The Nanny Diaries And Rent-A-Mum

Here my situation:

1) My former confinement nanny (yes, the shark) has a wild preference for being blocked off for weeks at a time, months in advance, even when I only need her for a day or two a week tops, so I can take Rockstar to a music class (conducted in Cantonese, an effort to get him to learn the local language)/ spend a few hours at the pool with him, have lunch with girlfriends. (Kings is more often than not either exhausted or not at home so can’t swing a feed while I pump).

2) I like my current (daft but sincere) helper because where we live the helper community tends to teach each other annoying things (for e.g. our previous yet-another-helper-whom-we-were-assured-was-incorruptible found out I was pregnant, decided she could get an easier gig, proceeded to destroy more than 10 items of clothing, many of which were branded (apparently you can only deduct a maximum of HKD 300 per month from their salary for stuff they destroy) in order to get herself fired rather than resign (because when you fire a helper you have to pay them an extra month salary and an air ticket home).

We know this for a fact because when the agent came to collect her she boasted, “Been messing up deliberately for ages, they took so long to get the hint!”)

3) Our current helper is less inclined to um, learn anything easily. Waiting at the bus stop for Rockstar, she was once unable to communicate to me that his school bus had come and gone without him getting off. It was only a few minutes before the bus doubled back, but I know this because coincidentally I had called about something unrelated around the time the bus pulled away sans Rockstar and she’d not said anything, she herself would tell me later.

(Rockstar would narrate he’d seen the doors close before he was near enough to get off and thinking the bus would move again too soon for him to do anything, had promptly returned to his seat, buckled back his seatbelt – and waited. “When we move again the bus mum goes around checking,” he said, and sure enough as his bus mum did the rounds she’d exclaimed “What are you STILL doing on the bus?” and they’d swung back to let him off. Standing in our doorway, he would pronounce gravely, “She was really quite surprised, actually.”)

Also why we drum into Rockstar, getting on and off taxis and other vehicles, to find the shortest, safest distance to a kerb and stay there. And though I still do any medicating (also very good at putting pills down the dog’s throat btw), Rockstar and I go over reading the labels and measuring out medicines repeatedly – I have more faith in my 4.5yr old self-medicating correctly than in my helper getting it right.

Silver lining: Rockstar learns to check what my helper does, instead of relying heavily on her.

Conclusion reinforced: Helper shall not be left alone with baby. (Not just applicable to current daft helper, also to any new helper who might be spiteful if ticked off. When I worked we even had cameras accessible via your cellphone on the internet. Know what? That camera can’t pick up what’s in your child’s bowl.)

So I’ve recently started engaging Rent-A-Mum on days when I attend music class with Rockstar, and intend to do so for any school and other social events I might need to attend as well. Charges are – wait for it – a whopping HKD 180 an hour, before 20% agency fees.

Now hear me out.

1) In the almost 2.5 years I worked and Rockstar’s main caregiver was a helper, we ended up changing helpers 3 times. That’s 1 month additional salary (unless you want an almost-out-the-door-and-knows-it helper in your home, occasionally alone with your kids, handling your food, for a month) + air ticket back home.

Today a helper’s salary is about HKD 3,800 min, I think few years ago it was about HKD 3,300. We paid these yes, 3 times.

2) You also owe them air tickets home. About HKD 2-3k, up to a whopping HKD 8k, once, for a helper who lived in a very ulu area requiring changes of flights. No we did not pay that 3 times. We paid MORE times.

For two helpers (one of whom had a very solid character recommendation or we would’ve caught on sooner how dodgy she really was), we paid for two additional trips home (though you are only required to give them a ticket home for the hols in their second year of service), not including the one we are required by law to pay them when we fire them.

Why? Partly because they cared for my child so I would at least try to keep them happy. The other reason being I fall willingly for the “You are a mother too, you must understand I miss my children,” pitch every time. Grateful are we to have been the ones blessed by the Lord to be able to afford generosity, instead of being the ones wrangling for it.

3) For the helper with “solid character recommendation” we sprang for an additional HKD 2,000-ish baby care course complete with CPR training and report card and certification, which the helper gets to keep as her own professional training (that helper btw would end up apprehended and detained for questioning by the HK police, occasionally coming home in the wee hours of the morning or not at all, fabricating an elaborate story about helping in a church and therefore not being able to work for two weeks, getting sick with very scary coughs and colds every couple weeks when we needed her to handle a baby and I was at work 10, 12 hours a day.)

4) Cost of more than 10 clothing items (ours as well as Rockstar’s) of Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein etc, some of them brand new, that one helper ruined in order to get herself fired.

Somewhere in there will also be my response to suggestions of getting a second live-in helper. That’s a second monthly salary, screw-up risk, termination risk/costs plus air tickets… And a helper we mostly don’t need except when I can’t be two places at once. (I didn’t even want a first full-time helper before the baby, when we just had Rockstar – just a part time cleaner/ dog walker – but Kings insisted after I once passed out from a stomach flu and then couldn’t walk. He didn’t want that should happen when he was away working and I was home alone with Rockstar.)

Q1: Was all that money spent on dodgy helpers comparable to how much a premium nanny would cost?

Because I couldn’t justify paying a second helper salary for a lot more hours (and problems) I don’t need, instead of premium care specifically for the hours I do need.

Q2: Which money is more “well spent” – on a professional nanny providing the best care and speaking perfect English to the kids, or on a bunch of helpers who provided Rockstar with absolute crap care and filled his head with rubbish when he asked questions about the world in general?

(For e.g. In answer to him once asking why there was a dead sparrow on a kerb, an ex-helper thought it was hilarious to illustrate her response with a graphic stomping and grinding of her foot. I was right there. Obviously she saw no problem with such an answer. I wonder what answers she would consider problematic to give in front of me and so would tell Rockstar when I’m not around. Hmm. This is hard to imagine.)

Ps: Rent-a-mum would later explain to me company policy that any child below 20 months was allocated a nanny who was certified in child care and first aid. As a bonus, the professional nanny we were allocated is also a certified baby massage therapist (that bit about awakening their senses through touch, reflexology etc – I hadn’t been looking, but pretty happy with).

What I really appreciated was her diligently endeavoring to settle Ms Rockstar in her crib so she wouldn’t just be used to being cuddled to sleep all the time. Despite the higher incidence of screaming. Lotsa people I know would just cave and carry the baby throughout. I would be sorely tempted to do that, if I wasn’t the main recipient of future bad habits of Ms Rockstar’s myself.

Ms Rockstar: That’s umpteen Malaysians and Singaporeans, Hong Kongers, an American or two, and now also my British nanny I’ve screamed my lungs out at. British national (of Scottish origins)…. Check!