I’ve always liked the idea of seeing life as raw material waiting to be shaped or built or sewn into something useful. But occasionally there are events so trying and uneven that they never quite make their way into the quilt—that is, they never make any sense, at least not in any obvious way. Some experiences just undo your seams.

Some years ago, I was in the position of having to hire a woman to take care of my daughter. She was a still a baby, and I was still a novice, nervous and unsure of anything other than the jolt of realization that becoming a parent was a crash course in learning to trust your instincts. Without instincts, you had little else to stand on. I was lucky enough to find someone who I hit it off with immediately. Makena was a kind, trustworthy, and gentle caregiver, smart and funny and equipped with an even attitude about most things. I came to think of her as a friend, well beyond our professional relationship.

In late July of 2007, two years after Makena had taken care of my daughter, she received a phone call from one of her employers, who told her that he no longer needed her services, effective immediately. Makena, who had been working under the table taking care of the couple’s only child for nearly a year, grew speechless over the course of the brief phone call. She was in a state of shock. As the man on the other end of the phone, who seemed to be in a hurry to be done with the conversation, was concluding his statements, Makena asked, “Can you please tell me why you are firing me?” After a short pause, the man responded. “Because we believe that you done something sexually inappropriate with our daughter. We believe you have harmed her.”

Makena is a practicing Christian, and every Sunday she goes to the Presbyterian church in her neighborhood. “God is good,” she says to me when I ask her questions about her life in Oakland. She came to the U.S. from central Kenya, in an area known for the Kikuyu tribe. It’s estimated that the Kikuyu account for about 22 percent of the Kenyan population, which has reached about 38 million. Inhabitants in this part of East Africa are known for many things, among them being the home to three of Kenya’s presidents. But there is also a popular joke that Kikuyus account for the biggest share of the country's criminals and prison inmates, a fact that Makena laughs at, not because of the horrible light it sheds on her country, but because she knows there is some truth to it.

Makena is able to laugh at many things, which is one of the many things that I have grown to admire about her. She has survived atrocities, including the destruction of the Kenyan village in which she lived and taught English, and other unspeakable acts that I won’t go into here—yet. After being granted political asylum in the U.S., Makena lived a comparatively comfortable life in California. Over the last seven years, she’s been able to bring both her son and daughter to the U.S., and has at times shared a two-bedroom apartment with one of her siblings and her two of her children.

For many years, she brought in a fairly decent income in a situation known as a “nanny share,” in which she took care of two children at a time and was paid respectively by each mother. It’s a very common practice among nannies in the Bay Area, where it seems to be a win-win situation for everyone involved. The kids have someone to play with, the nanny gets paid “double,” the families don’t have to spend as much as they might at a daycare, and there is more personal attention than a daycare setting would provide. Often as many as three or four moms who may only need part-time care bundle together and split the week up with one nanny.

Makena loves working with children. She speaks Swahili, Kikuyu, a regional dialect, and English. When I first met Makena I was about to go back to work and needed to find a daycare situation for my daughter, who had just celebrated her first birthday. Like most new mothers, I was overly anxious about finding the right situation, and after visiting many in-home daycare centers in my neighborhood, I was still uncertain. I couldn’t afford very much, and I felt torn between putting my daughter into a new, yet unfamiliar, arrangement or continuing to try to work at home with her, which hadn’t turned out to be very convenient once she’d started walking. After meeting another mother who suggested that we share Makena, I decided that I liked this idea much more than placing my daughter into a group with a bunch of other kids.

So for a little over a year Makena took care of my daughter and Maya, who was roughly the same age. The other mom hosted, which meant three days a week I dropped my daughter off at her house and went on to work. The transition was rough, but between the two of them (the other mom worked at home), I felt secure in my decision, even when my daughter cried as I left. It’s something I became at least fairly inured to, and over the next month the crying lessened, especially when she became more familiar with the environment and started to bond with her new playmate and a house full of toys she hadn’t yet become bored with.

During this time, my friendship with Makena deepened. I’d often spend time chatting with her at the park while she took care of the girls. Sometimes I’d pick her up and we’d shop together or run errands. Makena didn’t own a car or drive, but she lived close enough to me that I would help her get places whenever I could. On certain days, and sometimes evenings, when the other mom didn’t need her care or was on vacation, I’d bring my daughter to Makena’s apartment. She’d always invite me in and offer me ugali, a traditional Kenyan dish that consisted mostly of chicken and rice. I got to know her son, who was graduating from high school, and seemed to me to be one of the most well mannered boys I’d ever encountered, not at all like the teenage boys in my East Oakland neighborhood. He’d been taught to treat everyone with the utmost respect, and his kindness seemed to me to be almost anachronistic.

