I think this is the third time today that we are all crying at the same time. My sparkly-eyed toddler, parading her impossible two-ness before the world; my three-month-old, desperate for something I can only determine on the 11th guess; and me—with the intolerable decibel level reverberating through my ear canals, the heart rate and stress level in tandem with the noise, and soon I have decided to join their chorus rather than be the hero that I had always meant to be. Of course my rash reaction does nothing but exacerbate the situation, as my toddler's wide-mouthed screams are not startled into silence but rather disconcerted into crisis-mode, and my baby is anything but consoled by such an addition to the emotion flooding the room. These two girls need a crying mother like, as the Russians say, a dog needs a fifth leg.

Of course these episodes are not a daily occurrence. I like to think the emotional intensity level in our few square feet of living space is generally kept within fair degrees of normalcy for a young family. Making our apartment in the center of Moscow an asylum from what lies outside our windows has been an essential survival skill in braving this feat to live abroad. A quick glance out one of our windows and the harsh reality of what this city so generously offers comes right to life: smothering gray heavens falling around the smorgasbord architecture, pillars of cement and steel representing every proud era; a trillion automobiles congesting both roadways and lungs, racing here and crawling there, each the same color of smut, a gift from the black slushy street below; an ant farm of hustling people, donned in their animal skins from top to bottom, stern looks on their faces, made cold on the outside either by freezing temperatures or years of learning that it's better not to trust; billboards and advertisements littering every possible square foot, all screaming testimonies of the radical change that has taken place recently in this country; gaudy, showy, flashy dress and shiny expensive cars, where favorite words are "elite," "VIP," "status," and "prestige," witnessing of the importance the Russians put on class, as everyone scrambles to be on top, no matter who has to be trampled to get there. Living in such an intense place demands a certain amount of adaptation. In some ways we try to fit in, in others we don't.

That part of the American dream that includes the two-story house with a white picket fence in middle-American suburbia, lush green grass to run through, gardens to water, and a porch to sip lemonade on is not only a sweet memory of my childhood, but also a disappearing image of the mold my life would ooze into as I grew up and began my own family. Fate has landed me in a foreign place, where city living laughs in the face of that cute, simple suburban life. Everything is different—more complicated, more involved, more difficult. And this fact is not overlooked in family planning. Nobody in their right mind has kids two years apart, as we do. And it's at moments like these that I think, maybe I'm really not in my right mind . . .

I try to hold my head high as I struggle with my wimpy stroller through the brown slush, the two-year-old seated and the three-month-old slung from my shoulders. My high-heeled boots make great ice skates, especially as I try to push that stroller across the streets, and end up turning it around to pull it, the only way we can plow through what feels like sand. Inside I'm cursing my boots, this lousy stroller not made for this weather, this darned ugly snow, the frost biting my cheeks, the people for their stares (and refusal to lend a helping hand), and this mad city that has become my home.

* * *

Returning to Moscow a few months after the birth of our second, our new life greeted us with open arms. We were thrust back into the depths of the long Russian winter, during which you hardly want to leave the house, dealing with jet lag, not only ourselves, but of the two girls who took turns waking up screaming all night long for a week, a two-year-old blossoming in her defiance and independence, a young baby who had to be rocked to sleep for each of her 8 naps a day, a husband whom we only saw a few hours during the week, and a gaping hole of loneliness where a group of friends wasn't.

Within the first couple of days back, my father-in-law asks, "So how is it? Uzhas?"

Uzhas in Russian translates to horror, dread, nightmare, atrocity. . . And I proudly answer, "No, it's just fine."

"I don't want to be the project," I later tell my husband, " I don't want people wondering why we would do this to ourselves and thinking that we're in dire need of help and just can't make it on our own. We're just fine!"

But however hard I try wear my we're just fine sign on my forehead every day, I am still hounded with the question from the whole family, and stared at on the street with looks that scream: When are you going to get a nanny???

Nanny? Okay so I don't have a white picket fence, but that doesn't mean I have license to toss everything I had planned for the "Mother Era" of my life out the window. Never in my goals and imaginations had I slated in some other person to take care of my children. My whole life thus far had given me both ample time and enough material with which to formulate a complete and perfect impression in my head of the mother I was to become. We all know who she is—the ever-elusive embodiment of perfection in Mother form. The one that holds everything together at every moment without flinching, with ease, efficiency, style, and grace. All my efforts I have meant to steer in that direction, however far I may still be. But in all the plans for myself and who I was to become, no nanny had ever entered the equation. I mean, what perfect woman needs a nanny?

