I really dislike the word “manny.” I prefer “nanner” for a male childcare provider. “Manny” just sounds like some guy’s name.
For three years, I “nannered” for an amazing family called the Bentleys in San Francisco. The Bentleys lived in a beautiful Victorian home that they were in the process of restoring. They were like an educated, cool, punk-rock version of the Addams family.
The Bentleys had two kids, Larry and Mary,* who were twins. They were coordinated into two colors: Mary always in green and Larry always in blue.
My duties included taking the Bentley children to swim at the public pool, picking them at the school bus stop, feeding them, and generally hanging out until their parents got home from work.
It was a pretty cushy gig. Larry and Mary (age six) were pretty easygoing and, for the most part, fairly low maintenance. Despite being twins, the kids were very different from each other. Larry was confident but more of an indoor kid. He’s also the only person I’ve seen who eats pizza crust first. Mary was very rough and tumble but also shy and thoughtful at other times.
Here are a few highlights from my tenure as their trusty manny.
Chaos at the public-pool locker room
“Kelly, where the heck is my pepperoni!” Larry exclaimed while standing in his swimming shorts.
“Larry, you ate all the pepperoni in the bag, dude,” I said, as I struggled with to get a shirt over his head. Suddenly, behind me, I heard Mary beginning to wail.
“Mary, what’s wrong?!”
“I can’t find my goggles!” Poor Mary was in a state of distress.
“Whoa, let’s look in the swim bag. It’s OK!”
“I already looked!” Mary was close to having a complete meltdown. Out of seemingly nowhere, this old man materialized in the baggiest swim shorts you’ve ever seen to give her some totally unsolicited life advice.
“Mary, you do not cry; you find a solution,” said the tiny waterlogged old man, who then disappeared, never to be seen again.
Just as I began to process this life philosophy, I looked over to see Larry peeing right on the concrete locker-room floor, completely oblivious to the laws of society.
“Don’t have a cow, man. I’m peeing in the drain,” he said, completely missing the drain. Then Mary was crying about something again.
“I found my goggles but someone stepped on them, and now they’re broken!” I rushed over to try to click the goggle lenses together, and as I was doing that, I looked over and saw Larry peeing on the wooden bench.
“Oh my God, Larry. Stop peeing on everything!”
“Cool your jets, bro.”
We booked it to the car and peeled out as a hard as a Nissan Sorrento would allow. The pool staff ran after us, shaking their fists in outrage. Larry was laughing, and Mary was reading a comic book.
“Keep repeating that, Larry! Batman doesn’t pee his pants!”
“Kelly, put on the darn Aquabats, or I’m going to lose it.”
Ten minutes from home base, Larry found a bottle of Diet Snapple and drank the whole thing.
“I’m going to explode! I’m dying back here!” He was squirming in his car seat. It was just like that scene from Reservoir Dogs in which Tim Roth is screaming from a gut-shot wound in the back of a speeding getaway car as Harvey Keitel is trying to get him to keep his shit together. Only in this version, Mr. Orange is trying to not pee his pants instead of bleed to death.
“Larry, does Batman pee his pants?!”
“No! Batman doesn’t pee his pants!”
“Keep repeating that, Larry! Batman doesn’t pee his pants! We are five minutes from the house. You’ve got to hold it!” My eyes were darting all over the road like RoboCop’s as I searched for a parking space. One minute later, I abandoned the search and resorted to desperate measures. I double-parked and pulled Larry out of the car to pee on a telephone pole.
Tourists on Segways passed and were horrified by the scene. Larry waved as he peed all over the sidewalk, entirely missing the telephone pole.
Foul language at the playground
I had brought the kids to a park. I posted myself where I could keep an eye on Larry, who was running around with another kid named Rufus, and Mary, who was feeding pigeons potato chips on the blacktop with another girl. I was chitchatting with an aunt who was watching her nieces.
“How old are your kids?” she asked.
“Oh, they’re not mine. I’m the manny.”
“That is so adorable. You must have so much fun.”
