On setbacks and care work

Setting goals and planning projects has always been part of my career development process. In building my business, I have set certain goals for myself and identified milestones to ensure I’m on track. I have goals around building content for workshops, I have a survey that I’m recruiting participants for, and I’m writing blog content on a weekly basis to help people get to know me and learn about coaching.

The past couple of weeks I haven’t made progress on most of my milestones. I had to travel to support my father with some healthcare needs. I also made time to check in with friends and family who needed some quality time together. This trip home involved rejigging my usual routine, reducing the hours I had available to work on my goals, and took me away from my kids and husband for nearly a week. I even asked some clients to reschedule sessions, which is not something I do lightly. Going into that travel week, I was aware I would get less done and I’d have to replan once I got back to my normal routine.

Setbacks that keep piling up

Despite my best efforts, even with the flexibility I gave myself, I couldn’t do everything I wanted to do. I wanted to get more work done on the train ride, but I couldn’t focus on my laptop for more than an hour without feeling motion sickness creeping in. I wanted to spend more quality time with friends and my brother, but some complications with my dad’s medical appointment meant I had to focus on that and was tired out as a result. As plans shifted throughout that week, I kept reprioritizing my time and energy and deferring tasks from my work to-do list. To top it all off, once I got home, my kids and I all ended up getting sick, so we were sidelined for a couple of days. I couldn’t catch up on the work I’d paused the week before, and I had to move a client appointment again. Ack!

In reflecting on all the replanning I need to do, I realize that some of my agitation about it comes from how I’m looking at the source of this disruption. If I was replanning things because I’d had a really busy week with client work, or if I’d been invited to speak at a conference, the disruptions wouldn’t feel the same. They’d be aligned with my job goals and my long term plans for my business, so I could justify some of the replanning more easily. They’d be work-related and not personal disruptions. Realizing how I differentiated these forms of disruption was an ah-ha moment.

Reframing personal commitments as care work

The disruptions I’ve had are the result of personal commitments I’ve made. But I realized in my reflection that I need to reframe this. The week I’ve had is the reality of someone who does care work in its many forms: supporting family members and friends, raising kids, showing up for your community. All of these are forms of labour - physical, emotional, and social. Families and communities are built on having people do the labour of care work, usually as an unpaid and quiet form of contribution. And very often, these tasks have fallen to women and people socialized as women.

Care work can look like sitting with someone in a hospital. But it can also look like buying groceries, making appointments, and being there in times of grief.

My father’s health is better off if he has someone who can drive him home from a medical procedure and monitor him during recovery. Someone who can listen in to the meetings with physicians to hear the things that he might not be listening for. Someone who can take notes, and debrief with him so that he’s making decisions with as much information as possible. And my friends and family take it in turns to be there for one another when we go through difficult times. I couldn’t do my care work without a husband who took over my share of the care work for our family while I was away. And who kept on going, as the only one who didn’t get taken down by the illness that left me and the kids sick earlier this week. I would’ve had a harder time working through the stress of the week without long walks outside with one of my best friends. Without this back and forth of exchanging care work, life is not as vibrant and the hard times are harder.

Reframing to quiet the noise

Care work is important. It might sometimes show up as a disruption to routine and jobs, but it’s necessary. Care work is work. I did some of that care work this past week, others did work to care for me. And as much as I wish I’d also gotten some more of the job-related work done too, I am now reminding myself that my energy was spent on things that matter. I have to let go of the discomfort of having personal commitments take the place of work commitments, because in the end it’s all necessary. This realization doesn’t make the to-do list any shorter, but it does make it easier to tackle it if I can stop putting energy into stressing about the cause of these disruptions. And for right now, that’s what I need.

How does care work show up in your life? How do you frame it for yourself? Are you able to make space - logistically and emotionally - for care work when it displaces other forms of work? What might need to change to allow you to make that space? If this balance between your care work and job-related work is something you’d like to explore through coaching, let’s kick things off with a discovery call.