Woman says she thought her husband was just treating their nanny like hired help — and within a week she had taken the twins, moved in with her mother, and realized the nanny had been trying to warn her about something much worse
A woman on Reddit said the story started as a childcare problem and then turned into a marriage-ending one almost overnight.
She wrote that she and her husband were first-time parents to 6-month-old twins and had hired a nanny when the babies were 8 weeks old. She worked outside the home, while her husband worked from home, and she believed he mostly stayed upstairs in his office all day. At first, everything seemed fine. Then she started noticing the nanny acting increasingly uncomfortable and eager to leave at the end of her shifts. One Friday, the woman came home early and saw her husband tell the nanny to change one of the babies’ diapers even though both parents were already home. That same night, the nanny texted asking for a meeting because she was unsure whether she wanted to keep working for them.
At first, the wife thought the problem was that her husband had been piling on extra duties. According to the post, the nanny said he kept asking her to do work outside their agreement, including coming in early or staying late when she had already said she could not, and taking on tasks beyond the childcare duties she was hired for. The wife confronted him, he admitted he thought that since they were paying the nanny, she should do more while the babies slept, and he sent an apology email. The wife was embarrassed and worried the nanny might quit, but still seemed to think this was a problem of disrespect and unrealistic expectations.
Two days later, the nanny did quit. The wife wrote that her husband apologized directly, they offered the nanny a raise and bonus, and she still refused to stay. More importantly, she recommended that the family use daycare rather than bring another nanny into the house. That detail shook the wife badly. She said she was angry about losing childcare, but even more disturbed by the fact that the nanny did not simply want to leave the job — she felt strongly enough to suggest no other nanny should be put in that situation either.
That is when the wife reached out to the nanny privately and asked her to tell the full truth without her husband around. In the final update, she said the nanny eventually confirmed what she had started to suspect: the husband had not just been pushy or lazy. He had been making inappropriate “jokes,” sexual comments, and at one point had touched the nanny in a way that made her feel unsafe. The wife wrote that by then she had already taken the babies and gone to stay with her mother, and after hearing the full story, she knew she could not trust him around the children or herself the same way again.
She said her husband tried to minimize it by claiming he was joking, but she no longer believed that. In comments preserved in the BORU post, she made clear that the nanny had been concerned for her own safety, and that the wife herself was now concerned for everyone’s safety because of the kind of comments and behavior he had shown. She also said very directly that, to her, this was not only sexual harassment but also a form of cheating and a sign of terrible judgment around boundaries and consent.
What began as one mother worrying that her husband was treating the nanny like a maid ended with her realizing the nanny had been trying to get out of a house where the real danger was not the workload. It was the man who thought being in his own home gave him permission to make a woman working there feel unsafe.
