My Dear Old Nanny

In the last Hackie column, "Olde School Cabdriver," a customer tells me about her childhood with a full-time nanny. I'm always somewhat floored when I run into a person with that history.

I grew up in a time when most women, even middle-class women, stayed home to raise the kids. It was possible, way back then in the antediluvian days of the 20th Century, for a family to enjoy a decent standard-of-living on a single person's salary. Hard to believe, ain't it? The only nannies I heard about were from books with characters in the English royal family. Plus, mom-at-home or not, I spent every single day, from the minute school let out until dinner, playing on the streets and schoolyard of my neighborhood. The streets were my nanny, baby!

Now, of course, it's not uncommon for a couple with two professional jobs and a couple of kids to have full-time, in-house childcare help. It actually can be less expensive then carting the kids to a decent daycare center everyday. So, I have no judgment about it being elitist or some such, it just is entirely foreign to my experience.

Anybody out there in blog-land have any experience with nannies in their life? What's it like? Did you ever forget who your real mommy was?