Mother for hire

"Mommy, Marta lives far away," my daughter said. "She lives very, very, very far away." This was true. I had dropped Marta off at her place on weekends but had never met her entire family. On her dresser in our home the faces of her two children were framed: her son standing in a colorful but shabby living room, her daughter in a blue satin dress posing for her Sweet Sixteen. They were both being brought up by sisters or aunts thousands of miles away, and Marta had not seen them in six years. I could not imagine the economic hardships that had compelled her to leave them, never mind the emotional ones she now had to shoulder. I probed only tentatively, protected by our language barrier, because I was certain that the truth would be too painful.

Could I blame her if there was a transference of love from her children to mine? For she had become like a second mother to Celeste, responded to her with effusive affection, indulged her with candies and tortillas despite my protestations. "It is good when little girls become gordita," she said. But I didn't want my daughter to become a little fatty. I was aware of a contemptible sentiment, but there it was: I adored Marta for her effusive love, but I was wary of our worlds overlapping.

"Can I go to Marta's house? Can I?" my daughter continued to ask. "One day," I said. But one day we traveled to a different place. It was the dinner hour, and Celeste was having a tantrum, with all the fiery histrionics of a two-year-old on a rampage. She threw her food across the kitchen. I spoke to her in a sharp voice; Mommy was clearly not happy. She ran out of the kitchen and headed for Marta's room. Before I could grab her, Marta had scooped her up. "Chickie-tita," she said. "Mama-linda." She stroked her hair. "What is wrong with my baby?" Celeste hung onto Marta with a defiant look as if to say, Come and get me. And that is precisely what I did. "Marta," I said. "Give Celeste to me." Celeste wrapped her legs harder around Marta, then strained past her at the lure of the TV. Marta held Celeste and did not move. "Marta," I repeated. "Give me Celeste." And in that fleeting moment Marta did the one thing she should never have done: She did not give my child back to me.

And so we were finally at this place: a pinnacle where the slippery slope of love and power divided us, the ground zero of our true distrust and suspicion. All of the sociocultural complexities behind our relationship fell away, and what was left was a weighted sense of loss and displaced motherhood. I had implicitly asked Marta to love my child like her own but never to cross that invisible line. But she did. Could I reproach her for that as well? Later we spoke at length and found a truce, but something had definitively shifted. There was distrust on both sides now: not only mine of Marta, but Marta's of me. For what mother makes her child cry like that? Perhaps, underneath it all, there was also the unconscious questioning of our mutual predicament, in all its cruel and relentless irony. For what mother lets her children be raised by other people? And the answer is: mothers just like us.

The ensuing days were strained. I felt like I'd ripped out a little piece of Marta's heart, and this sadness moved me to do something I'm loath to admit: One day I went into her room and rummaged through her affairs. Why was I here? Was I trying to understand Marta in some way? Or get closer to her? There was her faded blue purse. A half-used tube of Ben-Gay (a reminder that caretaking is backbreaking work). I pulled open the drawer of her bedside table, and there was her Libro Catolico de Oraciones. I don't read Spanish well, but I got the drift: the prayers, the yearning for salvation and God-like intervention. I imagined Marta at night, exhausted after a long day cleaning house and watching Celeste. With her Bible and her Ben-Gay, she was praying for a better life.

I didn't know if she would get this better life. But inevitably the time came: Celeste was rapidly approaching preschool age and soon, I would no longer need Marta's services. I dreaded the moment, for I'd grown to care deeply for this woman -- even the confrontations and the strain had become a source of connection between us. But now there was the queer sensation that she was already fading into memory even as she stood in front of me; that she was already moving into that oneiric place where all Martas and Marias and Anas went -- dark-skinned women and mothers who shepherd our children through some of the most pristine moments of their lives. I had my own memory of our housekeeper, Maria -- a strange but faded confluence of images from the sixties: there was Gilligan's Island, Black Panthers, flower power ... and Maria, ironing, chasing us through a messy house. What would happen to Marta? What would Celeste remember of her as she slowly dissipated from the urgency of the moment?

Six months after she stopped working for us as a live-in nanny, Marta still comes by to clean our house. When she crosses paths with Celeste en route to preschool they are overjoyed to see each other. Paradoxically, a new closeness has developed between the two of us in the absence of our live-in relationship, with all its emotional gray zones. Marta has still not found a new full-time job and she worries. She needs the money: Her son in Belize has health problems. Her daughter, who was accepted to medical school in Juarez, is pregnant. Now Marta wonders -- and the irony does not escape her: Who will take care of my daughter's child? Marta sighed. "It's a lot of work." "Yes," I said, "but at least you know exactly what you're getting yourself into." She smiled as if it were consolation, though we both knew that it was not.

Excerpted from "Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves," edited by Kate Moses and Camille Peri, former editors of Salon's Mothers Who Think. Copyright (c) 2005 by HarperCollins. Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers.

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