My husband is a hero. There's no doubt about it. I mean, how else do you describe someone who not only doesn't get furious at you when you manage to drop your e-reader in the tub AND lose a credit card in the same weekend, but actually gives you the last piece of his favorite candy just because he loves you?
Yeah, I'm married to a saint. The fact that he's a surgeon (he'll debate me and say he's still just a "surgical resident," but I don't care, he's a surgeon) just adds to his sainthood. You know, that whole saving lives thing. What he does every single day, whether he's actively saving lives or simply caring for ill patients, is no small feat. But that's not actually what I'd like to talk about here. Yes, he does amazing work and he's an unbelievably patient and loving husband, but he is also showing me that there is hope for a brighter future in the often dismal world of surgical education.
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I went through the regular weekday morning motions: leaving my apartment a few minutes later than planned, moving my Wisconsin feet at a New York pace, trying to catch the walk light at the big intersection, descending into my subway stop through a grimy staircase where the faint scent of urine lingers permanently.
I swipe my card and move through the turnstile in a single, fluid motion, practiced daily these past six years. I head toward my preferred seat on one of the few wooden benches along the platform, the seat that lies at the perfect spot so that when the train arrives I can walk straight forward without moving so much as an inch to either side and stand directly to the left of the train's open door. From this spot, I can enter the train right away and, hopefully, get a seat for my commute. Today, though, my seat is taken by a man whose fetor announced his presence many yards away. He lies sleeping across the bench, curled up into as little space as a tall man could possibly occupy. His tattered clothing as well as his hair hangs from him in a disheveled mess; he seems a man thick with dirt but thin with wear. Like the rest of the commuters on the platform, I do my best to ignore him, as if by not bringing attention to him I am giving him some modicum of privacy. It's gracious, really. I stand nearby, waiting for my train, and others walk by with eyes downcast or straight ahead in measured stride. Unaffected. But one little girl stops. Seven years ago I sent a Facebook message to a stranger:
"Okay, this is going to seem incredibly forward and possibly a bit bizarre, but I hope you'll continue reading. . ." Throughout the month of January 2012 I had been seeing a guy I met online, a graduate student studying astrophysics or some such science in Chicago. He was nice enough, but I could tell after a few weeks that it wasn't going to work out. When I told this to a friend over email she responded "Well that's too bad. BUT there are plenty of other fish in the sea! You should really check out this guy, . . ." So I did. I checked out his Facebook. I checked out his JDate profile. I Googled him. My 21st-century-pre-date-research (which is definitely not the same as stalking) revealed he was smart, goofy, and almost definitely not a serial killer, so I sent him a Facebook message. Of course, I knew that when he checked Facebook only the first line or so of the message would appear before he clicked on it to read more, and I needed to make sure he wouldn't immediately dismiss my single attempt to contact him. He responded two days later, presumably after doing his own 21st-century-pre-date-research (definitely not stalking). Apparently what he saw (or didn't see) was enough to convince him because, as he wrote in his response, "It's a good thing I kept reading because that opening line really made it seem like the rest of the message was going to be asking me to donate money for a lost prince of Nigeria." Sunday in our home is our "Get Stuff Done" day. Between J and me, our typical Sunday To Do list includes:
This do-it-all-on-Sunday schedule works just fine for me with my Monday-Friday job, but is less convenient for J whose schedule has no concept of seven-day-cycles and that perpetually enigmatic "weekend." Indeed, finding a way to balance the demands of our two conflicting schedules has been among the biggest hurdles in residency, because not only does getting things checked off my list bring me a sense of calm, but so does spending quality time with J. While tasks and errands and obligations multiply, quality time is hard to come by. It was a Friday, and I had managed to fall dreadfully behind on my Shabbat-prep timeline. Challah was in the oven, but I still had to make the rice, cook the vegetables, and prepare all the toppings for our poke bowl Shabbat dinner, for which a few guests were arriving that evening. And I needed to make dessert but of course I didn't have all the ingredients so I had to run to the grocery store but I also still had to clean up and---
"I'll do the grocery shopping, sweetie. I can see you're getting stressed, so I'll take care of that." *Swoon* J really does know me! And not only did he buy the groceries, but while he was there he also picked up the toilet paper and cat litter we needed. Then he spent an hour chopping vegetables with me, arranged them into beautiful platters, and we hosted a spectacular meal with friends, after which he single-handedly cleaned up. My hero! Unfortunately, my bliss was short-lived. Candle lighting for the last of the fall High Holy Days, Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, is less than three hours away. Once those candles are lit the holiday will officially begin and I will shut off my computer and phone in order to better immerse myself in my Jewish life and the rituals surrounding the holiday. I will eat large meals with good friends, sing and dance in my synagogue with the Torah in my arms, and nap. A lot.
