"Madam" at 31

t this point in our lives, I'm sure many of us consider ourselves fairly adept at playing the many roles we have either been saddled with or have voluntarily embraced, while simultaneously forming new relationships with people around us. We are all daughters and sisters, wives and mothers, friends and confidants, acquaintances and associates. The list goes on. We play these roles with all the charm and charisma that we can muster, in the hopes that the other actors around us will not discover what we know to be true: we are always only seconds away from a juggling fiasco. If we were to be truly honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that our ability to succeed at balancing these roles depends mostly on being able to get what we want from others without simultaneously having to give them too much of ourselves in the process. I have found this balance quite difficult to achieve of late, mainly because I am donning a brand new role for which I have been completely inadequately prepared: I am now the proud employer of a middle-aged Sri Lankan live-in nanny.

You thought I was going to say proud owner, didn't you? I wish the most troubling aspects of this complex relationship were the issues of third-world labor rights and expatriate delusions of grandeur. Oh no, the dynamic goes much deeper than social issues or American egocentrism, having formed way back in my childhood on a small farm in a small town in a small state in the Northeastern United States. (Okay, I'm going really deep, but it will all be worth it, I promise.) During my youth, my parents of pioneer stock instilled in me three important things: a keen sense of money management (including a considerable fear of financial debt), a highly developed Protestant work ethic, and an almost unbearable standard of self-sufficiency. "Never let anybody else do anything for you that you can do for yourself" is a mantra that should have been nailed to the barn my father built with his bare hands. And my parents were as good as their word: upon graduation from high school, I received three pieces of packed luggage and a handshake. While I didn't let the door hit me on the way out, I began to realize that my parents' gifts to me would be both a blessing and a curse in my life.

My money managing skills came in quite handy during my years pursuing a PhD on the East Coast, eating breakfast cereal for breakfast, lunch and dinner. My decision to work a full-time job while going to school full-time was driven by both my stalwart work ethic and the necessity to make ends meet without incurring any "unnecessary debt." After my marriage to an over-worked, underpaid officer in the Foreign Service--which marked my transition from one side of the poverty line to the other, as I now had another paltry income to supplement my own--I realized that I had to work even harder than ever as we began to plan our family. The arrival of children turned our attention toward living abroad not only for the financial incentives offered by embassy-provided housing and obvious cultural benefits, but also in order to provide for them educational experiences that we never had.

Our children were also the motivation for one of the first decisions we made after agreeing to serve our first tour in a Middle Eastern country: the hiring of a live-in housemaid and nanny (called "live-in" for short). We reasoned that such a move would free my husband and me from menial chores, which would in turn allow us to spend more quality time with our children. Having a live-in would also provide me with the opportunity to teach at a local university and thus further my own career while still donning the obligatory role of the trailing embassy spouse--another role that has taken more emotional energy than I originally thought I would have to give it. The live-in we chose came highly recommended: not only had she worked for two other Foreign Service families, but she had also spent the last six years working in the same house--the very house we were moving into. You could almost say we inherited her. By the time my husband and I actually arrived in Dubai, we were perhaps most excited by even the mere possibility of a life without laundry, and we were anxious to embrace the social freedom that was certain to come our way with the addition of a full-time sitter for our two small children. So with great feelings of excitement toward the future--and perhaps not enough trepidation from the past--we met the newest member of our household.

It became apparent to me by the end of the second day how my childhood education on the farm complicated my foray into the world of house help. I spent the first week of our new life together begging our live-in to stop calling me "Madam," and instead refer to me by my given name. She spent the first week ignoring my requests. Not having been a "madam" before, I found the term somewhat embarrassing, as well as demeaning, both to myself and to her: I certainly don't feel (and indeed am most definitely not) old enough to be called "madam," especially by a woman who is old enough to be my own mother. Besides an implied level of maturity, the word also implies an advanced level of monetary means and the power that goes with it, which, as the wife of a junior government officer, I can assure you is certainly not the case. But as the days went on, I realized that my discomfort with this new title stemmed more from my own guilt at letting somebody else do work that I was fully capable of doing than with theoretical constructs of class and race. I believe that it was, in fact, due to this guilt of luxury that I subconsciously began to try to carve out a different kind of relationship with our live-in. Being an employer felt too uncomfortable: I began to want a friend.

