She Grew Up With Food Allergies. Now She Helps Manage Someone Else’s
This is the fourth story in Raffy's Village: a series about the people living alongside food allergies in every role this world actually has, not just the ones with a diagnosis of their own. This one belongs to Molly Upjohn, a professionally trained nanny in London who has spent years working with children who have food allergies, and who, as a teenager, lived with food allergies of her own.
Long before Molly Upjohn ever managed anyone else's food allergy protocol, she sat at a family dinner table in rural France, staring at a plate of food she didn't trust to eat.
The context
Molly trained as a nanny through a well-known residential college, choosing the profession after growing up with a natural affinity for younger children and hearing, almost by accident, that the woman who'd looked after her briefly as a child had done it as an actual profession.
She looked into the training, was drawn to how detailed and responsible the role could be, and liked that it didn't lock her into one shape of career; she could work with a family short-term, long-term, locally, or abroad.
She's currently with a family in United Kingdom looking after two boys. The oldest lives with life threatening allergies, and the younger of whom doesn't, as far as recent allergy testing can tell.
Her own experience
Molly has her own allergies, though she's careful about how she frames them. As a teenager, she developed a pollen-linked food allergy, a reaction to certain foods that share proteins with particular pollens, in her case apples, pears, plums, and some nuts.
She's never needed an adrenaline auto-injector for it, and most of what she reacts to is fine once cooked. But the onset itself troubled her at the time. She remembers, specifically, a family holiday in rural France, somewhere remote enough that she didn't feel confident about what she was eating, and the anxiety of that stuck with her long enough to still be a clear memory now.
She's explicit that she doesn't equate her experience with what her charges live with. She isn't managing anything close to anaphylaxis risk, and she doesn't want to borrow that weight for herself.
But it's given her something practical rather than abstract: a real, lived sense of what cross-contact anxiety actually feels like from the inside, not just a rule she enforces. It shows up in small domestic moments now; her partner, still learning the ropes, grabbing the same spoon he'd just eaten an almond salad with to ask if she wanted a taste of something else.
She's had years to build automatic vigilance around exactly that kind of moment. He hasn't, and probably never will need to the same way, and the gap between the two of them is its own illustration of what she's talking about.
What changed
The clearest recent shift has been with egg. The oldest has been through oral immunotherapy for it, and has reached the point where fully cooked egg, in any form, is simply fine. A milestone Molly describes as genuinely exciting rather than routine.
But getting there hasn't simplified the day-to-day as much as it might sound. Cooking a pad thai for the boys recently, Molly scrambled the egg thoroughly on high heat, on a separate part of the pan, stirred it through the noodles, and let the whole dish cook for several more minutes to be certain.
She still caught herself putting his plate in the microwave for a couple of extra minutes afterward, fully aware there was no real need, simply because the habit of checking hadn't caught up with the medical reality yet.
She compares it, half-laughing, to counting oral immunotherapy doses three times in a row even though she already knows the count was right the first time.
A specific, repetitive kind of second-guessing that seems to come with the high level of responsibility.
The line between "cooked" and "raw" has also created its own confusing language for the family to manage. Egg that's fully cooked is fine; egg that's raw or undercooked still isn't.
On a recent holiday, Molly deliberately ordered herself an eggs Benedict with a visibly runny yolk and sat with the older boy while she ate it, using it as a way to actually show him what "raw" looks like rather than just telling him. She's found that distinction: okay in this form, not okay in that one, genuinely harder for a young child to hold onto than a single, simple rule would be.
That's part of why the family hasn't yet updated the nursery on how far things have progressed. The nursery already runs a blanket no-egg, no-nut policy because of several children's allergies, and Molly worries that loosening the rule for one child risks a well-meaning mistake. Where someone assuming "egg is fine now" and handing him an egg mayonnaise sandwich, not realising mayonnaise is typically made with raw egg.
A single hard no, she's decided, is safer for now than a nuanced one that depends on somebody else correctly remembering the nuance.
There's an emotional layer to all of this that's grown alongside the medical one.
