Boundaries, burnout, and babies

Nobody tells you that the hardest part of this work isn’t the work.

I have been thinking about boundaries a lot lately, specifically about the fact that I understand them conceptually and apply them inconsistently, which is probably the most honest thing I can say about where I’m at. I know what they’re supposed to look like. I know the version of me that holds them cleanly and goes home on time and doesn’t overextend, and then there were the twins.

Two babies, parents who were really going through it, and I stretched, a lot, I stayed longer than I should have, I went more often than I could realistically sustain, I missed bedtimes at home, my husband picked up more than his share without complaining about it, and I pushed until I got sick, which my body has a way of doing when I refuse to listen to it through more polite channels.

The thing is I don’t entirely regret it. That’s the complicated part.

Because there was a night when I got both babies to sleep at the same time, left two clean, calm, sleeping infants and one clean, calm, breathing parent, and I walked out of that house and felt like I had done something that mattered, and I went home energized in a way that doesn’t happen often, and I had missed my own kid’s bedtime and that part genuinely sucked, and both of those things were true at the same time and I’m still working out what to do with that.

This is what burnout looks like for me so far, not a dramatic collapse, more a slow leak, the getting sick, the slightly shorter fuse at home, the tiredness that doesn’t lift after a good night’s sleep, which is your body’s way of saying you’ve been running a tab and it’s coming due.

The tension of being a caregiver professionally and personally is something I didn’t fully anticipate, you come home from a long shift at someone else’s house and your own kid needs you and your own partner needs you and sometimes there is genuinely not enough left, and asking your family to absorb the overflow of your work is a thing that has a cost even when they do it without complaint.

What refills me, I’m still figuring that out, I don’t have a tidy list of rituals, the honest answer is that sometimes the work itself does it, the two sleeping babies, the clean kitchen counter, the parent who finally sat down and ate something, and sometimes it costs more than it gives back, and knowing the difference ahead of time is a skill I’m still building.

What I know is that the version of this work that’s sustainable looks different than the version I was doing with the twins, and I want to do this for a long time, which means I have to care about the long game even when the short game is right in front of me and really needs help.

I’m working on it.

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