Sierra

By Feature Writer Rebecca Nelson Lubin
I met Sierra in 1997 when I arrived for my meet the children interview for what was to be my first full time Nanning job. She was four years old, with blond hair cut short like a boy’s, huge brown eyes and a tiny little body barely grown beyond the perfect roundness of toddlerhood. She lived with her sister Willow, a lanky five-year-old with equally huge brown eyes, and her dad Jim, who was raising them alone after a divorce. Being a transplanted New Yorker, I couldn’t quite grasp the concept of a Single Dad, but hey, this was San Francisco. Things were different out west, even though I was quite certain that had my dad been left to raise me alone in the 70’s, he would have surely lost me before a week went by.

My first day with Sierra was a bust. I should have been warned that she was a Scorpio with a spirit filled with pure fire, but I might have declined the position had I known what was in store for me. I managed to get her out of her pajamas after breakfast, but could not convince her to get dressed for preschool. For three hours I pleaded and cajoled and sweated that I would be let go on my very first day of being a full time Nanny while she sat and screamed at me in defiance, clad only in GAP extra small purple checkered underwear, occasionally standing up to yell “Go Away!” and whack her head against her armoire doors in anger. She soon had a large red welt on her defiant little forehead.

Jim poked his head in the doorway of her room and smiled.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “you’re being tested.”

I was indeed. But I held my ground – for weeks – and Sierra evened out eventually when she saw I wasn’t going to cave. We grew very close very quickly. I would arrive at her house at 6:45 each morning and tiptoe upstairs to find her and her sister curled up with their dad in his bed, the three of them all sleepy with messy hair. He would carry them to the breakfast table where Sierra would promptly hide her vitamins under her napkin and Jim would read to the girls from the New York Times while they munched on orange slices and competed on who would feed him his pills. I learned slowly over those first weeks that Jim, aged 58, suffered from a heart condition. He had had a heart attack a few years back and confided in me during my first weeks that he feared he would not be around long enough to walk his girls down the aisle at their weddings, but he hoped to at least see them thorough college graduation. I quickly grew devoted to the three of them.

At four, Sierra attended afternoon preschool, so we had all morning to play. She would dress herself in something cute and frilly, put on her little bunny fur coat, slide on sunglasses and suggest, “shall we go to a café?”

I accompanied them that first summer to their house in the Hamptons. Sierra would creep into my bed in the middle of the night and sleep all snuggled up with me, whispering in my ear, “I love you so much.” My heart felt full.

My heart would sink when I had to chaperone her between her parents. We would fly back to San Francisco mid summer so she could spend two weeks with her Mom, and she cried to leave her Dad. She would then cry all over again at SFO, when she had to leave her Mom. It tore me apart to see her so sad. It seemed that her young existence was a never-ending series of saying goodbye to one of her parents. During the school year, when she came back to her Dad’s house on Sunday nights, I would help him prep for a welcoming environment for his girls: a warm fire crackling, fresh apples in a bowl on the coffee table and ice cream at the ready. He would sit with his girls in front of the fireplace and read to them and soothe them until bedtime. He made such a special home for them.

By the time Sierra was turning seven, I had a hard decision to make. I needed to make more money, and my job, with both the kids in school full time, was really becoming a part time position. There was no way I could ask for a raise. I had to give my notice. My last night was on Sierra’s seventh birthday. There was fire in her eyes when she told me that she knew I was leaving on her “birthday night.” We took a picture of the girls and me that last night, and she refused to sit next to me. She sat on the far side of her sister Willow, with the hood of her sweatshirt pulled up, arms crossed against her chest, looking pissed.

I babysat for them sporadically over the next two years, and attended their holiday parties, and loved them from afar. I was Nanning on Oahu in February of 2003 when Jim called me to say they were coming there for vacation. We all had dinner, during which nine year old Sierra asked me what my plans were for when I returned to California.

“We don’t have a Nanny,” she said pointedly, “and we only need part time. Can you do that?”

I looked at Jim.

“Seriously?”

“Sure.” He said.

And so I came back.

Sierra and Willow were living half time with both parents at this point so Jim’s needs for a Nanny was only a handful of nights a week and several weekend days a month. I could easily accommodate them along with my full time job and I was so happy to be back. The girls were growing up to be such beautiful little ladies, with crazy long legs and whip smart little minds. I planned and oversaw their birthday parties, took them on clothes shopping excursions and for haircuts.

