Between worlds.

There is nothing quite like the holiday season in a culture obsessed with happiness at all costs to make me feel the complexity of navigating back and forth between work and home life as a pediatric ICU nurse.

Home life as a mother to two young children, wife, friend, and community citizen takes on an intense pace from just before Thanksgiving through the new year. I am coordinating celebrations with family and friends, keeping tabs on the kids’ school holiday programs, addressing Christmas cards, and deftly dodging BOGO promotional emails day and night. Life feels boundless with possibilities for activity and opportunity.

I arrive at work and enter the room of my patient, whose life has been brought to a screeching halt. She lies sedated, restrained by lines and tubes, barely oriented to day versus night. If not for the holiday decorations that we put up around the unit, there may be no indication of what season it is.

What is cheerful for me to anticipate at home during the holidays may be potentially disheartening for my patients and their families to consider. I can leave the hospital at will. They cannot. I am sensitive to this fact, and my demeanor when I talk about the holidays at work becomes sober. Life feels terribly bound up in this one small room.

I return home after my colleagues and I spend our shift saying one final goodbye to a patient who’d become the sweetheart of our unit, a joyful light after an impressive recovery—then suddenly extinguished by unexpected events. My children bombard me with hugs as I walk through the door, chatting about the new light displays that went up on our street, speculating about which toys I might have wrapped up for them under our tree. I am all at once comforted to be with my children, yet my emotions linger in the intensity of my day at work.

To be fully present wherever you are: an impossible ideal?

There is a lot of talk about the need to be fully present wherever you are. In theory, I believe in this, but in reality I struggle as a nurse during the holidays. Both my home and work lives carry their own sort of respective weight and meaning, and it does not feel humanly possible to quickly transition fully from one to the other.

Rather, I set down just enough weight from one in order to take on the weight of the other, and back and forth this happens, day by day, week by week. I feel at times as though I live in some other world that is not entirely my home nor my work, but rather an indescribable overlapping space in between the two, where light joy and heavy sorrow, frantic holiday calendars and slow savoring of the inner life coexist. It is when I’m working throughout the holidays that I feel the disorientation of this existence the most.

When one world feeds the other.

On my best days, I make it my aim to bring the sobriety, attentiveness, and deep savoring of time from my work into the oft-frantic pace of home life during the holidays. Or I draw from the refreshing, boundless, and bountiful feel of my home life to open up my internal space and capacity for the needs of my patients and families at work. But some days, I simply struggle with the constant shifting, reframing, and readjusting. I am coming to terms with this reality of working as a nurse during the holiday season.