Every social worker I know has a car park.
Not the same one. Mine has been the family court, a hospital, a retail park with a drive-through, and once the far corner of a garden centre, because it was the first place I could pull in.
It is where you go after.
What happens there
You turn the engine off. You do not turn the radio on. You look at the steering wheel for a while.
Sometimes you cry. It is not always because something terrible happened. Sometimes it is because a foster carer was kind to you, and it was the first kind thing all day, and it went straight through.
Sometimes you ring somebody. Sometimes you eat a sandwich very slowly.
Then you write your notes, check your face in the mirror, and drive to the next one.
Why the car
Because it is the only room in the job that is yours.
The office is open plan. The visit was in somebody else’s home. The meeting was in a borrowed room with a broken blind. At home there are people who would like you to be alright, and you would like to be alright for them.
The car asks nothing. The car has seen it all before. The car smells of other people’s lunches and does not judge.
What I used to think
That crying meant I was not cut out for it.
I watched the people who had been doing it for twenty years, and they seemed fine. They were calm in meetings. They made jokes at the kettle. I thought there must be a trick to it that I had not been taught.
There is no trick. They had car parks too. I know, because years later I asked.
What I think now
That it would be strange not to.
You spend the day in rooms where the worst things that happen to children are being discussed in ordinary voices. You keep your own voice ordinary. That is the skill, and it costs something.
It has to go somewhere. Better the car park than the kitchen at home, or the bottom of a glass, or nowhere at all.
The ones I worry about are not the ones who cry. They are the ones who stopped.
If you are in one now
You are not bad at your job. You are doing a hard thing and you noticed.
Drink some water. Eat the sandwich.
Then tell somebody. Not everything, and not tonight if you cannot. But at your next supervision, when they ask how you are, do not say “fine”. Say “I had a bad one on Tuesday.” See what happens.
If there is nobody at work you could say that to, that is worth knowing. There are people you can ring.
One more thing
If you see a colleague sitting in their car with the engine off, do not knock on the window.
Go in and put the kettle on, so that it has just boiled when they come through the door. Do not ask. Put a biscuit next to it.
That is how you say it, in this job.
Maisie x
Next in the notebook: A field guide to the biscuit tin