Leaning into Family Life as a Physician Mom
What does it mean to lean into family life?
What does “leaning in” to family life mean? I discovered this term through Mother Untitled. For me, it means embracing. Owning. Taking more time and not apologizing for it. Giving yourself permission to love the unpopular aspects of homemaking and child-rearing. It means weathering doubt and judgement from those who think you ought to be self-sacrificing for patients and colleagues. It means ignoring whispers- even from within- that you wasted a spot in medical school, residency and fellowship, to go and “just” be a mom in the end. I am still in the middle of this journey, but walking with more conviction and leaning in with more audacity. Here, I commiserate and share the top lessons I’ve learned.
The struggle for ambitious women
This is something I think most ambitious women struggle with to some degree at some point in their life. Some of this is more specific for me, as a mid-career woman who has already poured herself into her work and established an identity at work prior to having children. I naively did not see the tension that would occur once I had children. I did not expect to settle so naturally into motherhood and find myself wanting more of those moments where I was just “mommy”. In order for me to function, I had to compartmentalize mothering while I was at work and adopt a blasé attitude toward the struggles. The nanny will help me with that, I will ask my husband to do that, sure I can take on this new task.
The message of you, as a mother, being replaceable is pervasive. Someone else can watch your child when they are sick. Someone else can supervise their piano practice or art project. The child will not remember you missed this recital. Anyone can tuck them in at night. The question is, though, the experience may not be replaceable to the mother. The focus is on the child not missing their parent, rather than, if a mother deeply wants to participate in the mundane moments with their children, she should not be shamed or faulted for wanting that. This is for those mothers who want this deep down and is afraid to say it out loud.
Can I take a step back from my career?
What I really wanted to say after my first maternity leave, and most definitely after my second maternity leave, was, can I take a step back? As I reflect upon my ideal day, I don’t want to do 8 am meetings because I want the ordinary experience of dropping my child off at school. I do not want to take on this leadership role because I want to use my mental space to be present for homework time and dreaming up projects to do on weekends with my children.
I don’t actually care about academic promotion and all that entails. Can I just do my job, take good care of patients, and go home to my family and not be harassed? To be clear, I am not being harassed overtly by anyone at work, but merely the expectation that I will return to my career largely unchanged after having a child.
Can I embrace my own definition of success? I fully admire and support the women in whom the conflict is less disruptive, in whom the drive to advance and excel has not dimmed. We need those women, and we celebrate them. But I am looking at the mom who has the realization that this identity now seems foreign and begins to feel an urge to make a shift.
Shifting, pivoting, pausing
So, then, what do you do if you want to change direction? Is it even ok to want to do that? Or is it just too sacrilegious? How would you even do it? How do you get the courage and the skills? This has been a 5 year journey for me to acknowledge this and start taking steps to make the necessary changes. I will share what I have learned, but I am no where near the end yet.
My Top Tips for Leaning into Family Life as a Career Woman
1.Optimize finances– are you in a position to take a paycut in order to spend more time with your family?
2. Change what you can in your current job- what are short term changes in your current situation that would allow you to lean in more if you wanted to?
3. Introspection and identifying your needs and goals- what do you really want this balance of career and motherhood to look like for you?
4. Start the pivot for long term change– if something more needs to happen, how do you get there? Do you need to develop skills outside of medicine or can you use your current skills or hobbies in a different capacity?
There is a place of intense inertia for physician mothers who want to leaning into family life. We have dedicated at least 10 years of training to become physicians, many of us more than a decade into our careers, our physician identity anchored since our 20s. But now, we are finding ourselves asking, now what? Is this it?
No, it is not, and the journey to this answer is a journey worth taking.
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