Calling

People talk about the cost of doing long-term overseas medical missions. And that’s for good reason—it makes us face many things outside our comfort zones.

But sometimes I think too about the cost of staying. I consider our temperaments, our skills and where they are more needed; I think about the great commission and God’s kingdom, and if I take all that seriously, should I not be asking myself why I’m not going? Should I not have just as strong a calling to stay as I would to go?

Because the easier path here would be just that: easier, more comfortable, but not necessarily less costly. In fact, in eternal terms it may be more costly. It would be much easier to let my life slip comfortably by; to allow the years to pass on my own terms, without truly growing and being challenged in my faith, without serving in a way that lasts.

There is nothing wrong with the cushy suburban life. We like house-shopping through car windows as much as the next couple. I just don’t want it to be a default. I don’t want to be there passively, because it’s easy, or obvious. I feel I should be as called to that life as to a life overseas.

I used to think being “called to go” was a big deal. But it’s no bigger a deal than being “called to stay.” It’s not really the going or staying, but the calling, that matters. And that just means being obedient to where we feel God is leading us. If we do end up going, it probably won’t be from some dramatic moment of revelation, but from a gradual sense of leading, circumstances and promptings. If we end up staying, I hope it will be just as intentional a process. Because the cost of not living intentionally for Christ, wherever we are in the world, is too great.

In Sickness And In Health

I’ve only taken one sick day my entire internship and residency, and that was after contracting a stomach bug that made me pass out while assisting in the OR. I remember staring at the open abdomen, the blue sheets going fuzzy as my vision blacked out and my body went into chills and sweats, thinking oh shoot I’m having a vaso-vagal and the next thing waking up on the floor. Luckily I fell away from the sterile field rather than into it. I spent the day on the couch at home downing Gatorade and went back to work the next morning.

I hardly ever get sick, and then I pretend I’m not. This is, of course, part of the Hopkins mantra. Calling in sick is weak. Along with, no one ever eats lunch. As far as I can tell, clinics schedule a fake lunch hour, but overbook so much the rest of the day that in reality no attending actually stops to eat.

But that was before we had a baby. I’ve finally given in to the fact that at daycare, every child has a perpetually runny nose. If I don’t actually see a river of yellow snot running out of both nostrils, it’s because the caregiver just wiped it off a few moments ago. Which means E basically has had one cold after the other for the past five months.

Luckily, for the most part this doesn’t seem to bother her. She likes her snot; in fact, is loath to part with it and absolutely HATES it any time I try to wipe it off her face. Fine, keep your boogers, I tell her. I tell myself she will be armed like a veteran against all those elementary-school bugs, unlike the other naïve kindergarteners who spent their preschool years cooped up at home.

But sometimes it gets to her. She’s had fevers and been on antibiotics twice. Both times D and I got sick too; between the hospitals where we work and daycare, it’s hard to know what starts what, but the bottom line is that we’re all miserable. None of us are sleeping; all of us are hacking up gunk and losing our appetites. Our house is a wasteland littered with cough-drop wrappers, used tissues, Tylenol bottles and Lysol wipes.

It’s hard being sick. All the tensions inherent in our lifestyles become obvious when she has to stay out of daycare, and we try to get off work or find sitters at the last minute. D has had to work a number of overnight shifts while sick, which sets him back from recovering. And it’s hard being married to someone who’s sick, hard to be loving when you feel about as good as a dung beetle and the other person doesn’t seem so appealing either.

I think sometimes God gives us sickness to humble us. To make us slow down, stop. To help us understand how our patients feel, even when the disease is trivial. When our spouses get sick, to remind us what it means to love and serve someone the way we promised to do. When our children get sick, to understand the pain that God feels when he sees his children suffer. We are forced to confront our selfishness towards our spouse; forced to yield our children again to God’s care. Sometimes we learn to develop healthier habits for our own bodies. I’m learning this can all be what it means to be with God, and with each other, in sickness and in health.

E, Master Flinger

She is just heart-breakingly gorgeous. Everybody thinks so.

She is also getting to be her own person. Her newest thing is flinging things with great abandon. She likes doing this best from her high chair. She’s a great believer in No Object Left Behind. Everything I see, goes! I don’t think she’s quite picked up on the concept yet that things end up somewhere; I try to point out where things are on the floor while talking about gravity, but she just looks at her empty tray like NEXT? We’ll have to work on the object permanence. That, and the sitting up without falling over.

