By Emma Goldberg, Photo: Gili Benita/The New York Times, The New York Times, April 16, 2022
Sandra Rosales’s voice takes on an affectionate lilt when she recalls the notes she received from the two girls she used to care for in Brooklyn. “If I had to describe you in one word it would be loving,” one of her nanny charges, now 9, wrote to Ms. Rosales last year. “Thanks for encouraging me to be brave.”
Ms. Rosales spent six years with them, working 10 hours a day and five days a week. They were family. Until they weren’t.
When Ms. Rosales, 54, got Covid in December 2020, the family she worked for told her that it wouldn’t continue to pay her while she was ill.
Something clicked for her that month, when she lay in her Queens apartment with a fever that climbed to 105 degrees. “I love those kids,” she said. But, she added, “when this situation happened, I was like, ‘I’m not part of this family.’”
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