I was nose to the grind stone last night at work, only looking away from the computer screen to check my phone and see if my husband responded to my text that I had not yet left the office. I was already feeling guilty for being late and rushed to finish an email. In my mind, I had had one foot out the door for at least an hour.

Then, the screen flashed “Come home asap.” And a few minutes later, as I was hitting send on an email, the phone rang.

“She quit. Today is her last day. She got an office job, and she starts Monday.”

Today is Friday. It is 6:00 pm.

The shock of being told your nanny just quit is akin to finding out someone had passed away. That first wave hits you, and suddenly, you feel like you are in a telephone booth, paralyzed from movement, less oxygen, everything else is blacked. The separation you feel from everything and everyone is palpable.

The second wave is anger. Why no notice? Weren’t we good to her? Didn’t we treat her with respect? Why didn’t she trust us enough to tell us what was going on – that she was looking to get out of the nanny business all together?

The third wave is regret, bargaining, and fear. Thoughts like, “I am a failure as a parent” and “What could I have done differently?” surface. A third and surprising thought is “How am I going to raise this child without her – I don’t know what I am doing”.

I remember when my step mom commented to me when Lucy was twelve weeks old that she was never that confident with her child at that age.

I am a confident person by nature. I may wear my heart on my sleeve, but whatever may frazzle me at the time (and I let other people know it) seldom – ever – rocks me at the core. So, I follow that bunny trail down the snowy path and wonder if some of my almost unnatural confidence for the last fifteen months of my child’s life didn’t depend at least in some part on an experienced nanny.

Fourth is sadness. This one didn’t hit me until I got home and saw the extra car seat in my hall. The key and credit card on the counter. Some old toys in our playroom that I had not seen in months.

Nannies develop complex relationships with each family member, particularly the mother. At best, the mother’s relationship is bound by trust and anxiety, learning and teaching, support and direction. The nanny-father relationship is also one of giving direction but subject to being overridden by the mother, and a good nanny learns how to mediate differences between the two. And, the child’s bond, of course, is something more indescribable. The toddler has unconditional trust in her nanny, and the love between the nanny and child can electrify the home in a way that both inspires confidence in – and assauges the guilt of – the working mom.

I haven’t felt truly rejected in a long time. I simply forgot what it feels like. So, maybe the strange and unfamiliar thoughts of failure on the drive home last night aren’t so strange. A person that had an intimate relationship with my immediate family – who witnessed and took some part in how we live it for the last fifteen months – has rejected all it and snuck away in the night.

And this is where a complicated relationship gets real simple. The nanny-family relationship is, in its purest form, one of at-will employment. You may not dwell on it, but you are one “I am leaving” sentence away from the end of the relationship.

Maybe it won’t hurt much the next time. Maybe it’s like when your very first boyfriend breaks up with you, and you are swept up in the melodrama of it. Or maybe like any relationship that burrows into the fabric of your daily life, it is always going to hurt when a nanny walks away. The way you come to trust and depend on a person – that you child comes to trust and depend on – for now, anyway, it feels awfully close to divorce with no closure. No trial separation, or division of assets, no mandatory waiting period, and most of all, no real explanation for it all.