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through three nannies in one year. The one who was supposed to be the other family’s loss but our gain never showed up.
    The last one had a bag of Doritos in her open purse. The last thing I needed was Duncan one day eating Doritos. I crossed her off even though I myself had eaten most of Russell’s Doritos the night before.
    The next day I took Duncan to his Baby Time class myself. I’d signed up for the class the last week of my maternity leave, so Careena had always been the one to take him, and I’d been too excited to sleep the night before because I was finally going to be the one to take him.
    â€œWe’re going to school,” I told him as I ran, pushing the stroller like a plow.
    Sitting in a circle on a rubber mat, I asked all the mothers if they could recommend a nanny. “Be careful,” a mother named Dara said. “Our nanny got into an accident and we had no choice but to take in her baby and toddler and dog.”
    â€œAnd dog!” I said. I could not believe what I was hearing.
    â€œAn Italian greyhound named Lightning. My husband walks her while I feed the children. I even breast-feed the little one.”
    â€œSo you’re a wet nurse for your nanny!” I practically screamed.
    â€œBasically yes,” she said. “And we’re still paying her salary while she’s in the hospital. What could we do? It sounds terrible, but try not to get one with young children. Just think long and hard before you pick one.”
    â€œExcuse me, but I could not help hearing-over,” my friend Gerde said. She had moved from Germany to New York and we had become friends during my maternity leave and sometimes sat in the playground on the weekends with Duncan and her daughter, Minerva, asleep in their identical denim Bugaboo strollers. Having the same taste in strollers and children the same age was enough to make us eligible to be friends for life. And we had both shown up a week early for the first class and stood outside the locked door confused together. She had a short blond bob and dressed like a housewife from the fifties for some reason, in shirtdresses all the time. She was very particular about what she ate and read too many magazines, so when we got together we always had to walk a million miles to some terrible sandwich shop that had just opened up and wait on a long line for some kind of trendy open-faced thing or little tart. But there was nothing in this world like walking down the street with another mother, our strollers side by side, proudly pushing our cargo, feeling at once as powerful as a God and as small as a worker ant carrying a crumb. Raising children in tandem, even if it was only for an hour here and there, made me feel like the greatest mother, and therefore person, on earth. “Did you say you are wet nurse to your nanny?”
    â€œWell I hadn’t thought of it that way, but yes,” Dara said.
    â€œI can not even believe it!” Gerde said in her heavy accent. “And you don’t mind to change her children’s diapers?”
    Gerde was the only mother I had ever seen who kept rubber gloves in her diaper bag and used them to change a diaper. Between the rubber gloves and the Purell, she turned museum bathrooms and park benches into some kind of a MASH unit. I was surprised there weren’t surgical masks tossed in with the Seventh Generation biodegradable.
    â€œI don’t have a choice.”
    â€œWell, of course you had a choice,” said a mother I had taken an instant dislike to for no reason other than she was already pregnant with her second.
    â€œNo, I really didn’t. She’s a single mother with a three-year-old and an eight-month-old. No family in this country. I don’t mind the diapers but I hate getting up at night with the baby. I haven’t sleep-trained him yet. And my husband and I can never go out anymore.”
    â€œWho took care of the kids while she was working?” a