"I remember when my daughter was that age... she's eighteen now."

"It goes so fast!!"

"Is she your first?"

"She looks just like you!"

"She must look like her dad...?"

Fourteen years ago I would quickly explain..."Oh no! I'm just their nanny... and, yes, they do look like their dad?" Fourteen years ago these questions and statements were aimed at me, a very young looking thirteen year old summer nanny. Let's not even start on how they thought I could have two, sometimes four kids aged four and under at thirteen.

Fourteen years later, I'm still a nanny, fielding these questions again... for the thousandth time. Only now my answers are, or could be, different. In reality, the best reply to these nosy, questionably well meaning, undoubtably unintelligent questions, is the stare you see above. Thankfully the baby I had two months ago had a nearly as a good bitch face as I do... because, let's be honest, she did look weirdly similar to me. Behind her stare the thoughts are, probably, "get your weird old fingers away from my face. How is that an acceptable behavior???"

Behind mine:

"You have no idea how fast."

"No, my first baby is dead."

Two days before I started nannying this particular baby, my own baby's heartbeat wasn't there. For the next two or three weeks I spent every day with a baby.

I looked like a mother, I acted like a mother, I am a mother. I am not her mother. To any other woman who's baby had died, I would be a trigger. I walked up and down Greenwich Village for days, this stranger baby gazing adoringly at me from her pram. We got coffee together. She liked sitting in the warmth of the coffee shop. We shopped for diapers and new baby food pouches for her to try. We trudged through the snow, sat on benches and coo-ed at each other while I knit. A blanket for my dead baby.

While strangers only saw her hard stare, she couldn't take her eyes off me. Because you see, I'm an amazing nanny. I don't know what I think about people having a calling but if I have one it's to always be around babies. I make them laugh by a flick of my eyebrow. A stroke on their knee and their bodies sink onto mine. I'm not the high energy, ball throwing, kick ass kind of extrovert some people feel they need to hire so their babies get properly stimulated. But I am really really good.

She was a very easy baby. Although, I think this is true of most healthy babies. Ninety percent of the time she was fussing she simply required eye contact. As soon as our eyes locked her breathing slowed down, her cries were replaced with babbles, her eyes narrowed into smiles, her little stomach softened. And every time this happened my eyes overflowed with tears. Babies love the color black... that was my only explanation as to why my tears always made her laugh. I know the exact path my tears take down my face, traced in mascara. I think every morning I thought that if I did my eye make-up it would make me less likely to cry?

Every time she melted at my eyes it was like my baby died again. My little hawk. Death is scary. She was scared and dying inside me and I had no idea. All she needed was my eyes on hers and I couldn't see. I didn't know. She was so tiny. So so tiny. I stroked and talked to her and she couldn't feel or hear. She never saw my eyes. I never saw hers.

My days with this stranger baby fell into a dreary pattern: Me watching her cry, her watching me cry. Me watching her poo, her watching me poo. Or hemorrhage. Me watching her eat, her watching me eat. She laughed and smiled. And sometimes I did too.

A few weeks later a friend of her parent's from Sweden came to take over, mercifully. By that time I was the baby's best friend. She utterly and completely adored me. A few weeks of her life is a massive percentage and we had been inseparable (as she perceived it). I didn't hate her. I haven't seen her since.