Work and Motherhood

Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do than what one can do. –Lin Yutang

What I’ve pretty much figured out during this last rotation is that I don’t ever want to work this hard again. The different areas of my life have become engaged in mutually destructive behavior. I’m worse at work because I’m a mother; I’m a worse mother and wife because I work. I’m constantly trying to cut corners at work, get home early, find time to pump. Then when I get home I realize how little I see the baby, and how much I neglect my husband.

I’m tired of this dichotomous, conflicting existence. I want to believe that work and motherhood can be mutually edifying. I want to believe that God led me through twelve years of training for good purpose, both for His kingdom and for making me a healthier, more balanced mother. I want to believe that being a mother now can be a blessing rather than a setback in my career; can show me a healthier, more well-rounded way to view work in my life.

I think that balance is possible. Because I look at the Bible and see that motherhood is good, and work can be good. I am created for both and I believe I am called to both. For as long as I can remember I’ve felt gifted for and joy in medicine, and in anticipated motherhood. I loved biology and physiology, loved learning on the wards, love operating. I love babies and children, love being creative and silly, love nurturing and teaching.

I think doing both well starts with realizing I can’t really do both well. I can’t have it all. I have to know this, deep in my gut, to make the choices I need to make. For me, this means saying no to the culture of academic medicine where I work. Work thus far has meant pursuing the best training possible at the cost of many things. But it has to stop here.

I don’t believe being a mother means never leaving E’s side, means giving up ever practicing medicine or operating. But it means doing that a different way. I want to be with her more, not because I’m driven by fear or believe I can control her life, but because I want to be faithful to love and discipline her, and for me that means being around her more of the time.

And so I’m rethinking my work. But I think this is a good thing. Perhaps what God wanted to show me, by bringing me back from maternity leave into the hardest rotation of the year, is what I cannot do. And how selfishly and idolistically I have practiced medicine thus far in my life. It is good to revisit my priorities, my motives, and rediscover the joys in motherhood and in working, when both are done better.

Journal Excerpt

I am surrounded by aging people. Cataracts are a disease of the elderly. My patients shuffle in on stiff knees, look at me with eyes wrinkled and hooded with age. Being with E, on the other hand, is like being with someone slowly coming to life. At first she could only stare at me owlishly. Then she grew a neck and her head stopped flopping around. Then her hands came alive. Nowadays her legs seem to be getting stiffer and stronger.

But boy, those hands. She is starting to fling things with great abandon. She sits in her high chair grabbing her plastic letters; she chews on each for a moment, then throws them aside. I watch them sail across the room. There goes the G! the E! the I! Hm, I think. This could become a problem. Meanwhile she looks at me in utter innocence. Where did they all go? Do you have more?

Wonder

Staring at the aforementioned garish animal mobile. She is always this cute in the mornings. It is hard to leave her.

Journal Excerpt

I have lost an alarming amount of weight. I am possibly skinnier than I was before becoming pregnant. This is what happens when you only eat granola bars on the go while pumping five times a day. Sometimes if I only have a five-minute break between cases I’ll think, well, better she eats than me, and go pump instead of eat lunch. D points out that if I do this long enough, I won’t have much to pump out.

Everyone is trying to fatten me up like a turkey. My mom comes over to cook all kinds of soups. She makes me eat things that are supposed to increase my milk supply: fish head soup, papaya, pig’s feet. My sister, who is becoming a gourmet chef, bakes pork and quiche. My best friend, another gourmet chef, brings me croissants it took her three days to make from scratch. D stocks the house with all kinds of fattening things, like cheesecake and chocolates. I merely have to hint at possibly wanting to eat something before he’s out to the door to the grocery store. This is how they love me.

Journal Excerpt

She is such a roly-poly baby now. She grips her legs with her hands. She wriggles around while sucking her fists. She is all oodles of chub and soft folds of skin. She has little dimples on her elbows and knees.

Her legs and feet have a soft, pliant, unused look about them, like vestigial limbs. I can move them around however I want; sometimes I scratch her forehead with her toes.

She is definitely in a very cute phase. Soon she will be tearing around bumping into corners and throwing things off the table. For now she smiles and sucks her fists and lies there looking like a little tasty dumpling.