I must admit here that either my childhood lack of female companions with which to bond (growing up with six brothers on a farm was not exactly fertile soil in which estrogen could take good root) or my displaced identity in Dubai as one of the newly arrived huddled masses yearning to be free from the drudgery of my own life might also have explained my desire to make friends with the live-in. Regardless, the revelation was fraught with troubling ramifications and personality quirks I wasn't ready to face. Indeed, no one can read a bookshelf full of books titled, "Orientalism," "Whiteness of a Different Color," "The Politics of Housework," and "How the Other Half Lives" and bumble ahead in gleeful ignorance of their most basic actions. And so the questions began. Did I desire to make friends with my nanny in order to assuage my own guilty conscience? Would special kindness somehow bridge the gap between the little money I paid her (relative to my own standards of a good day's pay for a good day's work) and the large amount of work she did everyday? Could it, like any good Ambien fix, give me more restful nights? Did I want to befriend because I pitied her washing other people's underwear hundreds of miles from her own daughter? Or was it merely my way of trying to navigate the physical closeness and yet the emotional distance inherent in the employ of a live-in?

Regardless of the reason(s) for my desire (and I am still trying to figure them out), I moved onward and upward with my recipe for a successful friendship with a domestic employee. As we all know, every good friendship must include the ability to show vulnerability. The first time I cried in front of the nanny she became so frightened that she physically shook, began speaking so rapidly I couldn't understand a word she was saying, and she eventually actually had to leave the room. Later that day she confided in me, telling me that none of her employers had ever cried in front of her and would I please never do that again. Heritage or nationality aside, there is a line between employer and employee that I have discovered is more cross-cultural than I at first had imagined.

Every good friendship must also include the capacity for complaining and consoling. I have found it almost as impossible to complain to the nanny about traffic tickets, rude cashiers, or long lines at malls or amusement parks as it has been for her to console me. After a tsunami has wiped out a good portion of your country, virtually crippling the economy and orphaning thousands of children, it becomes a little hard to complain about life's trivial misfortunes, and a little hard for others to understand why they are so frustrating. I cannot find in the live-in another privileged American who can listen to my paltry problems and provide a nod of sincere empathy in the direction of my plight.

We all know that friendship thrives on good old-fashioned honest communication. One of the safe subjects the nanny and I can broach is the subject of child-rearing, which seems especially relevant since she is taking part in the raising of my children. We have had marvelous discussions that I leave believing the mysteries of child disciple have all been solved, and then return home after an evening out at eleven o'clock in the evening only to discover all the lights in my three-year-old's room are still on, and he has drunk the equivalent of about 45 oranges since we left three-and-a-half hours ago. Notwithstanding any cultural differences in communication or child discipline, I have come to realize that while these discussions about child-rearing always seem fruitful to me at the time, the live-in's fear of offending my children and garnering a bad report from them, and thus jeopardizing her job, makes honest communication with me on this topic a bit of a farce.

The jeopardy of job loss clouds even the most innocent of interpersonal exchanges. When I casually asked her if she had seen a coin purse that had gone missing for a couple of days, she immediately panicked, told me several times that it MUST be somewhere in the house, and commenced a frantic search for it. I, meanwhile, had not even stopped to consider the possibility that an accusation might be embedded in the question.

Finally, friendship is all about sharing with each other. My efforts to share my children's old clothes and toys with the nanny and her nieces and nephews often leave me feeling embarrassed, particularly when the items are making the transition from worn to downright homely. I would never think of sharing these items with other (read, Western) friends that I have made here in Dubai, and would perhaps be insulted if items in such condition were sincerely shared with me. My nanny's efforts to share with me actually heighten my feelings of shame as her beautiful and thoughtful homemade birthday and Christmas gifts "cost" her more than parting with my leftovers will ever cost me.

Even my small gestures of friendship, which often begin with, "We have plenty of (dessert, expensive fruit, Christmas candy, etc.): please take some and eat it," are repulsed, not because they are inherently demeaning or patronizing, but because the wording of the offer is vague and allows room for misunderstanding of amounts to be taken and number of pieces actually being shared. She would not want to be accused of taking something that does not belong to her, for reasons I think we can both understand quite clearly.

I'm still not sure I have come to a comfortable place with the nanny. But a little introspection has led to a renewed effort to try to understand where my nanny is coming from, and to re-evaluate the inappropriateness of my demands on her for her friendship. Many of us often make unrealistic demands on those around us in order to fulfill our own needs, but when we do, we end up giving up more of ourselves than we are able. I think it's healthy to occasionally question my own competency in maneuvering the subtle minefields of human interaction, and I've learned that it's okay to have a few things blow up in my face now and then.

--Amy Bangerter