I am filing my survival of this last week under M for total freaking miracle. I slept until 10:00 this morning, after going to sleep before midnight, which is legendary sleeping-in for me, and I still woke up with achy feet and a very exhausted mind.
It’s tough to be unable to really write about work here. For as long as I have been keeping a public journal — nine years now — I have been self-employed, with only the occasional freelance gig where I had non-disclosures. Of course, I have never discussed every single case with Scarleteen, everything that goes on with managing the volunteers, nor did I do the same with Scarlet Letters or with photo clients, but I have always had an awful lot of room to discuss the ins and outs of my day being my own boss and having a setup where client privacy was not a big issue.
It’s weird to have a million big things I could write about and to be unable to write about them. Every day at the end of the day I come home with at least one client stuck in my heart or my head which I need to process, and writing things out is one of my primary means of expression and process. I have still sometimes written things out just for myself, but this is a large part of how much more infrequently I’ve posted here of late: time constraints notwithstanding, I just literally cannot write about my clients in-depth at the clinic or most of the goings-on there. I’m trying to feel out the ways that I can while protecting privacy, but it’s tricky.
In an extra training for options counseling yesterday — counseling for clients who are pregnant and don’t know what they want, so need someone to just sit for an hour or so and talk through their unique situation and walk through how all of their choices look and feel to them to help them find the best one — my trainer asked what we do to take care of ourselves when we’re feeling emotionally spent or upset. And I do still write it out sometimes, but given privacy issues and that writing is so much more work for me than leisure, I’ve been diversifying how I process lately. Obviously, talking it out with friends is massive, but on really tough days, I also have this thing going I really like where I load up the woodstove with wood and get a really hot fire going, sit in front of it and start sweating, and then let myself have a really good cry. The heat and sweat mixed in with the tears is my little sweatlodge: it’s seriously cleansing, and usually does the trick. I leave feeling warmed and relaxed by the whole process rather than feeling isolated or wrecked.
I also brought up the issue of how with any kind of job like this, you have to be able to recognize that there is only so much you can do, especially since by the time someone comes to you for help or counseling, they are coming as a result of situations and background that you can’t influence. In other words, the stage was set long before you. So, you have to invest yourself in doing what you can to help them right now — be that in giving them education they want/need or negotiating in relationships such as at Scarleteen, or in providing abortions or counseling to help them make reproductive decisions at the clinic. Any or all of that will, hopefully, help them, and be positives, but you can’t even get invested in those positives having legs: they may or may not. And by the time they leave your office or your websites or your email, you’ve done what you can do most of the time for them. You had your moments, and they have passed, and afterwards, it’s out of your hands. In other words, when you’re there, to do your best by them, I think you really need to fully commit and invest, but for you, after you’ve done that, then you need to be able to detach and let go. Obviously, that’s not always easy, and it’s also not always comfortable to fully invest when you’re in it.
The cases that keep leaving me hit the most hard are the genetics cases and the women you have to tell are too late to have a termination. With the genetics ones, even though I’m personally not one of those people who has ever seen the import of having biological kids vs. adopting (or to be more clear, creating family in any number of ways) — likely in part because I’ve never found that being actually related to someone automatically creates a stronger bond and because I also hate how many kids live their whole lives in foster care — it still is just so heartbreaking when a woman has planned a pregnancy or really wanted a happy surprise with one that was unplanned, made room in their lives and hearts for kids, saved money, etc., gotten all excited about it and then has to terminate when that is the last thing in the world she wants to do. Conversely, with the too-lates (which often happens because someone just didn’t know — lots of women have very irregular periods, especially young women — saving money for a procedure just took that long, they had to travel long distances, etc.) when an abortion is THE thing a woman wants, and she absolutely doesn’t want to parent or stay pregnant, telling her she’s without that choice is often an awful thing to have to do. When that happens with teens or very young women, I get extra sad, and when it’s with women, for instance, who are heavy drug users and you know that beyond their turmoil, they’re not even likely to deliver healthy kids (and lord knows that this is one of those instances where these folks are unlikely to be good parents, and those kids are unlikely to find adoptive families either, if they’re born special-needs), it’s another huge weight.
Of course, even outside of those situations, the stories women tell you about how they came to be in the spot they’re in are often maddening, upsetting, or just really sad. I’m not just talking rape or domestic abuse cases but also serious interpersonal betrayals or sudden abandonments with partners, the way they lose jobs or homes, how many doctors are just lax in telling people how to use birth control properly or just choose methods for patients that are not likely to work for them, how many partners don’t comply with birth control use, and so on. A couple times now, I’ve had women for whom the two-week period where you cannot have vaginal sex in order to prevent infection afterwards was a very real problem, not because of abusive partners (had those too), but because sex was how they paid the rent: making clear that they may have to choose between paying their bills and putting their health or lives on the line just stinks. And as a sexuality activist, how many women are thrilled when you say they can’t have sex for two weeks — some of whom will even ask if we can’t tell their partners it’s longer than that — is endlessly depressing.
I keep threatening to wear a button that says “Just keep it in your pants, man” for the men in the waiting room given how frequently I hear the story that’s that some guy doesn’t want any more kids because he has so many with other partners. Yet, Mr. Thing, knowing full well he no longer wants any children and being firm on that point, isn’t willing to get a vasectomy or even back up BC methods with condom use. Instead, he sees it as totally workable that he can just pressure partners into abortions they may not even want to serve his own ends. These same guys will usually pitch a fit when I say that no, they can’t come into the counseling session, because they usually really, very clearly, do not like the idea that their partner can say something about them uninfluenced or uncontrolled. Suffice it to say, if and when I find they’ve pressured a partner who doesn’t want an abortion and I discharge those partners with resources to have the kid they want, these guys are NOT happy. (Apparently, we’re not doing our job if we don’t push abortion on people, as clearly, we’re expected to do that.) I have, however, developed a hairy-eyeball just for them that has limited the number of times they’ll ask to go back with us, to the point that though I do usually say I can come get them when they are done if they have questions or want to talk to me, many of them are starting to get the message that they probably do not want to give me private time with them, because I am not the women they’re used to dealing with.
Too, sometimes you meet women who have just been through these unbelievably challenging lives are are flat-out amazons. I had one of them the week before last who had to be discharged due to having such collapsed veins from years of heroin use — she’d kicked the habit amazingly for the last handful of years — but got to come back last week. She had a kid she loved dearly, but because of a severe reproductive health problem likely due to her years as a user, found out she was not going to be able to carry another. I adored her, but there was something bittersweet about it, beyond her having to make a choice she would have preferred not to. With how she looked and what her social mannerisms were, with what she told me about her life and her recent medical history, it was clear she was one of those people that most tended to treat like shit on sight and without seeing who she really was. If I could have scheduled someone to give her a foot massage during her procedure and a week on some beach afterwards, I would have. I didn’t leave those days feeling sorry for her, like I said, she was incredibly strong and really amazing in my book, but there was something I carried home: this sadness that she deserved a life she was probably not going to be able to ever have, no matter how hard she worked at it and how much she survived.
This last week, not only did I work more than twice as many hours as usual, and have some other work issues on my plate to deal with, I had all of these kinds of cases and more when I was counseling. This weekend, I’d planned to be at Scarleteen pretty much 24/7 to make up for last week, but today that is so not going to happen. I think I need that heat and those tears today, and then some time to deal with no one’s crises.
posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, feminism, women, workworkwork, heart work |
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