It was just another thing that made my respect for Makena grow. I couldn’t imagine the struggle of being a single mother in a foreign country with little emotional support, but the fact that she had managed to raise such a sweet young man amid her tumultuous life made me admire Makena for her strength and tenacity. “I am a strong African woman,” she would always say to me with a hint of sarcasm in her voice. “I can do anything!”

Her comment stayed with me for a long time, and became sort of a reference point. Whenever things got tough in my life, which they did during the time that I knew her, I’d think strong African woman—I need to think more like a strong African woman. In so many ways, Makena helped me to put my life, and what I perceived of as my struggles, into a different light. She helped me to see how lucky I was to have my basic needs met, and because I am an articulate white woman, to have respect shown to me almost automatically—even when I couldn’t see it myself.

She had some challenging qualities too. She didn’t like dogs and wouldn’t work in our house unless we kept our dog in the backyard. She was admittedly homophobic, and felt somewhat uncomfortable with all the gay couples in our neighborhood. It was something that was going to take her a long time to be comfortable with, she once told me. So, because she knew I felt strongly about not having prejudice, we talked about other things, cooking, shopping, husbands, and kids. At 52, she had a lot of wisdom in her. She didn’t hide much from me about her life, here and in Kenya.

On the job, at the local park where she and the kids spent a good part of the day, Makena was surrounded mostly by Spanish-speaking nannies, women from Latin America. The cultural gap made her feel a little isolated. When I told her about the trend in California, mostly among affluent white women, to hire “language nannies,” women who will take care of your children and teach them Spanish in the process, Makena joked that no one would ever hire her to teach their kids Swahili. She maintained a good sense of humor about everything, even though I knew that this bit of knowledge made her feel as though her skills weren’t as “marketable.” Eventually she met some Ethiopian women, a few of whom also worked as nannies, and they became her allies.

It was interesting to see American customs and ethos filtered through Makena’s experience. Her comments weren’t infused with the political correctness that the Bay Area is oversaturated with. I appreciated her less predictable way of seeing the world, even if sometimes it clashed with mine. We remained friends long after our professional relationship, and I enjoyed hearing her stories about some of the more demanding women she was now working for, one of whom had found Makena through me.

During this time, I learned a lot about these women who hired Makena to take care of their toddlers. On the whole, they were a difficult-to-please bunch, and it was clear that Makena was beginning to resent being scrutinized so often, and to tire of the position she felt dropped into. After all, she’d been a teacher in Kenya. People respected her there. Here, in the Bay Area, she was a foreigner and, even through the studied veneer of cultural sensitivity, you could sense the hesitance a potential employer might exhibit, a fear which moved beyond the usual set that accompany handing the care of your child over to someone else. Makena came from a culture few people knew much about.

One woman for whom Makena worked would not leave her sight for the first couple of months she worked in her home. This woman also spied on her while she was out at the park with the kids, a fact Makena became fairly quickly aware of. I suspected these women were more familiar with the Latina nannies, women from Mexico and further South, and did not know what to expect from an African woman.

After my daughter went on to preschool, Makena worked for one of my neighbors, and I soon got caught in the middle of a crossfire of complaints. The mother complained that Makena talked on the phone too much (Makena’s own mother in Kenya was dying, so there were a lot of phone conversations with family) and Makena complained that the mother—who worked from home—constantly criticized her choices. When confided in, I tried to stay neutral, even though my gut was telling me that Makena and this woman weren’t a good match. I’d never encountered any of the “problems” she had with Makena. In fact, I admired the way Makena took care of my daughter. She was very insightful and loving, and was capable of being both firm and flexible at the same time. She had always respected my requests if I differed with her on anything.

That afternoon, after receiving the phone call in which she was let go, Makena called me, crying, telling me that she’d just been fired, and asked not to come back to her employer’s house. When I heard the news I suspected that my instinct had been right. Makena wasn’t a good match for the helicopter-type mom, “the hoverers” as I called them. But, something much larger was happening. Makena was being accused of an unthinkable act, and one of the mothers involved in the nanny share was about to call the police and report her. The news was crushing.

We sat on a park bench near my office as she recounted the details. I don’t understand. How could they think that about me? Why would I want to do that? I’ve loved their child, taken care of her as if she were my own. I’ve earned their trust. All of her statements had me baffled as well. Deep down in my gut, I had an intractable feeling—I knew that Makena wasn’t capable of this. I knew it was a false accusation. I wasn’t blinded by our friendship. It was knowledge, certainty, as far as I was concerned. I knew I had to trust my instincts.

