A Primary Child Care Giver’s Story: When you are expected to be a parent, but are never considered one by Mariella Dawson

I am raising a child that isn’t mine. She turned 3 years old on June 7. I am with her 50+ hours per week (and have been since she was 3 months old). I am expected to be a parent but at the same time am never considered one. To protect her identity and that of her parents who are high profile entertainment industry people, I will call her Moonie (I love her to the “Moon” and back).  I am her primary care giver (PCG). Being a PCG was never my dream job. It comes with an emotional toll I am not sure how much longer I can carry. But life has its own way of doing things and, at some point, it sort of pushed me into this. 

I do not think many people realize what it is like to raise a child that is biologically not your own or how the world views you in this particular capacity. I am often asked “are you her mother” or “is she yours”, which I find extremely offensive. But here’s the thing: People ask what you do so they can calculate the amount of respect to give you. When I tell people “I am her mom”, the whole dynamic in how I am being viewed and treated changes. It often makes me feel ashamed of what I do when I absolutely should not. 

Personally, I do not think that giving birth makes you a parent. Never would I say such a thing and take the away the value from adopted and fostered children, and their parents. It is everything you do after they have been born that makes you a parent.  As they grow older, apart from the day-to-day responsibilities that come with raising a child, a PCG is also expected to teach morals, ethics, common decency, kindness, compassion, confidence,  self-esteem….the list goes on. 

Moonie is an advanced child, at least 1.5 years ahead intellectually. She has always required a specific approach and I am raising her this way as a result. She is an emotionally high maintenance child (I will leave the particulars out for now, as I do not want her labeled), which comes with its own set of challenges, but I accept them gladly. She owns my heart, after all. But such are the tasks and responsibilities of a PCG, often over-worked, underpaid, unrecognized, unacknowledged, rendered invisible and, ultimately, forgotten. 

Being a PCG comes with an enormous amount of joy, such as seeing their first moments of true happiness and milestones.  It also comes with an enormous amount of pain. Some families do consider you a part of theirs. But there are the ones who do not, who render you invisible and non-existent as soon as the door closes behind you. 

As a PCG, you give up your own life. There is no time, nor emotional space for one. You are told ‘we are going to be late’ 5 minutes before you are set to go home. You receive texts and emails late at night or on weekends and are expected to answer them immediately. You are told you are needed to work on weekends or holidays at the very last minute.

As A PCG, you are not allowed to have a ‘bad’ day or show any signs of stress, exasperation or pure exhaustion You are expected to be perfect. You are denied having feelings or, worse, showing them. You get what I call “tear credit”; you are allowed to cry about twice a year before your tears become meaningless or a nuisance, and before your advice based on life experience and knowledge is viewed as being argumentative. There is little to no respect or understanding for what you feel or go through in a day.Parents, however, are allowed those luxuries, which often includes beer and wine before the clock hits 6 pm. 

Many parents believe the education system is to blame for what they call “the state of today’s kids”. Personally, I believe the education system is not responsible for teaching a child morals, ethics, common decency, kindness, compassion, confidence, self-esteem, and equality for all. It starts in the home. 

Where parents teach their children that there are different classes of people. If you exclude your child’s PCG from family and holiday celebrations, make sure they’re out of the line of sight during a Zoom or FaceTime, how long does it take before the child subconsciously picks up on the fact that you are considered ‘less’? And when you yourself start to feel ‘less’?

A PCG’s value decreases over time. During that first year, you get chocolates, flowers, gift cards, and balloons. The year after, that all disappears. You are overlooked or, even worse, receive a re-gift hastily stuffed in a used baggie. While your care and love for the child does not decrease. If anything, it only increases. 

