On Going Back to work, Edition 2
As with everything relating to my second child, I’ve been here before. It’s the last week of my maternity leave. This time next week I’ll be at work doing the things I do there: operating or chatting to patients and colleagues, assessing kids down in the emergency unit or following up on them in the wards and clinics. I won’t be doing the things that have come to define my leave: feeding, belly-poking, driving to and from school and teasing the details of the day out of my two-year old’s strange mind. These two lives — the one where I go to a job and the other where my job is to be home — are worlds and worlds apart, and to be sure there is no small amount of anxiety about leaping from the one to the other.
I remember how it felt, going back last time. The guilt and grief at leaving the fresh-faced creature with the adoring smile with someone who will feed him powdered milk from a bottle. The way, as a friend put it recently, it feels like someone pushes a ‘Fast Forward’ button on your life the second your eyes fly open on that first day back, as you hurtle around work attending to the needs of scores of people rather than just the two or three at home, and then as you race home to attend to those two or three at their neediest, wheedliest time of day. I remember how almost empty my head felt, as if the things necessary to know in order to do my job had been packed away without my noticing, and I had to run around opening drawers and cabinets to find it all again.
But also, as with everything relating to my second child, nothing is quite the same. By the time I went back last time, my kid was sleeping through and I felt positively refreshed compared to when I left. The new baby is not a great sleeper: at the moment we’re getting four broken hours a night, and we feel cranky and brittle all day. The logistics are more complex. There’s a new nursery school and all it comes with: a drop-off time later than my own ward-round time, fund-raisers and sports days and parent-teacher meetings. My final exam, after which I should eventually become a specialist, is now less than a year away and I need to fit tutorials and dedicated study-time in and around all the other things. Life will be hectic. But then again, whose isn’t?
People often ask me how I ‘manage’, how I find it possible to both specialise and grow a family at the same time. I always tell them that us humans are incredibly resilient and flexible, and that everything becomes bearable and ‘normal’ after a time, if not necessarily fun. I always tell them that I couldn’t do it without my amazing husband and the wonderful woman who is nanny to our babies. I always say there are people who somehow cope with even worse situations than mine: single mothers, women who wake at four in the morning to commute to low-paying and ungratifying jobs, parents of special needs or very sick children.
But even if my life is easier than it could be, it still feels pretty tough, and I often want to tell the people who ask how I’m managing that I’m not sure that I am. To use a tired metaphor, I wonder if I’m failing to see the wood for the trees. I thrash through each day, moving doggedly from task to task, and at the end of it I have done my job and my children are clean and asleep and in bed. But am I actually getting anywhere? Am I actually moving through the forest to some magical clearing, where I’ll be a specialist who has some control over her own life, with whole, healthy children in whose lives I play a meaningful role? Or am I just wondering in circles and burying myself deeper in the underbrush?
These are the questions that stop me from responding to Facebook posts recommending that female registrars don’t have children while they’re still specialising, or to articles and forums suggesting that trainees have a Mirena inserted before they start. I can’t rally against the nay-sayers when deep down, I worry they may be right. The past week or two, as I inch through the interrupted nights, as I wade through the tired days, as the hospital that employs me looms larger and larger as I drive past it on the way to my kid’s school every day, I really do wonder if I’ll be brave and strong enough to ‘manage’. I hope I will, because I do desperately want it to be possible for women to have a fulfilling career and a healthy family at the same time, and I want to be an example to younger colleagues and trainees who fret about this at night. I want to prove that the people who feel entitled to deliver comment about another person’s reproductive and career choices are wrong. But mostly, I hope I manage because I love my job and have great belief that the thing I hope to be one day is a thing the world needs, but I love my family more, and couldn’t bear to see it broken.
Of course, I am not the first person to do this thing, and am fortunate enough to know and be inspired by many women in a similar position. I know women who finished specialising despite being single parents, or having several school-going children, or giving birth twice between writing their primary and final exams. They had their babies, and went back to work, and achieved what they set out to. I like to think they have left the forest behind, that it didn’t consume them, and that they are stronger and wiser for the journey they took. Each of them that I have spoken to has always told me that it was worth it in the end, and also that ‘it’ — this jumbled life of children and patients and husbands and colleagues and friends and on-calls and kiddies parties and academic presentations — gets not only easier but also better, with time.
In university I had a friend who would always say, when things were rough, ‘Kyk noord en fok voort.’ Really, there’s not much more we can do, is there? Check our compass, check our supplies, and push through that forest. The clearing is out there somewhere.
Two Years Ago: On Going Back To Work
