“So that’s that,” I half-said, half-asked my wife. “We’re not going to bring her back.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess so.”
It was a tough decision — an unpleasant one — but one we had nonetheless arrived at after careful examination. One of our part-time nannies (we have two to cover the needed hours) was going to be out for at least six weeks with knee-replacement surgery. This is the second time this year she’s had to take an extended leave, as she had her hip replaced in January. To cover that absence, we’d cobbled things together, mostly leveraging my sister to help out.
But this time around, things would be different. This time, we’d cover the absence by putting Parker (our three-year-old) into pre-school for full days instead of the planned half days. When the nanny was ready to come back, we figured, it wouldn’t makes sense to pull him back out just so she’d have someone to watch. (Our other son, Tyler, starts kindergarten in the fall).
So that would be that, but it sure didn’t feel good. First off, there was the fact that we would be separating from a woman who had been a great nanny (and any parent who has needed one knows their value) for many years. Secondly, the way it was happening felt bad — nobody wants to tell someone who is about to endure physical trauma that they will no longer have a job afterwards.
So I kept vetting the logic above, step by step. “This is happening, so this is what we have to do and, thus, this means that.” I wanted to ensure we’d arrived at this unpleasant place because there was nowhere else to go. And there wasn’t.
But what could we do to make it as right as possible? First off, severance. That was an easy decision. Secondly, I tried to recall things I’d learned from our CIO readers about separating from vendors, and the following came to mind:
- It’s not personal, it’s business
- Be clear, honest and transparent
- Be respectful
- Be timely
So the next big decision was how to handle that final bullet point. Should we tell her a few weeks before she was to come back? Should we tell her at the beginning of her leave? Should we tell her on her last day? While many of those choices might have offered us some kind of protection against a less-than-professional reaction, they didn’t feel right. I went back to the lessons learned from CIOs and knew that since we had made the main decision, the best, the “rightest” thing we could do was to tell her immediately. We owed her this, and it would give her a few things:
- The most time to adjust the to the news
- Time to emotionally separate from the kids
- Time to tell her other contacts that she’s be available for work after her recovery
And so, we did. Now, I still feel bad about this whole thing. I feel bad about the separation in general (which, of course, was inevitable — kids grow up, etc) and I feel bad about how it evolved. But when I do, I take solace in the logic which led to it, and the fact that, once made, it was handled in the best way possible.
Sometimes, that’s the best you can do.
PS: We received this note from our former nanny a week after her last day with us.
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