Regrets of a Doctor and Mother of 13 Kids…

Regrets of a Doctor and Mother of 13 Kids…

Posted by JewishMom on Jul 23, 2012 in Inspiration, Jewish Moms, Motherhood, My life |37 comments

My mom’s a doctor, and I think she did a great job of balancing motherhood and her medical career. When we were in school, she worked part-time so she was always home by 4. And now, even as she approaches 70, my mom continues to love her career as a psychiatrist with a large private practice.

Dr. Chana Katan, by contrast, looks back with a lot of regret at the many years she spent as a gynecologist at Jerusalem’s busiest Delivery Room, during which time she sometimes didn’t even see her young children for days at a time. I’m not posting this because I think it’s impossible to balance motherhood with a medical career. I know from my own experience that it is possible. I am posting this because I agree with Dr. Katan that it’s so important for us mothers to stay aware, to make sure that our children, marriages, and we ourselves are not paying too high a price for the hours we spend outside of the home…

The following is an excerpt from Woman’s Life by Dr. Chana Katan:

We started our married life as a young family in Alon Shvut. I studied full-time at the medical school of Hebrew University, and at the Hadassah Medical Center in Ein Kerem, and my husband studied Torah at Yeshivat Har Etsion where he worked part-time at the yeshiva’s library. Our first-born son would spend the entire day until 4 PM at the Emuna daycare center of the yishuv, and appeared to be happy and cheerful. When daycare was over, Leah the babysitter would pick him up and watch him in our empty home until my husband would arrive home at the end of his evening learning session.

This arrangement worked well for all of us for several months, until one evening my husband returned to our apartment from synagogue, and our babysitter Leah, who was generally a quiet woman, greeted him with a furious rebuke, “What kind of parents are you?! You have such a sweet child and you are never with him! You leave him at daycare in the morning and by the time you come home he is fast asleep!”…my husband broke out into uproarious laughter and tried to calm down our angry babysitter. At exactly that moment I arrived home, and the babysitter repeated her angry outburst for my ears as well, but I, in contrast to my husband, broke out into bitter sobs.

Several years passed. The hour is 6 in the morning. In the background I hear the quiet sounds of a morning radio program. My husband’s already at synagogue. As I drink a cup of coffee and eat a little something my eyes stop at the invitation posted on the refrigerator: an evening for the women of the yishuv, something special and fascinating. But I have to work on that day and nobody can replace me, especially since there is a party at my child’s nursery school the coming week and I already “sold my soul” in order to get a few hours off in order to participate in it.

I slowly approach the crib where my baby is sleeping peacefully. It pains me to wake him up, but what can I do? I must leave, and I can’t nurse him for the coming 40 hours. I lift him and he wakes up. I attempt to ignore his cries and try to nurse him when I am half-sitting and half-standing, a rushed morning nursing. That’s it, I need to move. I place him in his bed, look at my other chicks who are still fast asleep. I kiss them one by one as they sleep, and leave. Exactly 6:35. The entire world is asleep. The house is quiet. The first chirping of birds is heard in the air. I’ll return here the following day, and I already miss it…

The following evening I return home. What a view—it is dark outside, the home is quiet and silent, the children are already sleeping. I didn’t say kriyat shema with them before they went to bed, I didn’t tell them a short story, I didn’t sing them a lullaby.

I pass between the beds, place kisses on soft cheeks, lift the sleeping baby and sit down for a nighttime nursing…I am surrounded by disorder, dolls and toys are scattered everywhere, and out of the corner of my eye I see that some of my children are sleeping in their clothing. But my eyes can’t see anything anymore; I am waiting for a few minutes of sleep in order to gather my strength. In just a few hours it will be sunrise, and again I will leave before the birds are chirping…

The truth is that it is not only female doctors who combine many roles. The modern woman rolls within her hands, like a circus juggler, balls of different colors, and quickly switches between different multicolored hats.

She is the merciful nurse when a child is injured, and with expertise, softness, and a mother’s touch she improvises an amazingly professional bandage even if she never took a first aid course; she is an economist when the need arises, planning and caring for her family’s needs; she is a professional seamstress, specializing in Purim costumes; every evening she quietly climbs the mountains of laundry like a professional mountain climber, irons and folds and makes order; she is her children’s tutor in all subjects…; she braids challot and braids her daughters’ hair and makes them hair-dos; she is also the interior designer of her home, but most importantly she designs the coming generation; she decorates the rooms of her house, and gets dressed up as evening approaches to greet her husband when he returns home; she is an expert in arranging flowers, and the most beautiful flowers of all—she grew them within her womb; she dries laundry and dries her children’s tears; she repairs broken appliances but mostly broken hearts; she is a soldier in permanent service every day of the year, also on Shabbat and holidays, and she will never say: Enough!

In my clinic, I ask my patients, among other things, about their occupations, and I try to phrase this question very exactly: “Do you also work outside of the home?” Most of the time, I find out, women have a workplace also outside of the walls of their home. It is not uncommon that these mothers are on the brink of collapse, at which point I ask myself: Is it all worth it? Even though most research says that mothers’ professions provide the woman with freedom of expression, self-actualization, emotional satisfaction, and general security, and all of these contribute to a woman’s general sense of self-worth, which could benefit the marital relationship and her mothering as well, on the other side, I hear my husband quoting what he learned growing up in his childhood home: “Ales—kan men nisht”: which, roughly translated, means “You can’t do everything.:

I think of entire days full of experiences in my home that took place without me, entire nights that I was working and my bed was empty. And Shabbats? And holidays?

I find myself, a doctor working full-time, telling my own daughters: “Why should the babysitter be the one who enjoys the new experiences that your child had in nursery school, and the pictures which he places into her hands with excitement, and the conversation of children around the lunch table? When a mother comes home in the evening, the excitement has faded and the experiences are nearly forgotten”…

My husband would say to me during the difficult days of residency, when I had neither night nor day: “I feel more badly for you than I feel for the kids; you miss all the nachas from our sweet children—this is quality time that will never return!” Today I understand how right he was.

I gave it up. I gave up kriyat shema at bedtime with the little children, the goodnight kisses, making the morning sandwiches, the end-of-the-year parties in kindergarten, and even one or two Parent-Teacher meetings.

Time that will never return.