This is for the people at home. The ones who get what is left of us at seven in the evening.
You did not choose this job. You chose somebody who did. Here is the manual we should have given you.
We cannot tell you
It is not that we do not trust you. It is that the stories are not ours to tell.
So you will get a version with the names and the places taken out, and sometimes you will get nothing, and a face.
Learn the face. It saves a great deal of time.
Do not ask “How was your day?”
It is too big. We do not know where to start, so we say “fine”.
Ask, “Good one or bad one?” We can answer that. If it is a bad one, ask, “Tea or wine?” and then talk about something else. Tell us about your day. We would love to hear about a day that had a printer problem in it.
We will be late
Not because the work matters more than you. Because at ten to five a child needed a bed for the night, and you cannot leave that on a Post-it.
We know about the dinner. We are sorry about the dinner.
We will be strange in public
We will notice the child in the supermarket. We will read a news story with our jaw set and then tell you, at length, what the newspaper has got wrong.
We cannot watch anything on television with a social worker in it. They are always either a monster or a fool, and they never have any paperwork.
We do not need you to fix it
You will want to. You will say, “Could you not just…?” and we will bite your head off, because we spent the whole day on whether we could not just.
Try, “That sounds really hard.”
I know it feels like nothing. It is the whole thing.
Make us stop
We will answer emails on a Sunday. We will take the laptop on holiday “just in case”. We will say that nobody else can do it, and we will believe that.
Take the phone off us. Book the holiday. Say, “The work will still be there on Monday,” because it will. It always is.
When to worry
When we stop talking about it altogether. When the jokes go. When we are not sleeping, or sleeping all weekend. When we are drinking more than we used to, or we cry at an advert and cannot say why.
That is not the job being hard. That is the job getting in. Say so, gently. Make us tell our manager, or our doctor. Come with us if you have to.
There are people we can ring, and we are much worse at ringing them than we are at handing out the number.
What you get in return
Somebody who is very hard to shock.
Somebody who will be good in a crisis, and useless with a form of their own.
Somebody who knows how lucky they are. Who comes home from the worst of it, and looks at you, and at the kitchen, and the ordinary evening, and is grateful in a way they will not manage to say.
We are saying it now.
Thank you for waiting up.
Maisie x