“Do you think I look like a boy?” Sierra asked me at ten, looking in the salon mirror at the results of her latest pixie cut.

“I think you look beautiful,” I said, and took her for hot chocolate.

“Your son is so cute,” a women cooed to us five minutes later in the coffee shop and Sierra flipped up the hood of her sweatshirt over her hair and shot me one of her looks filled with fire.

“That’s it. I’m growing it out.”

They moved over the bridge to Marin that year Sierra was ten, and it was great to have them living only ten minutes from my home in Mill Valley. Long past the years when I would spend the summer with them back east, I still packed them up every June and shipped what they needed to New York, and brought their dog to the airport in his crate. I would drive back to the airport in San Francisco towards the end of August to welcome them home. But the summer of 2004, only the girls came back. Jim had suffered a second heart attack in Sagaponack, and remained in the hospital in New York after a grueling quadruple bypass. He would need some time to recover before he came home, so the girls began their school year without him, staying for a month with their Mom. I was so relieved when he came back to their home in Tiburon, and their life as a little family resumed. Everything went back to normal. I oversaw Sierra’s 11th birthday sleepover that November, helped them set up their Christmas Tree in December, and worked with Jim on putting together all the family photographs in huge leather albums – he was always in a hurry to have everything organized for his girls, and their memories were no exception.

“I want them to be able to remember everything when I am gone,” He would say, sitting beside me and passing me pictures to tape on the pages.

“Aw Jim,” I would say, “that won’t be for a long time!”

But life was certainly changing, and fast. Willow at thirteen was, well, willowy, tall and slim and beautiful. Sierra was shocked one afternoon in the dressing room at JCrew to discover that she suddenly needed a bra.

“You better come in here,” she yelled out, angry. She was still a total tomboy, even though her old pixie cut was grown out to her shoulders.

“I think we’d better go to the lingerie department at The Gap.” I said, and it made me almost tearful to see her picking out sports bras. I still had a picture of her in my head at four years old in the little baby underwear on my first day with her.

On the way home she asked me to tell her dad I had brought her a bra. She was too embarrassed to tell him herself.

At twelve she grew taller than me. She enjoyed laying her arm across the top of my head and mocking my short stature. She called me “Beccy Boo.” She still liked to talk with me about anything, and lie on the couch with her arm entwined with mine watching movies, and laugh at me from across the dinner table. She was still a delightful little girl.

Then, everything changed with her 13th birthday. She grew surly and secretive. Her entire life revolved around her cell phone and computer, constantly texting and chatting with her friends. She was rude to her father, and shouted at him with a fire I hadn’t seen in her since she was a small child, still reeling from her parent’s divorce. She was rude to me, and the weekend I babysat for her right before she turned fourteen still ranks as one of the worst weekends of my life. She snuck friends over and I grounded her, and when, chastised, she tearfully asked me if I was going to tell her father I replied,

“No. You are.”

After I made her write out all her crimes in a letter to her dad we sat and had a long talk.

“What kind of person do you want to be?” I asked her.

She thought about that one for a while, and her behavior slowly evened out. As the school year wound down, she was full of excitement. 8th grade graduation was around the corner, and she had been accepted to attend the same boarding school as her older sister. The entire family would be moving to Santa Barbara at the beginning of the summer. The last Sunday in May of 2008, I sat with Jim, finishing up the photo albums. It was our next to last weekend before they moved and we spent time talking over ten years of stringing Christmas lights together and watching his girls grow up. Sierra rushed in to show us a beautiful white dress she had bought to wear to her graduation ceremony.

“Dada can I get new shoes too?” she asked as I got up to leave.

I hugged them both and said, “I love you guys. See you next week. The last week I work as your nanny!”

“You’ll have to visit us in Santa Barbara!” Jim called out as I left.

And then, the next day, he died.

It was a third heart attack that did him in, while he power walked at Crissy Field, just after dropping Sierra off at school. I was in shock. In tears, I remembered our conversations when Sierra was four and he mused that he just wanted enough time to see her through college graduation. It seemed so cruel that he didn’t even make to see her graduate eighth grade.

I went with his close friends to the hospital where they had taken his body to say goodbye. He still wore his watch, and I sadly removed it from his wrist to give to the girls. He had worn it everyday that I had known him, so surely there must have been some good energy in that leather band. I kissed his cold forehead and vowed to always be there for his girls, and then I pulled myself together and drove to Tiburon to see them.

