This episode was brought to you by the Peppa Pig franchise.
I recently went on a one-week road trip to Napa, where I learned a few important life lessons: that wine talk puts me to sleep faster than melatonin gummies, that the finest Cabernet Sauvignon is wasted on my cheap palette, and that I don’t actually know my child.
The story might come off a bit bougie, but so is the entire premise of Napa, i.e., America’s answer to Tuscany, so bear with me. You see, my partner is generally a very low-maintenance person (his idea of a “luxury purchase” is a pair of Common Projects) – that is, other than when it comes to food. An excellent restaurant meal is one of his greatest passions, something that gives him the same thrill as, say, a buttery soft The Row tote offers me. So, when planning our trip to Napa, there was one non-negotiable on Dave’s end: we had to try French Laundry, i.e., the three-Michelin-starred holy grail of American fine dining. We also happened to be staying about five doors down from said epicurean Mecca, so I knew that not getting a reservation would result in more wistful sighs and bitter comments than I could handle.
After missing the first-day-of-the month-30-second-booking-window, we called in a favor from a celeb friend (how cool are we?!) who got us a reservation in under 24 hours (God bless celeb friends and nepotism!) The next step was figuring out who would be staying with our rambunctious bundle of joy during our dinner. Since I notoriously prefer child-free travel, the world of hotel nannies was completely new to me. Most of our prior trips with Sasha have been of the “visiting family” variety, where said family members had acted as my designated babysitters. Here in LA, she has a nanny who practically doubles as her grandmother. Given that the girl only recently started speaking English after being raised exclusively in Russian, I had a very hard time picturing her staying with some English-speaking lady she had never met, in a hotel room she was hardly familiar with. And yet, I had no choice, for I knew that nothing would stand between Dave and his divine supper.
I started with the Napa nanny agencies, which seemed to be marked up at the same rate as French Laundry itself. Upon a friend’s advice, I posted a listing on Urban Sitter, an Uber-like nanny app with a more selective review system. A few days – and mediocre applications – later, Mary Poppins herself slid into my inbox, boasting referrals and pull quotes from former employers and vaccination records and all sorts of other nanny accolades. She seemed too good to be true, and I hired her on the spot.
The trip came in the wake of a toddler flu that had our child watching Peppa the Pig for four days straight, to the point where she emerged speaking English with a British accent and acting much like her cartoon idol. From the first day of the trip, she began rejecting all food other than croissants and bananas, answering “nope” to every one of our requests, and generally behaving like a tiny toddler terrorist (“you get a new child every few weeks,” they say). As the big day approached, I got more and more nervous – there was no way she would listen to somebody she had never met, if she had entirely stopped listening to me! And so, I devised a Plan B.
On the morning of the reservation, I called the Napa Mary Poppins, explained the situation, and presented her with my new plan: “How about we skip her day nap, so that she’s super tired by 7pm, and then I’ll put her to bed myself? And then you can just hang out on the patio while she falls asleep, and enter the room a little later?” Mary Poppins sounded doubtful. She insisted that she had stayed with plenty of children in hotels before, and they had all adjusted adequately. I maintained that my child was different, and that it would be a disaster, and would she please just go with the plan?!
An hour later, we were touring a vineyard in 100 degree heat with a whining human Peppa in tow, when I got a text from Mary Poppins saying she “respectfully” had to cancel the job. She didn’t feel comfortable with the arrangement, she had hesitations about staying with “a child who couldn’t be consoled after the parents leave” and was worried that sneaking into the room would cause the hotel staff to call the police. I tried reasoning with her, quickly abandoning my plan and instead begging her to come early to get acquainted with Sasha, but her mind was made up. To add insult to injury, she told me that “frankly, after 25+ years as a nanny, it sounds to me like a case of a very strong willed two-year-old whose parents have raised her to believe she’s in charge.” BAM. I had been schooled by Mary Poppins.
The feeling I experienced was much akin to being broken up with before a first date – a mix of anger, defensiveness, and soothing anticipation of staying in bed in my pajamas that evening. One look at Dave assured me the latter wasn’t happening: he strongly advised me to find a replacement, for he would be dining at French Laundry with or without me. Friends who had traveled the word with their (equally headstrong) two-year-old assured me that hotel nannies were pros and Sasha would be completely fine. And so, I bit the bullet and called up one of the agencies from my initial research, who quickly found me a new nanny (at double of Mary Poppins’ rate and a $50 “rush fee,” of course).
At 6:30 PM, Sasha was bathed, fed a croissant, dressed, and ready for a “fun new friend” to come play with her. I envisioned a girl in her late twenties, somebody who would feel exciting and make her forget all about Mama and Papa leaving. When I opened the door, my stomach sank: an elderly woman named Sally was standing in front of me with a tote bag stuffed with baby dolls and a clipped smile on her face. There was no way in hell Sasha would fall for this.
Much to my shock, my stubborn, opinionated, unpredictable daughter ran up to Sally with her Peppa Pig and Pedro Pony figures in hand. Once the nanny was properly acquainted with her BFFs, Sasha led her to her play corner and got started on that day’s 30th iteration of her Peppa Pig puzzle set. I finished getting ready, then trepidatiously came up to them to say good bye, fully expecting Sasha to fling herself between my legs and beg me not to go. Instead, my daughter just gave me a quick hug, then turned back to Sally and said, “puzzle, then banana, then play with baby.” Sasha had things to do, and Mama and Papa were promptly dismissed.
As we left the hotel and walked towards our evening of caviar and freedom, I experienced an unprecedented feeling, one that I knew pointed to something bigger. It was equal parts disbelief, pride in my child, and admission of my own stupidity. I had never meant to baby my daughter – in fact, I had gone into parenting determined to preserve the same laid-back nonchalance with which I had tried to approach most things in life. And yet, just like with other things, it had mostly been an act, an illusion of how I wanted to present to the outside world rather than a true backbone of my behavior.
As a parent, it takes time to adjust, to create routines that work for your family, to get into a “flow” – which, in turn, makes it even harder to let go of said routines when it’s time. With all my love for “adventure,” I’m a creature of habit, a person who often gets set in her ways and has a hard time diverging from her carefully constructed systems. What I didn’t realize is that it was trickling into certain aspects of parenting in a way that wasn’t serving us – from my reluctance to stop breastfeeding (“but how will I console her?”), to my refusal to enroll Sasha into preschool a few days a week (“what if we lose the nanny?”), to me pushing off potty training until 2.5 years old (“I just don’t want to deal”). My daughter may have been ready to face these challenges earlier, but I wouldn’t have known, because I hadn’t been willing to get out of my own comfort zone. As a result, I didn’t give her room to surprise me, to impress me, to show me what she was capable of.
This isn’t to say that structure is wrong. After all, we all know that children thrive on routine and predictability – those are the building blocks of their nervous systems that we should never aggressively tamper with. And yet, there is a fine line. By sheltering our kids from change and novelty, we are likely doing them a disservice, for we are preventing them from evolving and maturing and developing a flexibility that will serve them in the future. The paradox of the job of a parent is that we must shelter our kids from the “real world” while also preparing them to live in it; that we must simultaneously create their comfort zones and push them out of them when it’s time. The good news is, they are often more ready for it than we realize.
P.S. We had a really lovely dinner.
What a life lesson for all of us. Loved this piece. But also, I really want a The French Laundry review...