Wifehood, Motherhood, Doctorhood, Womanhood

Tonight I met two bright, female high school teachers who love science. They were closer to my mother's age than to mine. Both told me that when they were in college, they wanted to be doctors. But both of them decided to forego that career path and chose teaching instead. Both said they made that decision because, as one of them put it, "I realized I couldn't be the wife and mother and doctor I wanted to be" all at the same time. They don't regret their decision one bit, both of them said. They don't make a lot of money, but they're happy and love what they do. Now, normally my English major mentality would leap forth at a moment like that and scream "Methinks she doth protest too much!" But I really don't think those women meant anything negative by what they said. I really do think they're happy, and they love what they do, and they don't regret their decisions at all. 

I reassured the AP biology teacher that as a medical geneticist, I won't be making a fortune either, not compared to people in business and certainly not compared to physicians in many other subspecialties of medicine. And then I stopped to think.

For most of my early childhood, my mother was a stay-at-home mom. Though she started working outside the home after my sister and I got a bit older, and continues to work outside the home, she and my father demonstrate very traditional gender roles. My mom does all the cooking. My dad cleans up after dinner. He pays the bills and drives the family around and is the family's primary breadwinner. She tries to teach my sister and me to cook, say Hindu prayers, and generally gain other skills that will make us suitable wives someday. It surprises me a little that I didn't give motherhood even a moment's thought when I decided to become a physician. Believe me when I say I wasn't one of those kids who dreamed of being a doctor all her life. I resisted the idea of going to medical school for quite some time, but by the time I was in college, I knew it was a field in which I would excel, and a career that would give me deep satisfaction. And that's where my thought process more or less stopped. Sure, I wondered if I'd ever have time for anything outside of medicine, but my focus was more on a vague sense of a personal life, and not caring for a family the way my mother always did. 

I suspect that more than a little of the hesitation of the women I mentioned earlier, and my lack thereof, has to do with the fact that those women likely had boyfriends or husbands with whom they were planning a future while they were considering medical school, and I simply didn't have that pull then, and don't really have it now. Because I don't have one person to mentally Photoshop into my imagined scenes of domestic bliss, I'm not very attached to that vision of the future. Here's what I know: I'm going to make a good physician, and my career will make me happy. Maybe someday I'll find myself in a domestic situation that causes me to change my tune and become a stay-at-home mother and wife. Maybe I just won't like the idea of someone other than me being at home with my children. Maybe none of those things will happen. Whatever the situation, I'm glad I decided to go to medical school, gender roles be damned. I think I can find a way to make doctorhood live in harmony with motherhood, wifehood, and womanhood, or whatever -hood life throws at me.

On Traveling with People Who Travel

A couple weeks ago, I visited Orlando with some of my friends from college, for pretty much the sole purpose of visiting Harry Potter World. It didn't disappoint, but that's not the point of this post.
All three of the girls I traveled with are in the working world, as opposed to the twilight that is professional school. Two out of the three travel extensively for work, have a formidable collection of hotel points and airline miles, and can jump into the express line at airport security with ease. The third doesn't travel for work, but she is a seasoned world traveler. Aside from my experiences traveling to India, I am none of the above.
In traveling with these girls, I realized a few things about such an experience. Traveling with those who travel (especially for work) is kind of like trying to hang out with the cool kids in middle school. They all own carry-on luggage that is mildly, but boldly oversized. Their suitcases all have not two, but four wheels, the better to transport them vertically. For every one of them who has perfectly arrayed liquids and semi-liquids in the regulation 3 oz size in clear Ziploc bags, there's another who blatantly brings aboard full-size bottles of shampoo, citing all the previous times they've done so and not been penalized. These girls are the type who know ahead of time what kind of plane you'll be boarding, and whether said plane will have DirecTv that you'll have to pay for, or if free movies will abound. They know that it's always better to carry on a suitcase than to check in--and they know that their carry-ons can be a little fatter, a little heavier, than the stated upper limits, because they've never had trouble with such luggage in the past. When taking an early-morning flight, they'd unanimously rather get another precious half-hour of sleep and park in the more expensive garages near the terminal, than wake up a bit earlier and pay less to park in a satellite lot and take a shuttle to the airport. In short, these girls are travel experts. I'm not.
For the most part, I found the tips and know-how of my friends to be helpful and illuminating. But I have to admit that I thought some of the things they did were a little, well, dumb. For instance, they always wheel their carry-on luggage around on four wheels, even though rolling it along on two wheels, at an incline, is often a much more efficient (not to mention ergonomic) way to transport it. The craziest thing about this all is that I found myself imitating them, lest I somehow throw a kink in the well-oiled machine that is Traveling Like a Consultant. And though I think it's kind of great to be able to sneak perfectly harmless liquids over 3 ounces past airport security (I get a sort of secret thrill when I realize I've inadvertently done so), I think it's bordering on entitled for people to knowingly flout the rules set in place by airport security. This isn't to say that my friends mean any harm by doing so: they don't. They just know they can get away with it, and so they do it.
I suppose this kind of knowledgeable handling of situations that all people encounter at various frequencies happens in all fields of work. I mean, if I'm ever admitted to the hospital, I'll surely have an advantage over my consultant friends, simply because I know how things work at a hospital; I know when to expect to see my doctor, when to ask why the team isn't running specific tests on me. When I wait forever in my primary care physician's waiting room, I understand the most likely reasons why that wait happened. (You'd be surprised how busy a primary care physician is all day long, from seeing patients to answering phone calls to approving medication requests from pharmacies, to checking on patients admitted to the hospital, and much more.)
At any rate, I guess since people in most fields of work/study can use their knowledge to their advantage, knowledge most other people don't have and thus can't leverage for their own advantage, it's not necessarily wrong to do so. More than anything, I found the whole situation somewhat amusing, and a little disconcerting, because I found myself imitating my well-traveled friends, even when I didn't understand why they were doing what they were doing. In a move that nearly hearkened back to clumsy attempts to get accepted by the cool kids in middle school, I even brought my VA hospital badge with me on the trip, because I knew it could get me into a short security line at the airport. I hoped I'd be able to provide some advantage to the group, since I was benefiting so much from the influence and smarts of my friends. Fortunately or unfortunately, we were never delayed enough that I had to use my badge. Perhaps more ruefully, I'm fairly certain my badge wouldn't have gotten us through security any faster than my consultant friends' "elite" statuses with their airlines. So it goes.