Empathy sends her regards

It’s 11.30am on a Monday and I’m leaving the GP’s surgery with my baby girl. My hands are shaking, making it very hard to push her stroller forward. I zigzag her through the cobbled pavements of Crouch End, tears falling as I follow the pram’s movement.

Although she has the usual winter cold, there’s nothing wrong with her.

But there was something very wrong about the doctor’s bedside manner.

Earlier on, I came into the surgery and explained that the nursery manager had called me that morning to say my daughter wasn’t feeling very well. She didn’t have a fever, but she was coughing a lot and was unusually whiny.

The doctor, a white British woman in her 60’s, appeared alarmed after examining my baby:

“Her hands are very cold. You’re not dressing her properly, are you?”

Amongst the many skills that woman had, she was an expert in making first-time mothers feeling guilty.

She checked my baby’s temperature. Her eyes were slightly rolled up, her lips pursed in judgement.

“You said she doesn’t have a temperature, right?”

She then held the thermometer up to my face:

“Well, she’s 38.9.”

I’ve been in the UK for too long. I’m fluent in passive aggressiveness and I know how the British can make you feel like the worst person in the world with just a few words.

She asked me to take my baby’s vest off. My hands were shaking. She continued:

“It’s tough, isn’t it?”

She wasn’t trying to comfort me. Her tone was more like the senior at a university who sadistically enjoys watching freshers being humiliated. She then finished off with:

“She’s so young to be at nursery.”

I grabbed my bags and didn’t bother finishing dressing my baby up. I had to leave the room before I burst into tears.

Listen to your elders, they say.

Sometimes I don’t.

Not if their words lack empathy. Not if the only thing they care about is showing me that they know it better. Not if they want to diminish me through their comments.

On my way back from the surgery, I wondered why that woman was so uninspired to help me.

I couldn’t help but imagine her at home. Her kids have probably gone to university. She spends her evenings watching cooking shows on TV and drinking more units of alcohol per day than the NHS recommends. She sleeps 8 hours straight every night — there’s no crying baby interrupting her dreams every fifty minutes.

She’s a GP at a surgery in North London at the end of her career. Her job is to tell people to keep an eye on whatever symptom they have or to drink lots of water. She doesn’t have to prove to her boss (and herself) that she’s still good at what she does after returning from maternity leave. She’s not sleep deprived and she doesn’t have a nursery manager who calls every day requesting an urgent pick-up because her baby has done more than 3 loose poos in 48 hours.

She leaves work at 4 pm. She doesn’t have to work after baby’s bath time to make up for a slow post-pregnancy brain. She doesn’t cry at night because she’s worried that all this work-life balance thing is bullshit and there’s no way women can be good at their jobs and being a mother because it’s exhausting.

She doesn’t remember what’s like to work and look after a baby at the same time. She has done it once, or twice. But she can’t remember it — that’s why she wasn’t nice to me.

In some ways, I don’t blame her.

My baby is only nine months and I have forgotten a little bit about the pain and the distress of the first few days after giving birth.

After this episode at the GP, however, I keep forcing myself to remember what it was like to come back home from the hospital with a new human being. That tight sensation in my chest that made me check every 5 seconds if she was still breathing. The physical and emotional pain of not being able to feed my child. The realization of why sleep deprivation is sometimes used as a form of torture on prisoners of war.

Even if I’d love to forget these moments, I made a pledge to myself that I never will.

Because my sister and my best friend are pregnant.

Because one day my daughter might be pregnant.

And the day I forget the experience of being a first-time mother, I will be like that woman at the surgery.

I’ll treat them with superiority, not sisterhood.