One couch. One full size bed (mattress, box spring, and metal frame). A bench, a shoe rack, an end table. Shelves, a desk, four chairs, two tables, and walls filled with framed photos and artwork (large and small, delicate and not-so-delicate, all equally cherished). A kitchen cart, a baker's rack, too many dishes.
Our apartment has been itemized into cubic feet and pounds, looked at and assessed by professionals who see cargo where I see a home. It's been an arduous month, but I have finally checked off the first major item on my "Moving to Milwaukee To Do List:" Find a moving company. When I started looking in January I thought the process would be relatively straightforward, but as with most things in adulthood I was sorely mistaken. It often felt like there was no one resource to give me all the information I really needed, so in true Type A fashion I did far more research than any normal human being would be expected to do. In the end, did it help me make a better decision? We won't really know until everything is delivered to us in Milwaukee in July. But until then, here is everything valuable that I learned in my research process. I hope that it can help at least one other person preparing for a long-distance move.
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Nine months ago the online application system opened for Surgical Critical Care, the specialty in which J decided long ago he wanted to do a fellowship after residency.
Eights months and two weeks ago, J submitted the Surgical Critical Care common application, indicating over thirty programs to receive it, most of them on either the East Coast or the Midwest in places we could reasonably consider living for a year. Six months ago, J flew out to Chicago for the first of what would be many interviews. Twenty-two in total, in fact, the last of which was one month ago. Two weeks ago, J submitted a ranked list of all those programs in hopes that the Match gods would look favorably upon the top of our list. In two days, we find out where J's education will take us after Residency. 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. This week we have a special guest post written by my husband, J! We've spent a lot of time over this vacation talking about how precious our time has become with our families throughout residency, and he asked to write about it from his perspective. I hope you all enjoy!
I met her for the first time on a sweltering June day. I was alone except for my backpack and three suitcases stuffed to the seams with everything I thought mattered. She waited for me with a crossed-arms, foot-tapping impatience that made me feel apologetic for any extra moment I took to get my bearings. At the curb outside the airport, she pushed me into a cab smelling suspiciously and excessively pleasant; the first of many affronts to the senses. The cab - whose air-conditioning was conveniently broken - raced and crawled and lurched and pushed its way through thick evening traffic, leaving my stomach trying desperately to hold on. She sneered.
When all the Match Day envelopes had been distributed and opened, the hugs of joy and pain exchanged, the tears dried (or at least temporarily held at bay), I said goodbye to my fiance and his family to drive to work. I was a part-time teacher at an elementary school where my day started at 11:30 am. I had just enough time to pull myself together and get to class before 25 4- and 5-year-olds showed up at my music room door where I Had to greet them with a smile and joy.
It's astonishing I even made it to work that day, considering the recklessness with which I drove. I could barely see through the tears that refused to stop for very long, and on the way I called my assistant principal to tell her the news. "So," she said, stealing a few minutes from the meeting she was in, "Do we get to keep you for another year?" "I'm going to Brooklyn" I said with an attempt at a laugh. "Oh..." |
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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