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.