They were laying together on Sierra’s bed, looking pale and totally in shock. I didn’t know what to say. There really wasn’t anything to say. I just sighed and lay down with them and held their hands.

The next week passed in a blur. I rushed to their house every night after work, and we pulled out all those photo albums Jim had had me put together, and watched all the family videos that he had had me edit. He certainly knew what he was doing when he organized all those memories for them. There was a memorial service, and Sierra wore the white dress that she had bought only four days before for her graduation. She stood up and spoke of her father, and read a poem that she had written about him, and she was so poised and gracious that I cried all the more. I was proud of her fortitude. That old fire she had always possessed was going to see her through this, the early loss of her father, this horrible tragedy of her childhood. I went to her graduation party that Friday night and found myself wishing that I could just turn back time and bring her father back to her. Like that scene in the movie Superman where Lois Lane dies in the earthquake and Superman, overcome with grief actually flies up into the sky and around the earth with enough force to make our planet spin backwards on it’s axis until he has reversed time to right before Lois dies, and he saves her. I wanted to be able to do that for Sierra, and I felt powerless with the fact that I was only human, and I could change nothing. I could only be there for her, and give her whatever support she needed, and let her know that that would never change.

And that has been the basis of our relationship ever since.

It’s been brutal at times, wishing so much that you could bring back the only person that a little girl needs in her life. It’s been amazing at times to find the exact words she needs to hear to make sense of the direction that life has taken her, how in an instance she went from being a protected and highly parented child living with a father who adored her to a teenager adrift, navigating an uncertain life in a dorm room in a new school in a new town with new friends who never knew her devoted father, never knew her life “before.” Her face seemed worn the first time she visited San Francisco, over the summer just after her father’s death. Her fourteen-year-old face was baby smooth and beautiful – and etched with grief. Her eyes were darkened. Her smile, non-existent, her energy, slackened by sheer loss. I cried driving home over the bridge after our brunch. I cried many times after getting off the phone with her, after talking her through her tears, and reassuring her that things would be easier to bear with time. I always managed to hold off my own tears until we had hung up.

And time has made the burden easier. She and her sister drive up for visits and we gather together all of the people who made up their family – close friends, her dad’s last girlfriend, her son, the woman who cooked for them for five years – we all meet up for dinner and laugh and reminisce and I am happy to see the light back in her eyes. It’s important for her, to keep all these connections. I make sure to gather the tribe for each visit.

This past summer Sierra came to stay with me for a weekend. We were both going to the Outside Lands concert in Golden Gate Park and her mother wanted to know that she had a safe place to stay. At very nearly seventeen, Sierra has grown into a beauty. She is almost six feet tall, with long blond hair and huge brown eyes. She is incredibly smart, and the precocious child has grown into a hysterically funny teenager. She is making plan for college, and is interested in DePauw, her father’s school. She had spent the summer in Guatemala, and had so much to tell me about her adventures and new friends. As I listened to her talk, I realized that she had amazing values and I was so proud of the person that she had become, and made sure to tell her often that weekend in between texting each other our locations during the concert in the park.

“I’m headed to see Further,” I wrote.

“Cool. I’m off to The Strokes.”

“Meet me @ gate for cab @ 10pm.” I replied.

My little toddler had grown up.

But she still needs me.

Just this week, as I was working on this article, I got a 911 text from her at eleven o’clock at night. She was in her dorm room at school, in another fury of tears, grieving over her father.

“Everybody tells me that it will be okay one day but their lying.” She said, “this will never be okay.”

I told her the truth. It would always hurt, but one day she would be able to hold grief in her hands and it would not burn. I told her how time takes away the sting of things, that children lose parents, and parents lose children, and it is never something that they get over, they just learn how to live with it. I told her that someday she would be a grown woman and look back on this time in her life and see how it had shaped her, she would see that everything she survived had made her strong. I told her that I believed in her, and I believed that her father was definitely with her in spirit, and that she should have faith in that, for faith is just believing in something that you cannot see. I told her that she would never be alone as long as I was in this world. I talked to her until her tears stopped, and her breathing grew easy, and then slowed, and she fell asleep on the other end of the phone. I listened to that easy breathing for a few minutes, smiling at the thought of the four year old her, who wanted me to sit on the edge of her bed while she fell asleep, sounding just the same.

And I whispered into the phone, “I love you sweetie. Good night.”
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Rebecca Nelson Lubin is a writer and Nanny who resides in the San Francisco Bay Area. You may read more of her articles at http://www.abandofwives.ning.com/

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