Moms Need a Good Mother's Life Not Just a Good Mother's Day

I am a working mother and I am a lucky one:

I gave birth to three healthy sons.

I am proud of having so many former trainees who are doing great things with their careers and are having a positive impact on the world around them.

I just heard THREE of them talk today at our annual conference for pediatric providers. I was literally a proud momma.

Our freshman in college son brought some of his friends home for a couple days: children by extension. We are rich in children and blessed.

My calendar is full of meetings with young people. Seeking advice, mentorship, conversations, input, connection. I am so very lucky.

Lucky Mother, April 1996

I do not have biological daughters but I have almost daughters: trainees, current and former students, and friends of my sons. Tomorrow, we are going to a concert with Nate, the boyfriend of my very first almost daughter Kate (with her real mother for the weekend) and Mike, the husband of one of my medical students from almost 20 years ago.

Yet, lucky one that I am, I did not have maternity leaves when our children were born.

I took vacation time and sick leave. My children all started day care at six weeks, which felt almost insurmountably painful at the time. I wanted to carry them in a pouch. I visited them at daycare, stealing minutes from the work day to nurse them, sometimes in the sun, sometimes in a dark corner so as to not offend the sensibility of easily offended people.

I'm a lucky one and had a pumping room during residency. It was called the moo room.  My on-call attending, when I thought my waters broke, made it clear that my number one priority, before taking my distressed self to the emergency room, was negotiating coverage by a peer, to ensure that he, the attending, did not work for me himself.

I'm a lucky one and I spent years paying astronomical sums to daycares and babysitters so I could work when my children were little, so I could bring my kids along on work trips when they were still nursing, so I could honor invitations to amazing places like Cold Spring Harbor or keep presentation engagements.

I'm a lucky one and I did not sleep for years and, at the time, even when the research showed that women are as, if not more, productive than men over the course of a lifetime, I was evaluated as a young woman without any allowance for the juggling act of motherhood and academic medicine. My h publication index is 19. It is good enough for a scientist by any standard. For a working mother with a primary educator hat, three children, a husband with an insanely busy job and no family in town to help...it's more than good and yet, it always felt insufficient, because (relatively) under-achieving by the standards of a culture that prides itself on love of science but cannot do multivariate math like appropriately measuring academic productivity during the reproductive years of a woman faculty.

I'm a lucky one that starting four years ago or so, thanks to lucid motivation and an exceptional trainer, I turned around or at least ameliorated several stress related disorders accumulated in my profession where women are twice as likely to die from suicide than women in the general population.

I'm a lucky one in a country where, according to a recent study, women who are mothers feel the most work/life balance stress of all the mothers in the developed countries' world. A country where one of the States just made it possible for a woman who has miscarried to be considered a murderer, where maternity leave or early preschool education is not universal and where many mothers and children do not have medical insurance.

I'm a lucky one that for the last decade, when my almost daughters or sons have their own babies, I can give them a gift of compassion, understanding and occasional help. It may help 2% only but it makes a difference.

I'm a lucky one that I have a partner who was not neutral but staunchly supportive about the importance of my contributions in a very underserved profession.

We all know children are the future.

Then, parents, teachers, people who work with children are the future too.
Let's protect it better.

Love and Happy Mother's Day to All,


Anne