sure that this was all worth it, once she tried feeding Emma some breast milk from a bottle. Emma was having none of it. She wanted the real thing, not some cheap plastic substitute. Still, since the only other option was formula, which Jane said was like feeding your baby straight-up pesticides, hormones, and other nasty development-impeding chemicals, she kept at it and hoped for the best.

Elena's previous employers had moved to Chicago the week before, and she was taking a well-deserved week off. She suggested to Lizzy that she might come over and spend some time with Emma before the big day next week. Lizzy thought that sounded like a good idea, so Elena came over on Wednesday afternoon and they hung out. Elena didn't want the visit to be on the clock because she didn't officially start till Monday, but Lizzy insisted. She thought it was only fair.

Elena came into the living room and threw a burp cloth over her shoulder before confidently taking Emma in her arms and giving Emma a big kiss. "Hi there funny girl! Hola! Say hello to Tía Elena. You want me to speak to her in Spanish, right?"

They talked about all of Emma's amusing little habits and quirks, like how she would arch and squirm while you were trying to change her diaper unless you sang her "The Ants go Marching" and walked your fingers up her legs. Although they had previously discussed Emma's sleep issues and how she liked to be held all the time, they revisited all that in great detail. They also discussed other things Lizzy found she was becoming more anxious about: Emma's not taking a bottle, her yucky diaper rash, how much and in what ways Lizzy and Elena would communicate during the day, and so on.

Elena seemed to take this all in stride. She had worked with lots of babies, she said, and she'd never yet met one she couldn't handle. "Everything will be OK," she said, holding Emma and stroking her head. Lizzy wasn't sure if she was talking to Emma or to her.

"We'll work on the sleeping," Elena said to Lizzy, smiling at Emma. "We'll get that all straightened out for you. She's a good little girl."

"Great. What kind of strategy do you think you'll take? She won't sleep for me, no matter what I do. She's too young for crying it out. And I really don't want to do that to her, anyway. I just can't stand it when she cries—"

"Oh, no, of course not, never," soothed Elena. And she talked about how she would put Emma in her crib, and rub her tummy, and speak softly to her, and sing her the same song every time so that she would associate it with sleep, and before Emma knew it she would be seduced into a long and deep slumber. Well, Lizzy doubted it, but Elena seemed to have backup plans in case that didn't work out.

"Great," said Lizzy. "I really have a hard time when she cries."

"I know. We mommies all do when our babies cry. There's something inside you that hurts when they do, right?"

"Yeah."

Elena said, "I know it's hard, but we'll be OK. You can call me anytime during the day. I have FaceTime(1) on my phone, and I'll show you what we're doing anytime you want."

"OK. Thanks, Elena. Half your job is taking care of moms, isn't it?"

Elena just laughed.

The three of them spent some time on the floor. Emma got in her tummy time on the baby gym, and Lizzy and Elena talked. Lizzy wanted to know Elena better—after all, they were in this together, this venture of raising Emma. What kind of person was she, other than being a super duper nanny?

"So, you said you've been in New York for about thirty years, is that right?" Lizzy asked.

Elena nodded, apparently calculating in her head. "Yeah, that's right. Plus or minus. A little less."

"What brought you over here?" Lizzy realized she was slipping into interview mode like she did when she was gathering information at work, so she tried to throttle down just a bit.

"Oh, well... I was a schoolteacher, middle school. Then my husband died—"

Lizzy murmured, "Oh, I'm sorry."

"—and I had to make more money for the kids. Things were bad then in the Dominican, the economy was bad. My brother was over here already, and he helped me get a work permit, so I came over."

"Did your kids come with you?" Lizzy asked.

Elena shook her head and made the animals on the baby gym jump up and down for Emma's amusement. "No, the boys stayed with my mother back home. My sisters took them a lot, too."

"That must have been really hard. How old were they?"

"Two, four, and seven."

"Wow. Wow."

"Yeah, it was tough. I was working a lot, though. No time to take care of them here."

"Were you a schoolteacher here, too?"

"No, no. I couldn't get certified in New York. The only job I could find was working as a nanny."

"Wow. How crazy is that? Leaving your kids for someone else to take care of so you could take care of someone else's kids." Lizzy thought about it for a bit. "How long were you and your kids apart?"

"About five years. My first job was not so great, so it took me some time to save up enough money to bring them over. Then I started working for a different family. They had a pretty room for me to live in, and they paid taxes and Social Security and even medical insurance. They helped me get citizenship, too. They were really nice."

Left unsaid was that the first family hadn't done any of that and hadn't been really nice.

"Where did your boys live when they came over?"

"They lived with my brother and his wife and kids, and my mother, in the Bronx. She came over, too."

God. The Bronx in the mid-1980s had been horrible.

