Birth this morning, twelve hours, beautiful. The mother sang through the last hour, which I have only seen twice in my career, and both times the babies came out looking like they already knew something. I do not have a scientific explanation for that and I am not interested in one.
Mercury is direct again thank GOD. The last three weeks I have lost two pairs of keys, sent a voice note to entirely the wrong person (devastating, do not ask), and burned three batches of moon water. I know how that sounds. I do not care how that sounds anymore. Saying I do not care is part of why I am 28 and not 24.
Need to remember to text the client whose birth is next week about the cord ceremony. She wanted info. I keep forgetting because I am tired, which is funny because tired is what got me into this line of work in the first place.
What Tired Taught Me About Being Present
This morning, a woman sang through the last hour of labor. Twelve hours total, and in the final stretch, instead of screaming or going silent the way most people do, she sang. I have seen this twice in my career. Both times, the baby arrived looking like someone who had already made up their mind about the world. I have no scientific explanation for that. I am not looking for one.
There is a particular kind of knowledge that lives outside the clinical. Doulas and midwives and birth workers know this. We learn it not in training but in the room, at 3 a.m., watching a body do something that no textbook fully accounts for. You either make peace with mystery or you burn out trying to explain it away.
I am twenty-eight. At twenty-four I would have felt obligated to justify every instinct, to translate every felt sense into language a skeptic would accept. That version of me was exhausting to be. The work of growing up, at least in this profession, is learning which explanations you actually owe people and which ones you are only offering to manage their discomfort — or your own.
This week I lost two pairs of keys, sent a voice note to the wrong person, and forgot to follow up with a client about her cord ceremony. I am tired. Not the tired that a good night's sleep fixes, but the structural tired that comes from holding other people's most extreme moments as a matter of routine. Birth workers carry a specific weight: the joy is real, the stakes are real, and neither one clocks out.
Here is the thing about tired that no one tells you at the start. It is not a warning sign. It is a record. Every misplaced key and missed text is evidence of presence — of having been somewhere that mattered, fully, without reservation. The exhaustion is not the problem. The exhaustion is the proof.
The cord ceremony client will get her information. The keys will turn up or they will not. What stays, what I am still thinking about hours later, is a woman singing in the last hour of the hardest work of her life, and a baby who arrived like someone with somewhere to be.
That is why I do this. Not despite the tired. Because of it.
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The Marrow: Exhaustion in birth work is not a liability to manage but a form of evidence — proof of full presence in work that demands everything.
Key Sources: All details drawn from the author's personal experience as stated in the raw draft; no external sources cited. Cord ceremony reference: needs sourcing if expanded editorially.
What I Shaped: Preserved the three core images — the singing mother, the Mercury chaos as a texture of overwhelm, and the cord ceremony client — while removing the astrology framing as a literal claim and recasting it as ambient life-noise. The throwaway line "tired is what got me into this line of work" was the best line in the draft; I built the close around it. Restructured from diary fragments into a single sustained argument about presence and exhaustion.
