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.
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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. A couple months ago I found myself at large, relaxed Shabbat lunch filled with about 15 people, half of whom were new to me. I eventually wandered my way into a conversation with two young women where we spoke about our careers, their dating lives, and my marriage. One of them had recently started dating a medical student and was trying to wrap her head around his education, so I began explaining the detailed process of becoming a doctor - not just getting the MD with your medical school diploma, but the training that follows. After what ended up being a rather long explanation, she said with eyes wide: "Wow, I bet your husband wouldn't be able to describe your career training so well!" My doctor wasn't entirely sure what the scan meant, but she had a plan and reassured us that this would not define our future even if it was overwhelmingly terrifying in our present. I tried to remain calm as I shared all of this with J the moment my doctor left the exam room, and he responded with questions and statements of clarification. What are the numbers? What does it look like? So this is what we do next? Yes, that sounds accurate. Yes, I would agree with that plan. . .
"You're using your doctor voice," I said. "I know," he said stolidly. Then, more quietly, "I need to right now." 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. I love Queer Eye.
When it popped up on Netflix I vaguely remembered the show from the early 2000s that I never watched because I have no taste for reality TV, so I scrolled right past it without a second thought. But when a few of my fellow teachers began singing its praises last Tuesday at an end-of-the-year celebration, I decided to check it out if for no other reason than to balance out the extremely dark, intense shows that have occupied watchlist over the last few months (Handmaid's Tale and Westworld, in case you're wondering). It's summer vacation, after all! I could use a little light. I started watching that night and was immediately hooked. My friend hadn't been exaggerating when she said she cried at least once every episode. I think I made it through all of fifteen minutes before something in that first episode rendered me sobbing happy tears. Unlike many reality shows, this show seemed to make a concerted effort to represent thoughtful dialogue and affect meaningful change in the lives of both the subjects and the hosts. Each episode culminates in both an outward and a deeply internal change within the subject. Although I have to question the longevity of these transformations, the premise is simple: people can always strive to be a better version of themselves through introspection, a supportive team, and a fresh haircut. I broke one of my rules.
Rule #5 explicitly states: "If your insurance is kind enough to cover mental health, TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IT! It is not because you are sick or damaged or need to "get better," but because the closest person in your life will not always be available to support you and listen to you, and a lot of the emotional work may fall on your shoulders. A good therapist can go a long way in making the residency experience easier to bear." Apparently your therapist's maternity leave is not a valid excuse to stop going to therapy, even temporarily, at a time when your world feels like it's falling apart. 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: Many surgical residencies strive to provide a variety of experiences and opportunities to their residents, though few hospitals have the resources or personnel to wholly represent every specialty. They can make up for this in the form of away rotations at other hospitals, usually for a month-long interval at specific points throughout the training program. In J's case, he's had opportunities to rotate through a community hospital that afforded him greater independence and responsibility, a renowned transplant program, and a massive hospital devoted entirely to trauma with significantly more severe and varied cases than his own hospital's trauma team sees in any given month. The first two of these away rotations were, thankfully, in New York City, but the latter is in Baltimore. It is undoubtedly a great opportunity, but unpleasant to have to spend a month apart, each of us living alone in apartments over three hours away. Still, in the weeks leading up to the rotation, we knew we would manage. We always do.
But life has a funny way of turning things on their heads and throwing wrenches into plans. |
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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