"Did you get to see them at all?"

Elena nodded. "Oh, sure, on the weekends. They used to come see me after school sometimes, too."

"I guess you moved into your own place at some point?" Lizzy asked, curiously.

"Yeah, but not right away. The baby of the family started school, and they didn't need me full-time anymore. My middle son was starting high school, and he was getting in some trouble. He needed me around more, even though my mother and brother were doing what they could. So it was time to go."

"Did you squeeze into your brother's place, too?"

"No, I got my own. It's nice to have a place of my own after all those years of living under someone else's roof, and doing things someone else's way." She smiled.

"Yeah, I can imagine." Lizzy paused. "Did your mom move with you?"

"Yeah, she lived with us for a while. Now that my kids are grown up, she's back with my brother, though. My niece lives with me now. My place is closer to her college," she said, clearly proud that her niece was in college.

"Wow. I see what you mean that you couldn't have made it without your family."

"Nobody can, honey. It's too much for one person. I never understood how all these little families, just a mom and a dad, make it on their own. Do you have any family you can rely on?"

"No...Will's family is all gone, or couldn't or wouldn't help. Mine are all off in other places, doing their own thing." She explained a little more about her parents and her sisters.

"No friends to give you a hand, either?"

"Well, not easily. We don't live close together, and everybody is sort of in their own little box doing their own thing. A lot of my friends don't have kids, or they're working and have nannies. Or in Will's circle of friends, they're not working and still have nannies. I guess they need the time to get their hair and nails done and spend the afternoon drinking cocktails at the tennis club." She grinned and pretended to clink an imaginary martini glass with Elena.

Elena shrugged noncommittally. "Well, you look like you could use the time to take a shower and comb your hair."

"Oh, God, can you tell? I haven't had a shower today. This morning I took Emma into the bathroom in her car seat, but she started screaming and I had to get out of the shower before I even got wet."

Elena laughed. "I remember those days. Tell you what, I'll play with her for a while. You go take a shower."

So she did, her head buzzing with all the information that Elena had shared with her. At HRI she had been peripherally involved in a case about the rights of immigrant domestic workers. A young Pakistani woman, Amira, who worked as a nanny/cook/maid for a Pakistani-American family had been horribly abused. The woman of the house had done really unspeakable things to her while threatening her with deportation if she told anyone or tried to escape.(2) Writ large, unfortunately, this was a common enough story. HRI was trying publicize the egregious abuse in this case to pressure the Feds into doing something to protect women, like Amira, who basically just disappeared into somebody's house, with no labor inspectors or regulators of any kind looking out for their interests. Lizzy knew, theoretically, how it all played out. But these things had never hit quite so close to home before. Literally.

That evening Will came home from work late and they called for some Chinese food to be delivered from Chinese Dumpling Gourmet. After Lizzy tipped the guy at the door, they sat down to eat at the table in the breakfast nook. Emma nursed, as usual.

"So, Elena came over today to spend some time with me and Emma and get oriented. We had a really good talk. She has an interesting history."

"Oh, uh-huh?" said Will, mostly concentrating on his very yummy pork-and-green-bean dumpling.

"Well, I suddenly had this horrible realization that we're about to start participating in the structures of global exploitation of cheap female labor."

Will laughed. "Lizzy, we do that every day. Who do you think made this dumpling? Who delivered it? Who made that—" he gestured at her stretched-out maternity t-shirt "—whatever you're wearing?"

"A man delivered the food. I mean, we're doing this in our own home," she said earnestly.

"We're already doing it in our own home. Who do you think cleans our house?" Will asked, snagging another dumpling with his chopsticks.

"Oh, like you know who cleans our house," she retorted, a little irritated that he wasn't taking this seriously. She thought he still half-believed there were magical household fairies who would clean up all his messes, even though he did rinse out his own cereal bowl now.

He grinned at her. "Come on. Give me a little credit. And anyway, instead of looking at it like that, think about it this way: people, women, come to this country looking for a better job and a better life. They'd leave if things were worse for them here than where they started out. You're giving Elena a good job, and she's better off than she would be back...wherever she came from."

"The Dominican Republic. She's Dominican. I told you that before. And you know it isn't always that easy. Sometimes people get into things and they can't get out when they want to. They get stuck here." She picked up a dumpling and had almost put it in her mouth when she noticed she'd unthinkingly dipped it in the delicious-looking, and forbidden, hot oil sauce. She put the dumpling in Will's bowl and took another.

He shrugged and said matter-of-factly, "Sometimes, but you know, let the free market do its work. And anyway, you can do your best to be a kind, humane employer who she'll like working for. That's all anybody wants, I think."

"Hmmph," snorted Lizzy, putting down her chopsticks. "So we're just looking at this at the individual level, are we? No transnational human flows and big structural inequalities and all that?"