She also hasn’t figured out how to chew. She acts like someone who does; she goes around tearing great big pieces of food off with her gums, but once she gets them in her mouth it becomes apparent she doesn’t really know what to do next. She just ends up holding things in her mouth, hoping I suppose that her saliva will magically dissolve it, before spitting it out in one big sodden chunk five minutes later.

Sometimes she’ll stop suddenly, in the middle of nursing or playing, and look intensely at my face with a look of great concentration, as if I’ve sprung a third eye on my forehead. As if maybe her real mother has been abducted by the aliens and she’s not so sure about this one. She nearly goes cross-eyed with concentration. It always makes me laugh.

Beauty

People are starting to say she looks more like me as she gets older. Now we are talking subtle things, like her face taking more of an oval shape, or her eyebrows having a slight arch, and they are probably saying that just to be nice, but I’ll take what I can get. It’s strange how I can sometimes see myself in an expression, the tone of her skin. I looked at her arm once and was struck by how it felt like looking at my own arm; somewhat chubbier, but the bone structure was the same.

The one thing I am most glad she did not get from me are her eyelashes. They are so long it’s a wonder they don’t interfere with her eyes closing. They look fake, like the kind you see in mascara ads. They remind me of feather dusters and pastry brushes.

But she is perfect. I could not have imagined how she would have looked before she was born, but now I can’t imagine her looking any other way. She and I both peer curiously at all the other babies. Boy, they look odd, we think to each other. Perhaps it’s because she’s on the lower percentile of weight for her age that they all look overgrown, with puffy hands and large heads.

But I think parents who think their children are beautiful raise beautiful children. I remember when she was younger, and sometimes quite difficult, thinking that my mother, or one of her aunts, made her more beautiful through their love for and delight in her. She could be crying her head off with a face that resembled a squashed tomato, and they would make her seem like the most precious, adorable thing. This is the privilege that I have for her, and my husband: the ability to shape how they see themselves, and how the world sees them.

Dress Up

Out of the Present

Today she rolled over from her back to her belly for the first time. She’s been able to roll herself from belly to back for a few months now, but coax as I might, she never could go the other way. Then it was like she suddenly made up her mind and began doing it, easy as pie. This completes your quest for world domination, I tell her. You can now roll yourself wherever you want to go.

She does this little wriggle-wriggle thing with her hips. Where she picked this up I have no idea; maybe she watches Shakira music videos on the sly. She scootches her hips and shoulders side to side when lying down. Standing in the saucer, she bounces and wriggles, like she’s grooving to some hidden beat. She prefers to do this with one toy clenched in her mouth and both hands busy playing with two other toys. She looks like a D.J., swinging to the beat while spinning tracks with each hand.

She is moving out of the present. She used to just be all the time. Now she’s trying to roll off the changing table before her diaper’s on, crawl her way backwards across the floor. She sees something and wants it. I spend so much of my time out of the present: moving to the next thing, living in the past or future, in ideas or stories. I see her now starting to head places and realize this is part of what it means to be human. To want, to will, to imagine. The change is exciting, enlivening. But I can’t help wanting to hold her in the now just a little longer.

Journal Excerpt

I think she has figured out that there are things that go on while she is nursing, behind her back. The other day she flung her arm back while nursing and bumped it into my book, then madly started to grip and pull at all the pages, all the while sucking peacefully away. She was like one of those people with transected corpus collosums who button their shirt up with one hand while unbuttoning it with the other.

Usually when she flings her arm back she encounters Winnie, whose favorite pastime is wedging herself on my lap and against the baby’s back, and then the three of us rock back and forth. Winnie doesn’t seem to mind E’s hand occasionally poking at her. Those are one of my favorite times of the day, my petting the cat or holding a book in one hand while cradling her with the other, her falling asleep while I stare out at the dusk, the sound of D downstairs puttering around. If they say that God is in the small moments, this is certainly one of them.

Journal Excerpt

This is where I become REALLY glad that we started early on all the habits we wanted her to have, like falling asleep on her own in the crib, taking the pacifier, sleeping through the night. Because she is capable now of a whole new level of crying. I have no idea how she turned from a poor little mewling thing into this screaming, flailing banshee. She can cry bloody murder, and I’ll run in there expecting some horrible tragedy and just discover it’s because her pacifier got lost and she wants it back.

