So, I was always going to go to medical school. After spending a large amount of money on the application process, I was wait-listed at two medical schools and never received a call. At the same time I went through the application process, my fiance was applying for graduate school. He was going to be a science professor, do primary research, and I was going to be a pediatrician. We were married a week after graduating from a private California university, and had had an on-going conversation about what professional life for both of us would look like-with children.
Since I didn’t get into medical school, I put my biology degree to good use working as a cardiology tech while he started graduate school in a snowy east-coast state. I was disappointed but felt I could revisit the medical school question in a couple of years. Since I was working in hospital, taking call for interventional cardiology and working 60 hour work weeks, I started to “understand” what medical school and residency would have looked like.
Three years after we married, I became pregnant with our first child. We were ecstatic, but I soon started to wonder what full time work would look like. I realized that I felt like I could not mother and breastfeed the way I wanted to working MY full-time job. I spoke with my supervisor and said I would either find another part-time job in the university or I needed to be able to work 20 to 25 hours per week, and I could take call on weekends. Because I was a good employee and had investiture, I maintained my full-time benefits, working 20 to 30 hours per week. My husband took care of our baby one full day per week and she went to a babysitter for one full day per week, and then he covered the “call hours” I worked each week. It worked well for the better part of a year. As his studies became more lab-oriented and less academic, it became clear that he needed to spend more time on campus, and an opening with our care provider became available for one more day per week. When she was one, I worked three days per week. Since breastfeeding was very important to me, I was able to breastfeed her and pump on the days I was at work.
Shortly after she turned one, I became pregnant again. We were happy about this! But as I approached my eighth month, I found it harder and harder to work and take care of a toddler. When I sat down and “priced it out,” the cost of childcare for two was going to eat up all my wages. So we took a really good look at our “lifestyle” and realized that we should go down to “graduate student stipend only.” I mourned the loss of my job for three years, and it took those three years to learn to love being the at home parent.
After seeing the lifestyle of doctors in hospital, I no longer wanted to be a doctor. I did want to do something to do with health care, and considered several options-nursing, speech pathology, physician’s assistant, and finally midwifery. Once my husband finished with graduate school (and we added another kid), he was burned out on academics, and found a job working for a company that serves the taxpayers in a larger suburban region of the country. After buying a home, and having two more children, both birthed at home with a midwife, I found the right role for me.
I began as a student midwife in 2010. This role will continue until mid-2014. I am also starting to teach childbirth classes. We have five children now, actively engaged in the community and church activities, music lessons, etc. While not always seamless, we have arrangements that allow me to cover my prenatal appointment days and one or more days in a row when I am attending a birth. We have some weeks where we are too busy and barely see each other, and we spend a lot of time discussing the schedule and who needs to be where. We also actively support each other when we are there. I cook better than he does, and try to do so when I’m home. He balances the checkbook better than I do, so I try to turn in receipts and be on-schedule for those responsibilities. He is as likely to go grocery shopping as I am, and can take all our kids to all their activities as well as I can. We use an online calendar system to make sure we are on the same page. Sometimes I work 12 or 14 or 24 hour days, and sometimes he does. We trade off responsibilities.
It does help at this point that we have two daughters old enough to babysit, but we try to minimize that during the school week. We make this work for us, and appreciate that it is a balancing act. Since we did it this way, I was able to breastfeed and mother my very little children.
The most important thing I have learned is that my husband doesn’t always want to go to work. He LOVES his job. He gets really fulfilled. But more than one day per week, he’d rather stay home and read Percy Jackson with his kids, talk about science, and listen to them debate which flavor of ice cream is best. And sometimes I DON’T want to go to a birth, no matter how much I love doing it, like when we were setting up for Settlers of Catan on New Year’s and I had to leave. It was a beautiful birth. But it was not with my kids.
-Submitted by Stargazer
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I love that you have been able to adapt your roles and responsibilities to the needs of your family over time and that you have found a vocation that you love. I love your story. And I really love that picture!
It’s so difficult as a young person to see how a potential career will interface with the demands of a family. I’ve given up some success in my career for my family and I give up time I wish I could spend with my family for my career. But some career paths make it much easier to strike that kind of balance than others. As my children get older, I’m not sure how to balance the “you can be anything you want to be!” message with the “being successful in some careers will require big sacrifices in every other area of your life – including your relationship with your family – so choose carefully.”
Reading this gives me hope that somehow my plans to start doing a midwifery apprenticeship in a few years willwork out (I also have 5 kids).
So I think that having a goal toward a health care field has made lot of my learning easier. not that majoring in English is bad, but if I had not majored in a science and been thinking toward flexible arrangements for childcare from the beginning, if my husband had not had the year of home parenting our baby one day per week, then we would have a bigger struggle defining roles now. He learned to thaw beeastmilk, deal with a blocked toilet, was cloth diapers, and deal with tantrums from toddlers with grace and less rage spanking than I did (little but not none). My kids love when dad is the sender be home after school. Occasionally he has to go straight back to work and work all night after I have been at a birth all day. Hiss work usually is flexible enough for that. He does national security work so he cannot telecommute.
If you are way interested in midwifery, look around for conferences, seminars, help a local midwife with filing, get involved with both rth advocacy, teach childbirth class as, take a human anatomy class at the community college, read Pathways to Midwifery.
Breastmilk. Sorry.
thanks for sharing.
I have also found that the path you think you will take is not always the path you end up taking–and flexibility and teamwork are critical in keeping my family (and myself) stable. I also appreciate that you mourned the loss of your job for three years. I find that switching my role within my family or within the workforce brings emotional upheaval. I don’t always appreciate how much of my identity I have invested in a certain role until I switch roles.