Something happens around the first hour.
New parents say something they haven’t said out loud to anyone yet, and I don’t know why it’s me they say it to, I’m a relative stranger who has been in their home for fifty minutes, but I think it’s because I showed up and apparently a lot of people don’t, and also because I’m not going to make a face or say something about how that’s so normal or pivot immediately to a tip.
I’ve been thinking about what it costs to receive that, emotionally, in a way I can actually measure, and the answer is: something, it costs something, I leave a home carrying a small amount of what I found there, not most of it, not even a lot of it, but a detectable amount, and I looked this up and it has a name, which is genuinely reassuring because it means I’m not malfunctioning.
The thing I’m trying to figure out is where the useful version of that ends and the not-useful version begins, because there’s a version where I hold what a family is going through and stay a separate person while I’m doing it, and there’s another version where I stop being separate and just merge with the whole experience instead, and the second one feels more committed but is actually less helpful, a doula who has merged with the situation is not more present, she’s just more confused about where she is.
My own postpartum is useful here, I know what that particular fog feels like from the inside, which means I have a map I can draw on, but the risk is that I stop consulting the map and start thinking I’m back in the fog, and there’s a difference between I remember that and I am back in that, one is a resource and the other is a signal to stop and check myself.
A real week looks like: a home visit, some admin, at least one conversation that I’m still turning over at dinner, and the weight of it isn’t dramatic from the outside, it’s small and it’s incremental, and then I come home and my toddler needs something completely different and doesn’t understand about decompression time, which is fair, that’s not a reasonable thing to expect a toddler to understand, their needs are just as real and also they don’t wait.
The recovery isn’t interesting… it’s a walk, it’s writing a few sentences somewhere so the thing is outside of me instead of in me, it’s telling my partner, it’s sitting on the floor with my kid and letting what they need be simple and enough, which it usually is, which helps.
What I’m trying to stop doing is deciding I’m fine before I’ve actually checked, because there’s a version of this job where you convince yourself the weight doesn’t accumulate because you’re built for it, you chose it, you’re not a beginner, and I can already feel the pull of that particular story, and I don’t think it ends anywhere good, I think that’s just how people burn out while telling themselves they aren’t.
What I want is to care in a way I can actually sustain, which means being honest about what the work costs, including with myself, and I’m only just starting to figure out what that looks like in practice, but I’m at least asking the question now, which is apparently the important part, or so I’ve been told.