Exodus 2

And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Go.” So the girl went and called the child’s mother. And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed him. – Exodus 2: 8-9

“Rejoice with Jerusalem . . that you may nurse and be satisfied from her consoling breast; that you may drink deeply with delight from her glorious abundance.” For thus says the Lord: “Behold, I will extend peace to her like a river. . . and you shall nurse . . as one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you.” – Isaiah 66

My tracking of the word “mother” in the Bible led me this week to the first direct description of breastfeeding.

I could write a book on breastfeeding. I think Lamott described it once as “the purest form of communication I know,” and that is what it is like. The joy and satisfaction I feel in knowing I have something of consolation to offer her is hard to describe. No matter what else is going on, no matter what just happened or where we are, she is consoled at my breast. This is something I offer her that no one else can. She closes her eyes and sucks peacefully, little hand curled up on my chest. It’s her favorite place to sleep.

One of the hardest things about going back to work is my determination to continue breastfeeding. I hate pumping almost as much as I love nursing, but nowadays I pump more than twice the amount I nurse. But I think I do it because it helps me feel connected to her, reminds me that God has designed us to be together during this early part of her life. I think about Moses’ mother, and how God used that connection as a way to bring her son back to her for a time.

Lately life has felt like it’s hanging by a thread. For someone who normally doesn’t stress out much, my life is whacked with stress—about my surgeries, my patients, whether I’ll make enough milk, whether I’ll get enough sleep. About the future, and what I’ll do about work versus family. About whether we’ll make it. I need peace, peace like a river, a deep broad one. I need rest, and consolation, and comfort. This is a good reminder that I can only experience that from God, who can mother me in a way as deep and profound and natural as the way I am with E when she nurses. God, be my consolation and my peace.

Cats

She loves the cats. She likes high-contrast colors, and things that move, so perhaps this was inevitable. I wonder if all babies like black-and-white animals. Her eyes fix on them, then her whole body leans towards them, bobbly head and upper body toppling in their direction. She loves touching them in her own gangly, uncoordinated way. Sometimes she does this with a look of intense concentration on her face. Sometimes with little squeals of delight.

The cats patiently tolerate her. They are very Aslan-like in this regard. They sit quietly while she waves her chubby hands all over them and grabs bunches of cat hair in her fists.

Daddy and Me

She loves her daddy. It's all squeals and smiles when he comes close. Shortly after this was taken she started licking and slobbering all over his face.

Genesis 24

But her brother and her mother replied, "Let the girl remain with us ten days or so; then you may go.” – Genesis 24:55

I’ve been trying to dissect my guilty feelings about leaving E at daycare. I think there is a good part to the guilt—the part that comes of a healthy, God-given desire to be more of a present mother to her, to shape her environment and love her by caring for her myself. I realize not everyone feels this way, and maybe that’s okay, but this seems to be a big part of how I feel. This good guilt motivates me in the right direction, reminds me of my priorities.

But there are bad parts to the guilt. Guilt from worry and fear, that festers and grows upon itself and leads nowhere good.

I read this chapter and understand why it was hard for Bethuel to let her daughter go. It is a vague request, not rooted in ritual or a divine directive. Everything had been settled the previous day, and the reasoning repeated twice for the reader, by the author and by the servant’s retelling. Maybe Bethuel was rightly hoping to keep her daughter near a little longer; maybe she was fearful and hoping something would change in that time.

Well, two things are clear. The situation gave Rebekah a chance to choose to obey, which she did. And her mother did let her go, with words of blessing. Which led to one of the most romantic scenes in the entire Bible at the end of the chapter.

There is a release that needs to happen in me too. The root of my bad guilt comes from an unspoken belief that I am solely responsible for E, not God; that I am in control, not Him. That I should worship at the altar of motherhood with everything I have. But I am still first His, ready like Bethuel to wake up one morning and suddenly find Him asking me to be wiling to let go of what He has given me.

There is a rightful sadness I feel in leaving E every day. I should ask for wisdom to make the right practical choices. But once that is done, there should be a peace. No fear. No condemning guilt. There should be belief in God’s sovereignty, trust that frees me to receive the blessing he has for me and for E in and through these circumstances. At least that’s what I’m asking for.

Journal Excerpt

It’s as if a light switch went on in her brain. This stuff they shovel in my mouth is food! Food! Her mouth has become a black hole into which large quantities of rice cereal and banana mysteriously and rapidly disappear. She cranes her head forward and holds her mouth open like a baby bird. I can’t spoon the stuff in fast enough. I never actually see her swallow, but as my sister says, it must be going somewhere.

