Travel

[DoulaRena]

I find that I am holding my family back from outings that may take us more than 30-60 minutes from home when I know I have clients due (which is almost always, I have been blessed [HUGE BLESSING] to maintain at least 3 clients per month). Taking time off for when I am hosting a banquet, attending an out of town conference things that take just as big of a committment.

I always have a back-up for events (like trainings, conferences and other clients) and I'm very open and honest before I am ever hired. So I feel like I need to stay close to home and avaiable "just in case" if it wasn't something we had discussed prior - like running up to the mountains just for lunch.

So I was wondering how most of you might handle such events when it comes to finding balance between work and family play time?

[DL]

Well, I don't have as many clients per month as you, but here's what I usually do when I'm on-call. Typically, I try to stay within an hour's drive, but sometimes I may want to go a little further away. For instance, my dad's house would be a two hour drive. What I do is call my client to check on her to see if anything sounds like it could be happening. If not, I'll ask if she'd be comfortable with me being two hours away. So far, they always say, "Sure! Go ahead and enjoy yourself. I'll call you if I need you." I even do this if I want to go see a movie for 2 hours, since my cell phone doesn't pick up a signal in the theater. Of course, if someone ever said that she wasn't comfortable with the idea, or if labor is suspected, then I wouldn't go. I hope that you can find a way to balance things out a bit with on-call and family time; I know it can get tricky.

[DL]

Here's a thread that may interest you:

How far away will you go when you're on call?

[tlcdoula]

Well, I don't really take private clients (took a hiatus from that for awhile) and right now I am working primarily as a hospital doula where I get to choose my call shifts. If we get called in we have to stay until the end though so if our shift ends we still stay.

I will say that we don't do a lot that would take us an hour from home, so for me even when I was taking private clients it wasn't that much of an issue. My family knows that doula work is my passion and if mama is happy everyone is so they try very hard to be understanding. I also understand that they have needs too so I will let them go to events or have dh take them without me if necessary.