When I take the time to reflect on my work, what I am grateful for every time are the relationships that have formed between two complete strangers. I would have had no way of meeting any of these families if it weren’t for my job, and there is no way I would be who I am today without them. 

In college I heard day after day that all change happens in the context of relationship. Change doesn’t happen when someone is lectured at, talked down to, or reads a handout. It happens in the long, slow work of relationship. I knew the significance of this concept in my personal life, but had little experience that allowed me to grasp both the beauty and vulnerability of walking alongside my clients. 

They find out they are pregnant, or they have their baby, and they let me come see them every single week. And life starts to happen. 

Their baby wakes up 8 times a night. They find out their parent has cancer. They feel the weight of depression and anxiety but don’t have insurance to access counseling. Their toddler starts having screaming tantrums on top of the forty other things they are stressed about. And they are brave enough to be vulnerable and share it! I get tears in my eyes thinking about how proud and grateful I am to know each of them. 

Each week my families open up their homes and their lives to me. It sounds cliché, but it really isn’t. Ask a parent—parenting is one of the most vulnerable and challenging jobs someone can take on. They consistently have people telling them what they should do, judging them for what they choose to do, and many times question whether they are doing the “right” thing for their child. 

I’m not sure they are aware of how much they have taught me over the last two years. They have shown me what it means to be resilient, to sacrifice for family, to find joy regardless of circumstance. I’m there on the mountain with them when they find success, and down in the depths when things seem like they won’t ever turn around. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it looks like to walk with the families I work with. Sometimes it looks like going to my car and crying for a Mom who feels like she has no parenting skills she can be proud of. Or feeling tears well up during a visit as a parent cries about a past abusive relationship. Sometimes it looks like coming home with fleas. Sometimes it looks like me ecstatically yelling “OH MY GOSH CONGRATULATIONS!” when a family tells me they are going to be living in a place of their own for the first time while clean and sober. 

I wonder who I would be, how I would act, if I never felt the full range of emotions that I have when I sit with my clients in the midst of their best and worst moments. I am a baby social worker, so I know I have so much to learn. There are days where the weight of this job feels so heavy, and yet there are more days where I am overcome with joy and gratitude that these families keep me around for all of it.