"Getting a nanny would be admitting defeat," I tell my husband. "It's like saying, ‘ I failed, I can't do it on my own.'"

However, the thought repeatedly bounces around in my head like a ping-pong ball in slow motion. What if there was someone to hand the baby to right now, so that I could finish making Milla's breakfast? What if there was someone I could ask to run by some milk for me, instead of bundling everyone up and hauling over to the grocery store? What if there was someone to entertain Milla while I try to write an email? What if there was someone to play with the girls while my husband and I go to dinner one Saturday, since we only see each other so rarely?

We braved to go out, just the three of us, only a few times. By the time both girls were dressed in sweaters, coats, boots, hats, scarves, and mittens, the baby inevitably screaming the whole time, myself also donned in all of the same winter garb, I made sure I had the keys, the wallet, the sippy cup, the diapers, the wipes, the bottle, the burpcloth, the change of clothes, the phone and the purse, and we stumbled out of the apartment with the stroller in one arm, the baby hanging over the other, the purse over one shoulder, the toddler dragging from my hand, got into the tiny elevator, down the 10 stairs, out the heavy door, to our car wherever it was parked on the street, and both girls into the car before Milla had darted out into traffic or we were hit with a falling icicle. . . I was nearly convinced we had to have a nanny.

But what finally pushes me over the edge was when I slyly and casually run it by my mother to see what she thinks. After describing what I have to go through just to get out of the house, not only does she think it is a good idea, I am finally starting to even feel justified.

And the search is on.

* * *

As Tanya takes her coat off the first thing I notice is a periwinkle fleece jacket. Its American-ness speaks calm to my soul. Her short brown hair falls around a very serious face so common to Russian women which tells stories of hardships in every nobly-earned wrinkle. As she sits across from us at the kitchen table and we speak quietly to avoid waking the girls, our conversation drifts comfortably from her past experience with others into her future experience with us. The contrast she is from the two women before her with a resume, a sense of responsibility and kindness to boot quietly confirms our hopes for this woman and we ask her if she will commit to us.

Watching this woman on her first day of work for us step across the threshold from her world and into ours with hardly a glance at me and such a casual air about her, as if she'd done this a million times, reels through my vision in slow motion. My "happy to see you" smile is front and center as I speak to her.

"Good morning, Tanya, come on in. Can I take your coat?" -- also playing the casual I've-done-this-a-million-times role, while inside the Intruder! Intruder! alarm is sounding so loud, I think surely she can hear.

As I methodically show her around the house, opening every cupboard, closet, drawer, box, nook and cranny to explain what is where and how she should take care of my children I feel I may as well have been leading her straight to my jewelry box to show her a strand of pearls.

* * *

I remember that conversation with my mother-in-law not long ago: Under too dimly lit lights for such a dark winter night I sit in a beige-colored living room across a long, dark table from my husband's mother, her busybody, high-strung, help-everybody intentions bringing the conversation once again to the Nanny Question.

"So where are we going to find you a nanny?"

"I wouldn't even know where to start. In fact, I'm not even sure I can pull it off, getting a nanny."

"I think you have a hard time trusting your children to someone else," she says, almost accusatorily.

"And, what, you had an easy time? Who is it easy for?" I say in my always-ready-Mother-in-law-defense-shield-voice. "I'm handing my children over to a stranger!"

"The idea is for that stranger to become a part of the family."

I fold my arms, sigh and put on my thinking stare.

* * *

Her presence in our passenger seat is subtly awkward and the heavy silence demands an attempt at the forced conversation Americans call "small talk."

"So where do your sons live?"

I'm paying her to do this. She's working for me right now.

"And how old is the youngest?"

Russians don't feel that pressing need to squelch silence like Americans do.

"Do you have grandchildren already?"

And they never feel the need to ask you anything about your own personal life. How much longer can I sustain this?

"And what does your oldest son do?"

When will she ever feel like part of the family?

* * *

If our foursome in the car had been somewhere around a 4 on the awkward scale, our all four being in our home together at the same time was approaching somewhere around ten. I nearly trip over it as I come home for a few minutes between errands and choir. Milla is successfully put down for a nap, so it is technically just the three of us. I fumble for my play-it-cool cards, as if it's every day I come home to a stranger holding the pearls I had carried for nine months. My motherly instincts are lining up ready for battle and it takes painful measures of self-control to keep from snatching my baby out of her hands. I wade through the awkwardness down the hall to the kitchen where I can be alone to wrestle with my emotions.