So my advice to new parents: start them early. Early is good. It may seem like your heart is being wrenched from your chest when they’re sobbing because they can’t sleep on your chest every night, but better that than the flailing-banshee scream, or worse yet, the little toddler banging on your door.

The funny thing is, you can tell this is something she is experimenting with. Yesterday she reached a pitch that completely stopped me in my tracks, and then we both stared at each other in silence. She was looking at me like, wow, can I really go that high? And I was looking at her like, uh oh. Don’t you even THINK about doing that in public, buddy.

She’s discovering she has a voice and it can do things. She’s like Eliza Dolittle doing vocal exercises with the gramophone. She sounds mostly like a wounded bird. She hasn’t figured out yet how her tongue and lips play into the mix, though she can now purse her lips and spray her spit out, which entertains her to no end. I do it back at her. Thhhppt. It’s fun times around here. Civil, fun times.

Cherry Blossoms

D has made it his personal ambition to go to the cherry blossom festival every year that we live in the area. I have to admit that it is worth braving the insufferable crowds. Probably. So this year we took the little one along. She looked very seriously at all the plumage and when she got close enough tried to eat it. Typical. We could probably have been in our backyard for all she knew, but somehow it was nice showing her all the monuments. I know D can't wait until she's old enough to get all the history. Whereas I make no secret of the fact that I have forgotten all my U.S. history. When she gets old enough to ask questions I look forward to making things up.

First Easter

Today I was sitting in the rocking chair quietly nursing E while looking out the windows. The windows are one of my favorite parts about her room. My mom made the curtains from fabric we picked out together, a cheerful yellow with animals like froggies and bunnies. There are large trees just beginning to bud outside. We might live in the middle of a city I’m not too fond of, but thank God for the trees around our windows.

Nursing now is about a three-minute affair. In the first few months she would nurse for what felt like hours, and in reality was at least thirty minutes. She (still) doesn’t tolerate much noise or movement while she’s feeding, and I would sit there feeling paralyzed. I read through stacks of books and watched an entire season of Friday Night Lights once I figured out how to maneuver my laptop and earphones.

But now I miss those times she lingered with me, so when she falls asleep nursing, like today, I hang on to her for awhile, and think and rock.

I felt very alone today. I’m proud of what D does, saving lives and all that, but sometimes I wish he were a librarian or cubicle worker. Episodic single parenting. That’s what being married to a resident is like.

I think about the separation and utter loneliness Christ felt on the cross, when the person he’d been in communion with for all eternity chose to reject him. It would be like losing an arm, a baby, being rejected by your fiancé or parents or spouse, but a million times worse. It must have been this that he dreaded, beyond all the physical suffering. I’ve never really felt lonely in that way, in a rejected way.

This is her first Easter. It’s a quiet one, just me and her, little fanfare. But I don’t really care about the white dresses and Easter baskets. I just wish I could tell her about this. I look at her asleep near my chest, hope she will never feel rejected and alone, and want to tell her that, because of what Jesus did, she never will have to.

Light At The End Of The Tunnel

Today was a day when our usually-harmless clinic policy of seeing same-day walk-ins backfired. There must have been at least nine add-ons, none of them straightforward. There was my post-operative patient who answered my usual introduction (“hi, thanks for your patience, sorry you had to wait, I’m going to wash my hands now, how are you doing?”) with “I can’t see anything” followed by “April fools!” NOT funny.

There was the lady in hospice with a ruptured globe who refused surgery. The patient with a bleed in her eye whom I neurotically examined and re-examined for an underlying retinal detachment; the patient who kept coming back with elevated eye pressures; the eyelid abscess that had to be redrained; the pink eye.

For some reason getting pink eye is a stigmatic thing for eye doctors, like getting “I don’t wash my hands enough and LOOK where it got me” branded on your forehead. Like a lawyer getting sued or a teacher failing an exam. It also puts you out of work for a minimum of two weeks, which means all the other residents hate you because they have to cover your call. But forget all that. I washed my hands about fifty times just thinking about giving E conjunctivitis.

I came home to her rolling on the floor and squawking like a bird and thought, maybe this work-mother thing isn’t so profound after all. It’s good to put in a solid day’s work, and it’s good to come home and be a mom. Work in moderation makes me a healthier person and thus a better mother. Clearly the operational word is “moderation,” particularly in this line of work, but I no longer feel like I’m playing a game I’ve already lost. There is hope.