What families have taught me

There are things you learn in training, and then there are things you learn in someone’s kitchen while they’re trying to remember if they ate yesterday.

The second kind sticks.

I’ve been in enough homes now to notice patterns, not in the families themselves, they’re all different, but in the shape of what’s hard. It’s almost always the gap between what people expected postpartum to feel like and what it actually does. Not dramatically wrong, just off in ways nobody named for them. The tiredness lands differently than they thought. The love is there but so is something heavier sitting right next to it, and nobody told them those two things could coexist like that.

The thing that helps, consistently, more than any specific task I do, is someone saying “this is normal” and meaning it. Not in a dismissive way, not “oh everyone feels that,” but specifically, about the specific thing they’re describing. There’s a moment when they see you seeing, and they exhale. They were waiting for permission to not be fine, and they didn’t know that was what they needed until it arrived.

I had a visit once where I didn’t do much. I held the baby for a couple of hours, made sure the birthing parent ate something real, tidied the kitchen counter because it was bothering them even though they hadn’t said so. Even though I felt I didn’t do much, just by being there and being reliable, by giving them the space to be themselves instead of ‘parent’ for a minute hit a kind of reset.

That’s what I keep learning: I don’t have to fix anything. I just have to be a person who is not panicking, who knows what normal looks like, who can hold the space for a few hours while someone else remembers who they are underneath the exhaustion.

The other thing families keep teaching me is that the non-birthing parent is almost always more depleted than they’re letting on. They’ve learned to be the functional one and they’re very good at it, and it means they’re carrying a lot in silence, and a small amount of direct attention, someone asking how they’re doing and waiting for the real answer, goes an unreasonable distance.

This work has taught me that I’m comfortable with mess. Not just the physical kind, though also that, but the emotional kind, the unresolved, the contradictory, the “I love my baby and I want my old life back” said out loud for the first time. I don’t need it to resolve. I can just sit with it, which turns out to be rarer than it should be.

I’m still learning. Every family is a new set of things I didn’t know I didn’t know. That part hasn’t gotten smaller.

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