It is better to be whole than good.

[john middleton murry]

And then one day, it's your last home visit ever.

You don't realize it at the time- when you walk in and smell that familiar combination of milk and blood and baby shit, as luminescent and comforting as the pungent dirt under your feet, thawing with spring. You don't realize it when the interpreter line cuts off again, leaving you stumbling through small talk in Spanish with a tired couple who look ready to give you their newborn child in exchange for an unbroken night's sleep. 

You don't realize it when the small dog tied to the front porch that you forgot about lunges at you and you dance away, swearing so filthily that you thank God afterward that there was at least a slight chance no one understood exactly what you said. 

As you're driving away (first turning the wrong way, again, then making a U-turn back to the clinic) you remember how tiny the newborn girl was, how she gazed towards your voice with the blurred look of new babies, the specific weight of a person who has only been here for six days- and then, you realize it. It's over. This whole time in your life is over.

It just doesn't work anymore. It's not the same. You're not the same person that you were the first time you ordered a copy of Paths to Midwifery online and cracked its spine during your lunch break on the sagging couch at the struggling nonprofit where you worked for less than minimum wage. You're not the same person who read this book over and over again throughout nursing school, who journaled about helping women and delivering babies. This was before you learned that no one delivers a baby except the woman who delivers the baby.

Or rather, you are the same person- you just know that person better now than you did when you were twenty-five. It's good that you didn't know yourself so specifically then, because it's good to try many things that you aren't good at. What is life for, if not partially for that? 

But it's also true that if you never sit down in the dark and hold your own hand, you'll never get around to doing any of the things you are actually good at either. 

Here is what was hard: not sharing a culture or language with people you are trying to help. Not sharing any life experiences whatsoever with people you are trying to help. Being someone in the first place who sees your primary purpose as being someone who should help. What if helping is not the point? What if being someone with something to offer is not the point?

What is the point? I don't know, I just know that I couldn't do most of the things that come naturally to me in that job. I saw way too many nipples, and truthfully, I am someone who will always feel a little bit awkward about seeing someone else's nipples. I couldn't be funny, not really. I couldn't banter. I couldn't explain to you why those things are what I wanted when I had a job where I could hold newborn babies, but there you are. 

Oh, the babies. Everyone always asked if that was the best part of my job, and my face curved into one of those automatic smiles but in my heart I knew that I could take or leave babies. I do not come from a line of baby cuddlers. The people in my family- men and women- look slantwise at babies, jostle them awkwardly, hand them back quickly. Even when I was a baby in my family, I knew that I was pushing it. 

I do very much want a baby of my own, but I've held enough babies-that-belong-to-other-people for a lifetime. I want to drive with the windows down when it's almost summer. I want to paint. I don't want to save anyone anymore. I don't want to only ever be showing up to someone else's party. I want to turn the lights on in my own garden, lay the table with flowers, hear the first few guests start to arrive. I want to spend the whole night at my own shindig-selfishly, deliciously, unapologetically- and then fall deeply asleep. Maybe that's not the point either. Probably it's not. But it's what I'd like to try next.