I have spent a lot of days like this in the last four weeks. Starting with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, in early September, each week has had one or two such holy days where work stops. How joyous! But the anticipation to these holidays, as many religious Jews will tell you, is filled with stress and a whole lot of running around, trying to get everything ready and clean and set and cooked and prepared and AAAHHHHH! before the sun begins its descent. So as I count down the minutes until candle lighting, trying very hard to remember to breathe and take a moment for myself, I am also saying a little slightly counter-intuitive prayer: "Thank you, G-d, that the holiday season is nearly over!" For each of the last six years, Rosh Hashanah and subsequent month of holidays has brought me both joy and conflict as I try to negotiate the happiness of having a beautiful community with which to celebrate alongside the disappointment when J is unable to join me for much of it. This year, I approached the season with added trepidation, having spent the last five months struggling with my personal religious practice and identity. It manifested itself in doubt, frustration, anger, and the complete inability to sit through a single Shabbat service. I was antsy and felt entirely detached from the text in my prayer book or, for that matter, the people sitting next to me, and I had no idea to whom, or what, I was praying. Have you ever opened up a journal or diary from when you were an adolescent and just cringed? You probably wrote about how the world was ending because your crush didn't smile at you one day, or how your parents were "the worst," or maybe how you were so in love with your boyfriend/girlfriend and you were certain it would never end. . .
And then you put it away and think "Thank God I've grown up!" Those written mementos, melodramatic as they may be, are valuable reminders of how things change with time, perspective, and maturity. When we write them we have no concept of how to contextualize the problems into a larger picture, into a timeline of personal development that will inevitably reshape and resize the roles of those problems in our lives. And although reading them can be painful ("OMG I can't believe I thought that!"), they are a great means of measurement for how far we've come in life. Well, apparently our capacity for melodrama doesn't always mellow with age. It didn't take me long to learn one of the top ten lessons for surthriving residency: to "find a tribe." Participation in a tribe, or community, though a meaningful part of any healthy lifestyle, becomes an absolute necessity when your better half is absent. The relative value of that tribe increases with every compounded variable, whether it's a cross-country move, moving to a place with few existing connections, a spouse in one of the more demanding residences (they're all demanding, but some are more arduous than others), or, you know, all of the above.
In New York, community serves a secondary function: to make the city a little smaller and more manageable. As we prepared for our move someone told me that even though New York is a huge city, it begins to shrink the moment you settle into your neighborhood and your routines. Finding your routes and your haunts, your favorite coffee shops and 99-cent stores, that bar you go to with one friend and the restaurant you go to with another, these are the things that turn The Big Apple into something more bite-sized. Even in How I Met Your Mother, the characters agreed New York City was The Best Place On Earth™ while sitting at the same booth in the same bar night after night. The truth is that Manhattan or Brooklyn or the Bronx might be where you live, but your neighborhood is your home. It should come as no surprise, then, that upon arriving in Brooklyn I had one very singular goal: to find a community. J and I recently bought a new couch to replace his old one that was, shall I say, well loved. It was so well loved that it didn't sit much higher than a futon, and you could feel the springs under the cushion if you sat down too fast. Since we're living on a training budget in Brooklyn we try to avoid major expenses like new furniture, but I was finally able to convince him it was time to say his goodbyes to his sofa and welcome a new one into our home. As we hemmed and hawed over whether or not we should spring for the protection plan (we did; I'm a slob), he did a quick Google search for median salaries in his field, just to reassure us that someday this won't seem like such a big deal. The purchase, that is, not his mild case of disposophobia.
More often than not, instead of actually spending money on things for our home we just talk about the wonderful home we'll have when he is done with training and we're settled down. It's little more than a fun game, a way for us to make light of the circumstances we unwittingly find ourselves in. But I also find it a particularly useful exercise when things just don't seem to be going according to plan, whether it's because of some emotional trauma or because I burned myself on the radiator that is unavoidably too close to my side of the bed. In addition to helping me cope it's also a reminder that I won't always live in an apartment built without a single 90-degree angle, or that someday I'll have a closet that fits both my winter sweaters and summer blouses simultaneously. My family likes to remind me to dream big because, after all, I'm married to a doctor! So here it is: Every May, J receives a “Vacation Request Form” to fill out. It lays out the 13 four-week blocks of the year, separated into segments of two weeks each. J and I discuss at length which of the two-week segments we’d prefer for his two vacations, taking into consideration such factors as holidays, our anniversary, my school calendar, and how best to time the vacations to avoid burnout. Some months are off-limits, like June, July, and the beginning of August because of the needs of the program as residents graduate and new interns arrive. Others we know will be hard to get, like the end of December when we celebrate our anniversary but many of his coworkers want to celebrate Christmas with families. The deliberations continue until we finally identify and rank four options, crossing our fingers and hoping for our top two. |
AuthorNashira is a music teacher and proud Small-Town Jew who, after surthriving six years in Brooklyn for her husband's surgical residency, is finally back in Wisconsin where she belongs! At least until the end of the two-year surgical fellowship, that is. It's a wild ride, and she's ready to tell you all about it! Archives
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