He crunched on some Chinese broccoli. "I think we have to. One individual woman, you, can't go back to work unless there is another individual woman, Elena, to take care of another individual baby woman, Emma. It's as simple as that."

"Oh, so it's all about women, is it?" Lizzy asked, ticked off by how he was framing this but also trying not to laugh about his calling Emma a baby woman. "Where do the men fit into all of this?"

"I don't know. It's a separate labor market, I guess. Anyway, this is how it is. What are you going to do? Are you not going to go back to work just so you can avoid giving someone a low-paid job? Someone who really wants that job, by the way? I don't think that's going to make anybody happy," he said, always the practical, utility-optimizing economics major.

She knew he was right. She couldn't do her job, which was an important one, and which she knew had caused some policy changes that made life measurably better for some people, without relying on those same people to do her housework. How ironic, or something.

"Yeah," she grumbled. "But I don't have to like it." She picked up her chopsticks again and reached for a dumpling.

Will gave an exaggerated sigh. "Aaaaah, First World problems," he said, referring to all the troubles and cares that came with having too much money, privilege, and leisure time.

"No, it's not a First World problem. All working mothers everywhere need child care, and then someone has to take care of the childcare worker's kids, here or in their home country. It's just punting the ball farther down the field. It's like this big web of interconnectedness," she said, holding up her hands with her fingers intertwined at funny angles.

"I think you think about these things too much," he said, gesturing toward her hands and smiling. This wasn't the first time a conversation between them had ended like this.

"I think you don't think about them enough." She gave him the lopsided grin that signaled the discussion was over.

Lizzy spent the rest of the week running errands, tying up loose ends, and trying to remember all the things she knew she was forgetting. She went to the mothers' group and said goodbye, since she wouldn't be seeing them again. She and Emma also went to the Metropolitan Museum and took one last look at the fountain where Claudia and Jamie Kincaid had bathed in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, one of Lizzy's favorite childhood books.

"You're not allowed to run away from home, Emma. I'll take you to the museum whenever you want," she whispered in Emma's ear.

All day Saturday and Sunday, Lizzy and Will just hung out with Emma, trying to get in this last bit of togetherness before everything changed. Actually, Will went off to play squash at the club on Saturday morning with an investor and went to the indoor driving range with another for an hour or so on Sunday afternoon. But in between, they walked Emma to the park, the toy store, the bookstore, and a café. They even went out for dinner on Saturday, to their favorite Thai place. They sat in a dark corner booth so that Emma could nurse unobtrusively. Of course had to settle for a whole meal of one-bomb dishes. It just wasn't as good as their five-bomb favorites.

Normally when they went out together, Will carried Emma in the Baby Bjorn. But that weekend, Lizzy carried her, clutching Emma tight with her arms, too, trying to charge up her baby batteries, fill up her baby reserves, in anticipation of saying goodbye on Monday, and every day after that.

On Sunday evening as they gave Emma a bath, Will asked, "Are you all ready to go tomorrow?"

"Yeah, I think so. Everything is checked off on my list, but—" she trailed off with her voice full of doubt.

"It's not like you're actually going away, you know. There are stores in New York. We can buy anything you forgot," he said reassuringly as he washed Emma's foot.

"I know. I still feel like I forgot something important, though." She stared off in the distance, trying to remember.

"Well, whatever it is, you can call Elena, and she'll take care of it. And if she can't, then Ahmed will do it. It'll be fine."

"OK, you're right. Oh, hold up her head! She doesn't like it when you let it flop over like that."

That night, Lizzy had a hard time falling asleep. Once she finally did, she didn't dream because, as usual, Emma woke her up to nurse every time she was about to enter REM sleep. But if she had dreamed, it would have been of scary monsters and masked figures swooping down and trying to steal away her baby.

Footnote:

(1) I'm sure everybody on this site already knows this, but, fellow Luddites, please let me explain that FaceTime is a smartphone app that lets you make a video call on your phone. I am very happy it is so easy to make futuristic video calls now, like in Dick Tracy, but I was also promised flying cars. Where are the flying cars?

(2) This isn't meant to single out Pakistanis or Pakistani-Americans as being particularly abusive of their domestic staff, but just to show in passing that it's common for co-nationals to end up in these situations. In fact, abuse of migrant domestic workers is widely reported all over the world, and there have been famous cases in Hong Kong, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East, the U.S., and other countries/regions that bring in a lot of women from other countries to do domestic work. If you're interested in an advocacy perspective on this, check out the Human Rights Watch site on domestic workers' rights.

Let's give it up for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Harriet the Spy, Eloise, and all the other children's books that first made us fall in love with New York City. Theoretical discussions about the international flow of female labor also welcome.