“You’re raising our daughter! She spends more time with teachers than with her parents,” a parent once told me regarding a student.

It was the first time anyone had said aloud what I’ve thought often enough. Such notions most forcefully — and most obsessively — worked their way into my thinking when we began leaving our daughter with “strangers” at day care. It was a stab of guilt, feeling K and I were somehow neglecting our responsibilities as parents, letting someone do the majority of our childrearing for us.

The irony of being a teacher myself didn’t go unnoticed. I thought of a film — I can’t remember the title — that had a scene in which a young girl drops off her child for day care then heads uptown to her job as a nanny.

I see into parts of their lives no one else sees. A young man writes, “I ask my mom [to play chess with me]. ‘I’m too busy at the moment. How about later?’ Knowing that later will be near 7 PM, I slither back to my room.” It’s a vivid flash of what his evening is like, of what he might be experiencing at the very moment I’m reading his paper. It’s a window few look through.