On a recent holiday, the oldest stood at an ice cream counter, genuinely excited, having had a particular flavour safely before. Only to be told, once the ingredients were checked, that this one had raw egg in it and he couldn't have it after all. Molly describes watching his face fall as one of those moments that quietly breaks your heart.
She's noticed that as he's gotten older, he's become more aware of missing out generally, not less. The emotional weight of the allergy seems to be growing even as the medical picture improves.
What other people see
Molly has collected her own small catalogue of the gap between how her family manages this and how everyone else assumes it works.
At a party once, while the oldest still reacted to all forms of egg, the host mentioned pastries laid out on the side. Molly asked, specifically, whether they were egg-free.
She'd already spoken to the host about the allergy in advance, and was told they had an egg glaze on them. She had to manage the moment carefully, professionally, without making anyone feel embarrassed of anything, while mentally recalculating what he could actually eat at that party.
Her practical takeaway from moments like that: bring a version of whatever is being served that looks similar, so a child doesn't feel singled out by a visibly different plate.
At her own barbecues, she's had the reverse experience. A guest arriving with a salad, offering it warmly, only for Molly to have to explain she can't eat it because of her own allergy, once she learns it contains almonds. She's candid that even without anaphylaxis on the line, that small social friction, the slight sting of being the one who has to say no to something offered kindly, is one more thing she now understands from lived experience rather than theory.
Who she is, outside of it
Ask Molly to describe herself in ten words and she moves quickly through kind, energetic, and creative before slowing down and adding patient, silly with the children, loyal, trustworthy, someone who doesn't take things too seriously, caring, and adaptable.
Her three priorities right now are her work, her relationships, and her own well-being, and she's clear that none of them function properly in isolation.
On work, she talks about wanting to push past nannying in the narrow sense and actively build knowledge around food allergies specifically. Reaching out to parents, doctors, and dietitians, treating her own professional development as something ongoing rather than finished the day she qualified.
On relationships, she keeps it brief and protects the privacy of it, simply noting that she makes time for the people who matter despite long hours.
On well-being, she's specific: eating well, sleeping properly, yoga and pilates over anything more intense, long walks, and the plain logic behind all of it. A happy nanny does better work than an exhausted one, and she doesn't consider that a selfish thing to prioritise.
What makes her feel most alive circles back to people and to music. She was a music scholar at school, trained as a singer and pianist, and doesn't perform formally anymore but still leans on it constantly in her work: breaking into song with the boys to help redirect their energy, using it the same way some people might use a walk outside to physically move a dull mood along.
Food sits close beside that. She genuinely loves it, which she considers useful rather than incidental in a job where eating can otherwise become entirely about risk management. Anything she can do to keep a meal joyful instead of purely procedural feels like part of the actual job to her, not separate from it.
The thing that changed her most
The event Molly names without hesitation is leaving home for university and training as a nanny abroad. She describes the whole shift: learning to cook, look after herself, hold down academic study and a vocational qualification simultaneously, as overwhelming at the time and formative in hindsight.
What stayed with her afterward wasn't just the independence. It was landing, by the end of it, in a job she genuinely loves, which she's aware is rarer among her friends than it probably should be.
Why it matters
What comes through in Molly's story is a specific kind of translation work that doesn't get talked about much: not just managing an allergy, but managing everyone else's half-correct understanding of it.
A host who thinks a glaze doesn't count. A nursery that keeps one simple rule than risk a nuanced one going wrong. Friends who haven’t yet built the reflex she has.
None of these people mean any harm. All of them are exactly the reason the actual work: checking, re-checking, counting doses three times, microwaving a plate that was already safe, never fully switches off.
The language of allergy management can be confusing, precisely because it can change underneath a family mid-journey. Avoid for years, and then suddenly a careful, conditional yes, in exactly the situations where a simple no used to live.
This article is based on a conversation with Molly Upjohn and reflects her own experience and the experience of the family she works with. It isn't medical advice.
This is what the village is for: not just the parents, but everyone standing alongside them holding some of the weight too. Molly's story is another thread of that. If yours belongs here too, we'd love to hear it.