Every feed I make a big bowl thinking to myself, she can’t possibly eat all of this. And then the more she eats, the more she gets into it. Soon I’m running out and she’s panting for more and getting this forlorn look on her face like, why are you starving me? Why?

Martyr Mom

Work has been very difficult lately. There’s an incredible amount of pressure to get as many cases as I can this rotation; with the holidays, I’m already missing half my surgical time, and due to freak accidents and the weather I’m missing even more. I spend all my time doing secretarial and social work, only to find out today that all eight cases for tomorrow are cancelled due to the building flooding. From a clogged toilet.

And I simply can’t work the way I used to. E does not reliably sleep through the night so I’m chronically tired. I’m always trying to get to work as late as possible so I can feed her in the mornings, so I miss lectures and resident meetings. I rush back to try to feed her before bedtime and can’t finish things I need to do. I interrupt my work day two to three times to pump, and stay up late at night to try to pump enough.

To be honest, D and I are barely surviving here. Even with my sister giving up two weeks of vacation to be our live-in nanny. Being a two-resident family with a baby is just—well, not how residency is meant to be, and not how parenting is meant to be.

Even though I know in my head E is more important than work, every day I go through the emotional process of letting work go. I feel down, insecure, pressured; one reference or conversation at work is enough to throw me all off again. A lifetime of perfectionism and caring what people think is hard to shrug off, particularly in a driven academic culture. It’s incredibly difficult to let go of being able to work the way I could, to not care how other people see me.

I always pictured myself a martyr mom. Have four kids or more, give up a stellar career and mega earning potential, raise a huge and happy family. I had no idea what it is like; how much tension there is. My work is demanding; E is not. My work is impressive, public; she is not. My work is over twelve years in the investing; she barely over a year. And every day, I have to let go again, and again. Through the guilt, tension, insecurity, fatigue. If God is trying to teach me something, he sure is doing it the hard way.

Journal Excerpt

E does this adorable thing now where she tries desperately to crawl but can’t and ends up looking like she’s swimming instead. She lifts up her head and vigorously waves her limbs, hands scrunching up the sheets below and legs kicking the air. I figure this is a honeymoon phase, when she’s cute and smiley enough to be heartbreakingly adorable, but not mobile enough to be annoying.

I look at her palm-able little bum squirming in the air and listen to her little squeals of delight. Don’t worry, I tell her. If we were underwater, you’d be there by now.

Journal Excerpt

I am molting. That seems to be the best way of describing the way my hair is falling out in clumps. I’m worse than the cats in winter. My hair litters the floor after I blow-dry; it lines Ellie’s fists. For the first time in my life, my hair feels relatively thin. Just when the rest of my body had gone back to normal. Will the hormonal changes never end?

E is blowing little fish-egg bubbles all the time now. Her doctor says this foaming at the mouth is her way of attempting to speak. I’m molting; she’s rabid. It’s a jungle world out here.

Genesis 17

God also said to Abraham, "As for Sarai your wife, you are no longer to call her Sarai; her name will be Sarah. I will bless her and will surely give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her." – Genesis 17: 15-16

This is the chapter in which God establishes the Abrahamic covenant. After concluding the terms of the covenant, He makes it a point to mention Sarah. If the covenant was between Him and Abraham, why does God do this? To test Abraham’s faith, surely, that a child would come from Sarah despite her age, though Ishmael had already been borne. But, more than that, to ordain Sarah as a mother, and describe what that would mean—how it would be her blessing, her identity, and her legacy.

Firstly, God tests Abraham’s faith in His sovereignty over the creation of life. Every word said about Sarah is identical to what was said earlier about Abram with the exception of one sentence: I will bless her and will surely give you a son by her. He knows Sarah will conceive; that it will be a boy. He knew just as surely that E would be conceived. She is a gift; she is given. Everything about her is ordained. Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you even at my mother's breast.

In this was Sarah’s blessing. God never used the word blessing in addressing Abraham, but He uses it twice in close succession with Sarah. Motherhood is the blessing of receiving a gift. It is a blessing that carries great future power and promise. Nations and kings.

