Wellness at Work

I was laid off a couple weeks back, days before welcoming my first child into the world (and hours after the water broke). The timing looks terrible, but the company truly is in a bad financial spot, so it’s hard to be mad.

Everyone who hears this says “I’m really sorry.” And sure, it wasn’t fun. But short-term? It’s been kind of great. Blessed with some savings, I’ve been able to forget the market’s demands and lock into the rhythms of my newborn. In fact, I’m shocked to find that these first weeks, which everyone describes as the most exhausting gauntlet of your life, have felt…dare I say, restful.¹

This would all feel a lot harder if I had to hit milestones in time to show back up at a desk. A friend of mine insists that sleep training is a capitalist conspiracy to rush women back to work. I can’t speak to that, but I do sense most parents don’t have a choice but to treat their child like a work project, knowing they’ll have to integrate the kid into the larger logic of their work life.

Freed from that logic, however, the whole texture of care changes. Three AM wake-ups are still exhausting, but they stop being a problem to be solved. You’re free to focus on the experience as tender, fleeting and sacred.

The discerning BQE reader knows that caregiving and emotional nourishment are complex skills that should be valued on par with any other. The market’s refusal to do so only reflects the shortcomings of the market, not of the skills themselves.²

But here’s a paradox I can’t shake: care is work that should be paid, yes. But it’s only truly effective and healing when it’s not treated like work, ie. when we don’t submit it to the logic and calendar of a job.

This is also why I’ve never seen a workplace wellness program that didn’t feel like a parody of itself. It’s a big knot I can’t quite untie.

* * * * * *

Back in November, we had a yoga teacher come to the office.

It was awkward at first, seeing coworkers bent over in all sorts of weird ways. But we were a tight-knit workplace, and after everyone stifled their laughter (or ran away completely) we all settled in and it was nice. Endorphins and a real sense of peace circulated around our usually frantic all-staff meeting room.

I let myself drift until shavasana, when dread pierced me with a vengeance. The next time we’d be in this room, we’d be laying people off. I’d be personally delivering the news to one of the people in class with me, because I was too chickenshit to stick with my own ideals of how a boss should operate.

The teacher closed with a final “om” and a dab of lavender. Everyone fresh and relaxed and ready to be shoved into the wilderness.

1. I jotted this down a few weeks ago and I knew I was jinxing myself as I did. It has gotten a bit harder since, but overall my experience still stands so far: this is way less stressful and taxing than the rhythms of business.

I am speaking strictly for myself here, with the huge caveat that I’m not the birthing parent and so, while I’m proud of the load I’ve carried to care for everyone, I don’t have to do the physically taxing work of breastfeeding, pumping, etc.

2. I grant that Western economies seem to be valuing these skills a bit more fairly lately. You might say the market corrected for this. And all we had to do was wait for wholesale societal disenchantment with industrial and material wealth’s capacity to make people feel fulfilled, to the extent that our civilization is on the edge of collapse.

It’s like when I used to have faith that markets correct the minimum wage on their own. Then I realize that they do this via mass starvation. No thanks.