Here was a sweet, responsible, kind, trustworthy woman we had chosen to spend time with our children so that I could more easily take care of housekeeping tasks and take a little time for myself for personal interests. Why was I hating every minute of this???

My nerves lead me to the phone and I dial my friend in order to shake the weight of my thoughts and numb my conflicting feelings for a few minutes.

"So when do you want to get together for lunch?"
"What are you guys doing this weekend?"

Unfortunately the light conversation only serves to make me feel worse. What, I can rightfully justify paying someone to sit with my baby while I am in the other room yapping with a friend? The awkwardness I had been running from is now morphing into guilt and creeping its way into the kitchen toward me. A nervous glance at the clock reveals it is time for the baby to be fed. I hurry to hang up the phone, flee the kitchen and the guilt that is starting to suffocate me, rush to the living room, and swoop up my baby like a vulture with all the casualness I can muster.

* * *

This time around Milla is no dummy. She's only falling for the "Hey-Milla-Show-Me-The-Kitchen" trick once—second time, forget it. While she holds nothing against Tanya, she was anything but going to quietly let her mother slip out the door as she was left with a woman that had walked into her life just two days before. She turned on all lights and sirens, everything that comes so naturally to a proud two-year-old: the beet-colored face, the headache-yielding screams, the deep eyes that house a hundred emotions, the fishlike flopping and flailing. The performance that is, to me, so familiar, and which usually stirs up impatience and frustration at such irrationality, now yanks out of me my own host of a hundred emotions, topping the list: shame, compassion, torment . . . I may as well have been leaving her on a lonely highway at night, telling her to wait for me just a bit, I had things I needed to do. I dress to leave and do my best to console her as Tanya does her best to distract her. Both efforts are fruitless and I am forced to peel her off me as if peeling off my own skin and close the door behind me as she lays in a soggy heap on the doormat. Our high-security steel door does little to muffle her desperate screams, and the increasing distance between us does little to placate my self-inflicted pain.

* * *

Tanya sits across from me in the living room with that same stone face that seems to experience zero emotion, that walks into my house every day and says hello so casually, the eyes that never change shape, the wrinkles that tell their own history, and the mouth that never really breaks into a smile in its truest form. As I prepare to discuss our schedule, she masks her nervousness with that phony casualness we both went to such lengths to put off. And then she forces out the words:

"I think I'm going to quit."

For the hundred emotions that had been drowning me for weeks as I panted and dog-paddled to keep afloat with some strained degree of composure, at this moment it seemed the sea went calm. I felt nothing.

My "that's really too bad-I'm so sorry things didn't work out-how can we pay you?-thank you anyway, we were very happy with you-good luck to you" escorts her to the door and closes it behind her, while my mental self slowly lays back on the couch and swallows the calm and the relief that it brings for a moment or two before my emotions once again subjugate my soul.

And I begin to sob.

My thoughts begin swirling in my head with tornado force. Did this mean I was wrong for trying to get some help in the first place? Had I been compromising the ideas I had for the mother I wanted to be—the one that does it all—by hiring someone? Had I been selling out? Should I just accept that things are going to be hard and get a grip? Maybe I wasn't meant to have any balance in my life, to reach all of my goals, to do anything but be a mother for now. Oh how I had been tortured by the decision to hire somebody to make things a little bit easier, and here I was, back where I had started, flat on my face in that same puddle of decision. Now what? Do I give up on trying to make my life easier, to perfectly organize my life so that everything fit? Was I asking too much? Did I have an impossible dream? Should I quit wanting so much from my life?

And I am once again dog paddling through my own tears, thoughts, motherly instincts, emotions and dreams.

* * *

We say goodbye that day to Nanny #1. We say goodbye with both sadness and pleasure, my conscience and I. She will never know, as most won't, about the crying chorus day. She'll never know about the feelings I had each time she walked in the door, and each time I walked out. She'll never know what Milla means when she says "a-ca-po," and will never feel the same pride I do when my baby begins to understand she can move her hands at will. She'll never know me, and the battle I face in trying to reconcile dreams with reality and the discrepancy between the person I want to be, and the person that I am. She'll never know what I go through, to try to do it all, to be it all, for myself, my husband, and my children. She'll never know the love I have for my sweet children, or the sacrifices I make to try to give them everything.

Of course, then again, maybe she does know all this. After all, she is a mother, too.

Jen Prokhorov lives with her husband and two girls in Moscow, Russia, and dabbles in creativity whenever possible. This is her first published piece.