It wasn’t long before I received a call from my neighbor, who had been one of Makena’s employers. She invited me over to her house, where I sat on her couch in her elegant living room, colorful baby toys neatly boxed up in the corner, and listened carefully to her story. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t fooling myself. I wanted all of the facts. For that hour, I was willing to suspend my beliefs about Makena for the sake of balance.

It started like this: one of the other moms, I’ll call her Patti, had been unhappy with Makena for nearly a month. One day, while changing her daughter’s diaper, she noticed some redness around her vagina. She then witnessed her daughter fingering herself, and grew alarmed. She’d never seen her daughter, two years old at the time, do this before. So, after sitting with the experience for nearly a week, she decided to take her daughter to the doctor to be examined for sexual abuse.

But upon examination, the doctor could find no evidence of sexual abuse. Patti went home and called her fellow mothers. She reported the news, and told them that by this time, “she knew in her heart that Makena had molested her daughter.” She also reported to each of the other mothers that her daughter had been crying a lot recently, especially when she would leave her with Makena.

Armed with Patti’s confession, my neighbor decided that, in order to protect her son, she needed to dismiss Makena immediately. I was at a loss for words, especially when her conclusions turned to the possibility that Makena was a sexual predator who may have harmed my daughter as well. I listened as best I could, but I stood by my conviction that I believed Makena wasn’t capable of this. When she entertained the idea that Makena “came from a country where behavior like this might be tolerated or acceptable,” I made the decision to finish hearing her out and politely excuse myself from her house. By then, I was enraged.

My head was spinning. If those other mothers only knew what Makena had been through before coming to this country they might…then I stopped myself. If they knew, it might add more fuel to the barbaric claim that she was somehow capable of such criminal behavior.

Still, I couldn’t help but think about the ways in which it might also be possible to delude oneself about such a situation. Was I refusing to think the worst out of stubbornness or loyalty? Did I have some version of the denial that the mother of the accused murderer might have? Was my admiration and trust for Makena overriding my responsibilities as a mother? When I allowed the anger that was building inside of me to die down a bit, I concluded that none of that was happening.

To be sure, I made a visit to the mother who initially introduced me to Makena. She had known her best, long before I did, and would be the right person to discuss the situation with. Having a similar reaction to mine, she decided that we should involve a childcare referral agency that had mediators among its staff for legal purposes, and pull together a meeting with all parties involved.

The accusations couldn’t be more serious. Makena was at risk of losing all of her childcare references, without which a nanny can’t really expect to be employed again, as well as her legal status and political asylum in this country. But she was also at risk of losing her dignity. A transgression of this sort wasn’t something she could inform her family of. There was too much shame involved in being accused of something so foreign and so unthinkable to her.

Our decision to try to conduct the meeting before anyone went to the police was based on the fact that no formal questioning or explicit conversation had taken place between the accusers and Makena. This, we thought, might be a good place to start. She deserved that. It would give all the parties involved a chance to tell about their experience. Here, in the presence of legal professionals, Makena would have a chance to defend herself and would finally be allowed to hear the parents’ concerns and their accusation in its entirety.

But after arranging a meeting, the events took an unusual turn. The woman who had once “known in her heart” that Makena had molested her daughter, was now telling everyone that she didn’t have the time or the energy to focus on these events that involved Makena. Apparently, her husband needed to undergo chemotherapy and the family was under a huge amount of stress. Stranger still, she was beginning to rescind her comments.

In an e-mail exchange she stated that “no accusations had been made” and that they had not planned to go to the authorities. She also said that she realized Makena “didn't get much time to consider this or defend herself against what she perceives as an accusation” but they didn’t feel that they “owed her anything” other than to tell her that their daughter was not happy in her care.

After a several weeks of almost daily phone calls in which we reviewed the events and speculated about the intentions involved, I received fewer calls from Makena. Though she never quite recovered from the situation, she did decide to temporarily switch her work to elder care, and seemed much happier working for an institution rather than these individual women. Because she was still sending money back to her mother in Kenya, an income was crucial. I was in the process of moving out of the area, so I saw her less. Over time, she got on with her life and tried to leave the experience behind her. But I know it never did.

We continue our friendship, having survived much in the process. But the experience still sits there in the back of our minds. I still believe she was the victim of a paranoid imagination, and a culture overly obsessed with sexual predators. I can understand the impulse to protect my child, and, as a parent, to do whatever it takes to see that your child is safe. But I still believe that the events that transpired were uncalled for, even ludicrous.

Bringing a child into the world is one of those experiences that leaves the most indelible mark on our existence. It teaches us, no matter how strong we think we are, about our vulnerability, and about how to trust our instincts, and how to make decisions based on these instincts. I know now that there is nothing more difficult than this.

And still, that this is all I have to stand on.

**I apologize for the length. This was a hard story to tell**