PCGs work when they are sick or hurt. When I do get sick, it is when a child transfers whatever they have to me. I have worked 10-12-14 hour shifts with a head-cold, the flu, ear infections, a fever, and with my hand in a splint without taking a single day off. Being over-protective is both my strength and my weakness. Moonie never leaves my sight. She was in a 7 month POD playgroup, in somebody’s backyard, with 4 other children and 2 ‘teachers’, 3 mornings/week for 2 hours. The other nannies (and there is a difference between a nanny and a PCG) leave to get coffee, but I never did.  I sat on a couch, only 10 feet away, and without her noticing it, cried silently the first 2 weeks. She just started PreK, 3 mornings per week, but the emotions and subsequent ramifications that go with that for both of us is a whole article on its own. 

She does not go anywhere without me and I do not leave her anywhere without me. No child under the age of 4 should be in any environment without a parent of caregiver. Maybe that’s my European upbring where children start kindergarten at 4 and first grade at 6. 

Moonie is super attached to me (and vice versa). She jumps into my arms upon arrival every morning, and cries and begs me to stay the night every day when I have to leave. It is different for parents who are used to handing their child(ren) over every day and are used to the separation. But they are handing her over to me and we are  fused at the hip for the next 10-12 hours. I take her tears home with me and carry them with me through a sleepless night. One parent a long time ago said it best: “I’m having a very difficult time with the attachment. But if she loves and trusts you this much when I am here, I can only imagine how much she feels loved and safe when I am not there. So I choose to be grateful instead”. I have never forgotten that. 

Always, the love a PCG has for the child(ren) we raise is used as leverage against us. Parents know that we will never leave the child(ren) we love so much. That love keeps us chained, and we will do whatever it takes, no matter how toxic or demanding the environment becomes, to not have to sever that love. 

Giving your heart that openly, knowing you were always a disposable and never a permanent want, eventually becomes your emotional undoing. The same thing that keeps me going is the same thing that breaks me in the end, the love for a child that was never mine. That is the hardest part of all. The knowledge of that inevitable loss. That grief that knocks the wind out of you and brings you to your knees. 

The future of a PCG is never certain and seldom shiny. It is always tainted by unbearable loss once a child grows up and goes to school or when a parent’s envy wins out and you are replaced from one day to the next, as if you never existed to begin with. The infant I held for hours because she couldn’t sleep and screamed until she calmed down in my arms, the baby who took her first steps with me, the little girl whose face lights up when she hears the key in the door in the morning, the toddler who maintains she doesn’t want a baby brother or sister because all she needs is me, assuring herself with that statement I will never leave her, will be ripped from me one day. I wonder sometimes how many of you, biological parents, could cope with a loss like that? Over and over again.

So in the end, what am I? What was I? Once my time has come to leave, some families never look back, don’t respond to texts asking me to see a child I loved so much. In the end, I was responsible for their most precious gift, their child, a little human being, a life created. In the end, I was discarded, like so many others. Did I make an actual difference in a child’s life? I will always remember them, but will they remember me? I never see them grow up.  In the end, all it does, is break my heart.

How long can I keep this up? I don’t know. Maintaining my own sanity during this pandemic while carrying not only the child’s but the entire family’s on my shoulders was an almost unbearable weight that still has me buckling under it. But still I go in every day, a smile on my face, my stomach tied in knots and fighting back tears often knowing that, now that she is getting older the time I have left with her is getting shorter. Something she is blissfully unaware of, but something that is a gut-wrenching reality for me. If anything, I hope a little understanding will come out of my story for other people like me: When you are expected to be a parent but are never considered one. 

Mariella Dawson is a temporary forever mommy, and an always advocate for children who have no voice; and (as a conscience vegetarian) for animals as well. One of her most rewarding experiences was working in the Neurosurgery Clinic at The Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, guiding parents and children through the worst times of their lives towards their best. In her spare time, Mariella is a writer and author whose novel brings to light the often forgotten child abuse victims and their heart-wrenching after-trauma journeys. She firmly holds onto the belief that there is good in people and in the world, and that this good should live on in our children. Feel free to follow and contact her on Instagram: @a_mommy_like_me and @the_cracks_in_my_existence,  as well as on Wordpress: A Mommy Like Me.