I think the challenge is in believing this. Believing in the blessing, the promise, the legacy that we are leaving behind. So far, being a mother has mostly been tiring and inconvenient. Being a two-resident couple with a baby is exhausting. It’s much harder than being a surgeon, yet much less recognized and glorified. There’s not much glorious about pumping milk in random empty rooms in the hospital, or getting up at four a.m., or wiping stinky poop. The immediacy is so overwhelming it’s easy to lose sight of the eternal. In a sense it’s hard to even see E as a real person; she’s such an infant still.

It’s good to be reminded of the privilege that it is to be a mother. To be reminded that one day when I look back on what I’ve left behind in this life, E and the person she will become will probably mean more than any patient I took care of, than any cataract I ever took out. God is asking me to believe this, now. Now, when most of it seems more fantastical than real. He is asking me to believe in this blessing, this promise, and this calling.

Journal Excerpt

This week she had solid food for the first time. It was a somewhat anticlimactic experience. First of all, I’m not sure rice cereal really counts as food. It’s a mysterious powder mixed into milk or water. Despite all my instincts I tried tasting it. It tastes like nothing, with a slightly mealy aftertaste.

Secondly, perhaps a few morsels of said concoction actually made it down her throat. Most of it ended up on her fingers and the bib. The parts that did make it to her tummy probably got there by sheer gravity, as it took her awhile to figure out how to swallow apart from sucking. She spent most of the time drooling it out of her mouth, while trying to suck her fingers, which apparently remain better-tasting than the food.

I kept trying to spoon the dribbly parts back into her mouth and maintain order while she grinned and played around. Hm. This feeding stuff might be harder than it’s cracked up to be.

Journal Excerpt

E has this generalized look of nonchalance. I go around exclaiming all the time. Look! You’re grabbing the bird with both hands! You can bring things to your mouth now! You used to only be able to look at the butterfly in a strange stupor and now you’re actually grabbing it with both hands AND putting it into your mouth! I can’t believe it! I must take more pictures!

She just goes around with a look of extreme boredom. Look, lady, it’s like I’ve done this a million times. You got anything new?

Journal Excerpt

A strange thing happened today. I was looking through pictures of E while pumping, and found myself missing her newborn self. There is a picture of me in my hospital gown, gazing at her as she looked vaguely back, mouth agape and tiny head resting on my shoulder. I miss those otherworldly days, when she looked like a gentle extraterrestrial. More alien than human, barely fitting in the crook of my arm.

I miss her tiny hands resting between my breasts while she fed, which was about all she could do back then. Suck and cry. She couldn’t smile, or focus on much. Her unused hands actually collected lint between its fingers and got smelly like feet do.

Now she is practically a different person, and I miss having a newborn. I actually felt myself longing for another one. I am turning out to be one of those women whom a few months ago I would have diagnosed as mildly psychotic.

Journal Excerpt

Her hair is gradually thinning out, as if it isn’t growing fast enough to catch up with the rate at which her head expanding. She’s nearly bald in several spots, particularly where the back of her head presses on her bed at night. I find myself sweeping her hair to cover up the thinner spots on the sly, like balding men do.

Genesis 2

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. – Genesis 2:24

As far as I can tell, this is the first time the word mother is mentioned in the Bible. And it’s basically to point out that it is a temporary thing. The verse could just as well say, For this reason a woman will leave her father and mother…

I think about what defines who I am, and the two things uppermost in my mind now are medicine and motherhood. Both have so unnegotiably transformed my life, are so inflexible. Both demand a lot. But I think more about what this passage is saying, and I realize the two things that should define me are God and my husband—two things that are not inflexible, most of the time not as demanding, but the two things that will last the longest. Marriage, for this lifetime, and God for eternity. God first, as the one who created me; D second, as the one to whom I am given.

This passage also brings to mind what it means to raise E as a woman. Right now I feel so connected with her. She was a part of my body and came out of my body; when she breastfeeds we are literally still one flesh. When she is naked with me she feels no shame. But she was not created for me. Woman was taken out of a man’s body, was created for him, and this is part of her purpose for existing. For a man, for Christ.

So to be a mother is to understand what it means to let her go. It is understanding for what purpose she was originally created, as a child of God, and as a woman. It is preparing her for a healthy marriage, by praying for her potential husband, by having a healthy marriage myself. It is giving her to Christ, because He will be the one who will be with her forever, not me.

And for myself: it is hearing the demands of God, and my husband, more than I hear her demands upon me. Which is practically difficult, but in principle important. I guess the more important things are often the harder ones to do.