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.
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How could I forget about Wisconsin summer mornings? Those soft daylight dawns wafting with lilacs, serenaded by mourning doves, which I always thought were called “morning” doves because they were the first track on the soundtrack of my day. Every morning I stood in the kitchen and watched two love-struck doves coo atop the swing set in our backyard. Sometimes they danced, sometimes they stood still, barely leaning on one another, content. But always they sang. The air is cool enough for long sleeves and the grass is wet with dew. It feels like summer is just heating up anew, a season baked fresh every day. Come early to smell it while it rises, be first in line when it comes out! Here, have some coffee while you wait. My rose colored glasses placed squarely on my nose, I feel the collective summers of my youth. Summer camp, lazy mornings at home, and those days when I mounted my bicycle at 7 am to get to work, they all roll into one beautiful Wisconsin summer morning. The memory is free from extremes of heat and rain, it is not sticky or mosquito-ridden. There is no strife, my life cleansed from the stress of paychecks, breakups, or the vicissitudes of life. I have harvested only the moments that are plump and juicy and come off their branches with a satisfying pop!, distilling them into a sweet, light, bubbly memory with notes of black raspberry and promise. 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
September 2019
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