She Said, She Said

I missed this little gem over the weekend, but it's gotten lots of coverage on the internets as of late, so I finally decided to check it out. I was not disappointed. When Helaine Olen launched this scud of an article, I'm sure she thought she was covering all the bases -- hit a trendy subject and lard with limo-lib tropes, and saturate it with a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone.

Unfortunately for Olen, the article inadvertently tells us much more about her than about the blogging nanny. [emphases mine]

OUR former nanny, a 26-year-old former teacher with excellent references, liked to touch her breasts while reading The New Yorker and often woke her lovers in the night by biting them. She took sleeping pills, joked about offbeat erotic fantasies involving Tucker Carlson and determined she'd had more female sexual partners than her boyfriend.

How do I know these things? I read her blog.

She hadn't been with us long when we found out about her online diary. All she'd revealed previously about her private life were the bare-bones details of the occasional date or argument with her landlord and her hopes of attending graduate school in the fall.

Yet within two months of my starting to read her entries our entire relationship unraveled. Not only were there things I didn't want to know about the person who was watching my children, it turned out her online revelations brought feelings of mine to the surface I'd just as soon not have to face as well.

I hadn't exactly been a stranger to the sexual shenanigans of our previous baby sitters. One got pregnant accidentally by her longtime boyfriend and asked me for advice. Another was involved in a mostly off-again relationship with a fidelity-challenged college football player. Yet those were problems I could feel superior to and that made me grateful for the steady routine of marriage and children.

Well, I suppose Olen deserves some points for honesty here, as she reveals more and more with each turgid paragraph that it's really All About Her. The type who, when placing a personal ad, makes it along the line of, "self-absorbed narcissistic power yuppie seeks same". The type who think nothing of adding a dozen qualifiers of the "half-caf low-fat double-chocolate dash-of-caramel frothy latte" type to a goddamned cup of coffee.

The type of idiot who has no clue how smug and off-putting their solipsism is to pretty much everyone around them, and who usually end up having neurotic selfish asshole children who are seeing a shrink before they're out of high school.

The Drinkin' Promiscuous Nanny fires back hard, with the courage of conviction that tells you that she's right. She ably dissects each and every one of Olen's tawdry clucking-hen complaints, and takes a few well-placed shots of her own.

Instead of revealing me as an uncaring and insenstive woman, Ms. Olen actually reveals her own pathologies. In the next section where she talks about the "sexual shenanigans" of her former employers, she does so to appear "superior." I find this really disheartening considering she discusses an unplanned pregnancy and infidelity. Why are these very common, rather serious problems that women face, reduced to "shenanigans?" And why is she more comfortable when she can feel "superior?" Its a sad comment on who Ms. Olen is as a person.

....

It is particularly sad when Ms. Olen expressed "fear" that I would "judge her life and find it wanting." This might be hard for Ms. Olen to understand, considering this article reveals that she lives in an insular inner world where everything is about HER, but I didnt judge her life. Why? Well, I never really thought about it at all. She employed me to care for her children. Her choices? Her compromises? Not my business. The only times I considered her life was in relation to my employment: Would she manage her schedule so she would stop changing my hours? Would she and her husband figure out if they were staying in Brooklyn so I would stop having to listen to them debate moving to the suburbs? But I think it is also relevant to point out that Ms.Olen's expressed fear that I would judge her life, is really to try to paint me as anti mother and anti children. When in fact, I have consistently blogged about how I want to make professional choices now to ensure that I can be a mother some day. Those posts are here and here.

Still think I am a party girl who judges women with children?

But what I do find *wanting* about Ms. Olen is a shocking lack of integrity and ability to find reasonable perspective on her own life and others.

Nothing earth-shattering here, but if you want to check out a good and insightful rumble that reveals a bit about a certain breed of person, there ya go.