“Oh. I don’t have Instagram, actually.”
“Ah,” I said. “Well. Never mind.”
This was the strangeness of becoming famous online. I had a million followers, I could access more people in a single moment than any European king of the last thousand years, and then someone could effortlessly wipe my entire kingdom away with a single sentence:I don’t have Instagram.
“And if you don’t mind,” Nanny Louise added, “I’d love to stay out of any content you share online.”
“Of course. I totally understand those boundaries.” I wondered if she had seen the email I sent to the agency—nannies will NEVER be visible on account, and they will sign a contract stipulatingso—or if this was genuinely just a perfect coincidence.
Clementine was pouring Louise an imaginary cup of tea now. Louise took it, sipped politely, then said over her shoulder, “Who has been doing the homeschooling for the children up until this point?”
“Ah! That would be my husband.”
“And you’re aware of the curriculum he chose for the children?”
“Of course I am.” This was vaguely correct. It would be a stretchto call what Caleb did with the children a curriculum, but from time to time I did see him on the couch with Clementine and a laptop, the screen open to some online website with poorHTMLformatting. From what I understood, the endeavor had something to do with learning math through the moral framework of the Ten Commandments. Thou Shalt Not Divide by Zero, et cetera.
“It’s very ideologically driven,” Louise said. “I just want to make sure you’re aware, and comfortable with that?”
“Oh yes. Perfectly comfortable!” I grinned at my daughter, who stared soberly back at me. “Well, Clementine, what do you think? Would you like to play with Nanny Louise for a while—”
“Actually,” Louise said, “Louise is just fine.”
“Excuse me?”
“You said Nanny Louise. Louise is fine.”
Well. That wouldn’t do. I’d been really looking forward to calling her Nanny Louise. It sounded more magical, like we were living in a storybook.It doesn’t matter,I told myself,she’ll never be online, the Angry Women will never meether—but it did matter. It mattered to me.
These moments happened frequently now. Spending so much time online, I sometimes found myself actively uncomfortable, almost revolted, by the discombobulation of my offline life. The piles of dishes in the sink. The silent watchful eye of my daughter, no musical overlay to soften our interactions. And now:Louise is just fine.Terrible. Like rubbing velvet the wrong way.
I gathered myself, then said firmly, “I’d really like to call you Nanny Louise.”
There was the slightest pause. Then she shrugged. “Okay. And your littlest one? Where is she?”
“Jessa!” I said. “Our little firecracker. She’s sleeping. I’ll bring her to you at three.”
Jessa was barely a year old, not so much a firecracker as a mushy puddle of need and want—but I’d needed a way to differentiate her online, a way for the Angry Women to know and remember her, and shehadbeen very fussy lately, and so the moniker had stuck.
“Great,” Louise said, and her attention turned back to the children.
I walked away from the living room, through the kitchen, and into the pantry. The tension in my chest fell away, so suddenly and powerfully that I lowered myself to the ground, letting the pleasure roll through me in waves.
I would never be alone with my children again.
What a beautiful time to be alive. It was springtime. The ranch was bursting at the seams with life. The fields were freckled with bluebonnets. On a quiet day, sapped of wind, you could tilt your ear and hear the river, rushing and foaming with all the snow runoff from the mountains. But it was the kind of beauty that felt impossible to grasp in person. It wasn’t just an option to organize this moment in the walled structure of a phone screen—it was essential. The best way to experience it.
If only my mother agreed.
“It just seems very … ostentatious,” she had said when we met a week earlier for coffee. “Do you really want so many people seeing Jessa in a diaper?”
I shrugged mildly. I already felt quite certain that my children were far safer online—their best selves preserved inside the four walls of my phone like little bugs in amber—than they could ever be in the real world. I thought of the woman at the grocery store, her disturbed expression. Even the cruelest comment I received online was no match for the memory of her face. “I think you just don’t understand how social media works.”
“But what if someone develops a fascination with them? Or with you?”
“You mean like a kidnapper or something?”
She nodded nervously.