“Yeah, I learn so much from them. Yep, I believe kids are our future. I feel inspired every day by—”
“Hey, Kelly!” Larry yelled from the metal play structure. I ignored him and continued my spiel to the aunt.
“They grow as people every day, and it’s fascinating to watch—”
“Hey, Kelly!” Larry yelled again.” I continued.
“It’s like I’m helping to shape the senators or poets of the next era, and—”
“Kelly, you fucking asshole, get over here!” the little voice hollered from across the park. I marched into the sandpit, and Rufus ran off, leaving Larry behind.
“Larry! You do not talk to people like that. I…” I heard screaming from Mary and discovered that she and the other girl had somehow caught a pigeon and were attempting to put it into the potato-chip bag. The creatures’ wings flapped in a mad frenzy.
When you work with kids, you have to choose your battles carefully. Make sure a hill is worth dying on so as to avoid total shit-shows.
“Mary, put that pigeon down! Those things are filthy!”
“I’m a bird girl!”
See, things like that. You never know what the heck is going to happen in any given situation. Oftentimes, you’re trying to put out two fires at once.
Looking both ways (always!)
The kids and I went and grabbed snacks at the nearby bakery that was a block down from the Bentley homestead.
“When we get home, can we have screen time?” Mary inquired as we made our walk down the sidewalk at a slow jaunt. Larry was eating a muffin backward and had chocolate all over his nose.
“Well, your parents wanted you to have screen time after homework.” I said.
“Serious? Homework is for suckers!” Larry stated as he chewed on the muffin wrapper.
“Please, can we have screen time first? I got a gold-star sticker from the teacher.” Mary had a tact for diplomacy.
I thought about it. When you work with kids, you have to choose your battles carefully. Make sure a hill is worth dying on so as to avoid total shit-shows.
“OK, when we get home, you can have a 20 minutes of screen time, but after that, it’s homework time.”
“Yay!” Mary jumped up in the air, and Larry dropped the half-eaten muffin on the ground. He bent over to pick it up off the grimy sidewalk. He wiped it off and was about to take a bite.
“Larry, throw it away. It was on the sidewalk.”
“What about the five-second rule?”
“The five-second rule counts only if it’s inside. That muffin is done, buddy.”
Just as I was debating the five-second rule with Larry, Mary bolted into the crosswalk in the path of a blue Volkswagen Beetle. In a flash, I had a vision of one of her Crocs flying in the air and the sound of steel crunching.
I screamed as loud as I could, “Marrrrrryyyyyy!” I actually was surprised how high my voice could go. Mary stopped and turned at the same second that the driver looked up from texting or listening to NPR or something and stomped on the brakes with a screech.
I ran to Mary as she nearly collapsed in terror in the intersection. I looked at the driver—her eyes were wide with shock. It was all too clear that a tragedy had been narrowly avoided, just by an inch.
I collected the kids together and calmed down as best I could. I was trying to stifle a heart attack. Mary was shaking and sobbing. Larry had somehow gotten the muffin out of the trash and was eating chunks out of it with his fingers, but that was not a concern at the moment. We sat on the stoop of the house as I took deep breaths and put my face in my hands.
Gradually, Mary’s sobs subsided, and we talked about making safe decisions and how scary the whole event was. When we wrapped up our talk, I offered to make box mac and cheese, which they emphatically supported.
“Yeah, we want mac and cheese!” they said in unison.
“OK, do you guys want extra boogers in your mac and cheese?”
“Ewwww!”
The twins are probably around 12 or so by now. I hope Mary is on the road to her dream of becoming a scientist and Larry is working on his drawing so he can grow up and work in comics in some form and develop his “Megalodon-Man” comic book.
Since then, I’ve started a career as an instructional aid at a school for students with autism, and I feel very lucky to work with that population. Sure, my job can be difficult at times, but it’s worth it for all the golden moments.
Since then, I’ve used my experience as a manny as inspiration for my first children’s book, Be Nice to Goldie.
The end.
*Names changed to protect privacy
