The results of The Match were scheduled to be released to the applicants at 12 pm EST on Wednesday, October 10. At precisely 11:56 am that day, I walked into a kindergarten classroom to teach music, praying the butterflies in my stomach wouldn't fly out the moment I opened my mouth to sing. Halfway through the period I used my phone to play a song for the students and saw the subject line of an email from J’s aunt in my notifications: “Mazel tov!” We matched, I thought to myself. But where? At 12:56 I shuffled out of the classroom, eager to check my phone in the four minutes I had before I walked into my next class. Forty-five minutes early, J had sent a group text message to me and our parents with a simple screenshot from the NRMP Match website. Match Results: Congratulations, you have matched! Program Med Coll Wisconsin Affil Hosps – Surgical Critical Description: Care – Adult Track 2 Yea The simplicity of the image stood in stark contrast to our excitement, our disbelief, our joy, our utter relief. As of August 1, 2019, we will be in Milwaukee for a two-year fellowship! Our parents responded with texts of “Mazel Tov,” emoji hearts, and his mom’s admonition against becoming a Brewers fan. And I, standing just outside the door of a classroom filled with first graders, smiled in the way one does when winning the lottery. I had worked hard to approach The Match with no expectations at all. I told myself repeatedly that we could end up at any of those 22 programs and that would be that, no more, no less. I wasn’t worried then about not matching in Milwaukee. And in truth, my expectations were so tempered that I nearly believed we wouldn’t end up there, because it was just easier that way. But now that it’s actually happening? It seems simultaneously unbelievable and inevitable. It finally feels like we’re catching a break, like our time in New York is being rewarded, like a cosmic balancing. Or more honestly, it is J’s hard work paying off in a big way. I do have to be careful not to stake my happiness on this homecoming. Life is still life; the grind is still the grind. There will be rent and laundry and work and errands and bad weather and too expensive avocados. There will be traffic jams and no good parking spots and flat tires. There will be illness and impossibly long hours and impatience and unkind words. But there will also be parents and sisters and niece and nephew. There will be old friends and old haunts. There will be grass and trees and rolling fields and forest. There will be calm, quiet. And there will be cheese curds. Oh, there will be cheese curds! There will also be the opportunity to settle down, to move with the expectation of staying. I realize that life might yet take us in other directions, but at least we can go to Milwaukee and let our roots reach deep into the ground, unencumbered by the countdown to when we will be forced to dig them up again. I can pursue my career whole-heartedly, dedicating myself to the students and schools with whom I will work without planning how I will say goodbye. It’s only a two-year fellowship, but it’s an opportunity for a lifetime. We still have eight months before we move, time enough to count all the people and places I will miss in this monstrosity of a city. I will lean in to all the things I love – the dollar pizza, the Shabbat meals, my students, the unexpectedly beautiful music from buskers in the subway – and I will try my hardest to ignore the less savory bits. In these last eight months I will do my best to pay homage to this place with which I have fought but which, ultimately and unexpectedly, has won a piece of my heart.
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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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