Nanny Diaries

Many Vancouver mothers don’t realize that the live-in raising their kids was forced to leave her own children behind

By Daniel Wood

Maria Reyes didn’t tell her girls that deception was necessary and they would cease to exist. Instead, as the jeepney taxi rolled out of the Phillipine village of Pangolingan West, she promised that one day, not too far in future, they’d be together again—mother and three young daughters—in Vancouver. They’d have money, and a real house, not a tiny one with a corrugated tin roof and bamboo walls and chickens underfoot. The girls nodded, trying to be brave.

Reyes was on her way to Vancouver, to look after another woman’s children. She’d trade motherhood for money, and try to convince herself they understood why she was going away. To get the job, however, she would conceal from Canadian authorities and from her Vancouver employers that she—a divorced, single mother—had three little girls, the youngest just five. Only the children would know of the promised reunion.

The jeepney stopped near the departure gates of Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport, and Reyes knew she’d have to be strong. As she walked away, she could hear the girls begin to cry. One glance back and she knew she’d be doomed…and her dreams for her family’s Vancouver future would vanish. Turn? Don’t turn? She remembers the date well: June 28, 1988.
The story is old. In this modern version, the odyssey begins with a country bankrupt by the Philippines’ 20-year-long Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship. At least $10 billon went into Swiss bank accounts and far-flung real estate investments; plus, of course, shoes for his extravagant wife, Imelda. In the face of this late-’80s economic collapse—and encouraged by Philippine government officials to find work overseas—ten million women began leaving the country, the largest female diaspora in history. Almost 40 percent of these women were, like Reyes, mothers.

During this period, millions of North American mothers, shunning the traditional role of homemaker, and yielding to pressures to enter the workforce, discovered that childcare options here were pitifully inadequate. For most, daycare hours were too short, and costs too high. Few centres took toddlers. Lacking the national childcare programs of Europe, the United States simply allowed millions of illegal Latin American immigrants through its porous southern border. Meanwhile, Canada created the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP). Both tactics provided North American middle-class mothers with nannies whose low wages and diffidence were products of their vulnerability. More than 150,000 Filipino nannies—again, 40 percent of them mothers—have come to Canada in the intervening years, about 20,000 of them to Greater Vancouver.

Maria Reyes was one of the first. As a child, she’d seen Reader’s Digest photos of maple trees turning gold in autumn and mountains carpeted with wildflowers. The colours seemed impossible; she wanted to see for herself. Later as a young mother, she came to realize there was no future in Pangolingan West. It was a remote farming community with little electricity and no running water; the local school stopped at Grade Six.

Eager to escape poverty and provide a better life for her daughters, she left her children with her 66-year-old-mother and, passing through the airport departure gates, set out for her land of dreams.

The reality was less romantic. “At first, I didn’t know anyone,” she says today. “I rode buses for entertainment. That’s how I’d spend my weekends. I’d buy a hamburger and Coke and sit in some park and read. Even though it was summer I was always cold.” So she threw herself into her job—looking after a North Vancouver couple’s three young children, assuaging her loneliness on Sundays at Canyon Heights Christian Assembly church. Fearing she’d jeopardize her LCP status, she kept the existence of her own children secret. The deception was easy; her female employer didn’t appear to want to know about Reyes’s life and family. It was as if the busy career woman felt enough guilt already, just by turning some of her parental responsibilities over to Reyes. She came to understand that discretion was required to prevent any further guilt that might arise—were a Canadian mother to discover how much a Filipino mother yearned for the touch of her own kids.

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