How to Fill Your Tank
August/September 2024 Newsletter
Sorry. I know this is late. So we are somewhere in between a late August and early September 2024 newsletter. I promise I’ll make it up to you.
Every night for the past two months I have thought that the kids would be in bed a little earlier, that L and I would have an hour or two to ourselves, curled up in front of the TV with snacks. Once or twice a week we might have our laptops out to do some work– her to finish her papers for publication, and me to write more blog posts. It’s not that I haven’t been writing– you’ll see that in a second– but I haven’t written anything for myself. 500-word essays for homework, yes. 1500 word op-meds, yes. But for myself, no. Because every night, something more pressing comes up– separation anxiety, or fevers and vomiting, or the litter box stopped working, or the dishes need to be put away, or half my staff has COVID, or or or. I honestly think it’s a wonder that parents of young children get anything done at all.
Did you hear that the Surgeon General issued an advisory on parental stress? Those of us who are parents can scoff and say, Duh! But I can also hear the other side, because I was recently there, just under two years ago, the side akin to All Lives Matter– non-parents have stress, too! Yes, yes they do! I am not refuting that. In fact, I have seen an increasing number of anal spasms and anal fissures in my practice in the past year– stress in young people, in particular, is a known risk factor for these two causes of anal pain (along with poor bowel habits, caffeine, and smoking)-- so I know that we’re all stressed out! We’re all tired. I blame this society that we live in where information is instantaneous, and we can’t disconnect, and there is this weird culture that we must keep on achieving without resting. The Surgeon General reports that 33% of parents vs 20% of adults report high stress in the last month. What is the written equivalent of an eye-roll? ONLY 33%? ONLY 20%? I would like to be doing whatever the other 6-8 people are doing. Says the woman who is doing eighteen other things besides being a mother of two under two.
My parents were visiting over Labor Day weekend and we were sitting around one night after the kids went to bed and my dad said to mom, And you thought I had a lot of burners going at once when I was 40 but that was nothing compared to Carmen. This was the first time I had heard that expression in Cantonese, literally “stove-top” low-tow, but I understood it immediately. As I've gotten older, or in the past few years since I've had kids, I've had my dad acknowledge more and more how much I was like him when he was younger: ambitious, busy, diligent. It's true that in the last two years, I went from having an academic medical job to being in private practice, having written a book and started my brand and consulting for multiple companies trying to develop medical devices, doing a class in Strategic Healthcare Leadership at Johns Hopkins, managing my social media, volunteering with national advocacy organizations and surgical associations and somehow, I still have two hours at the end of each day to feed, bathe, and take care of my kids and then one hour to spend with my wife, either both of us too exhausted and just looking at our phones or doing some late night work before crashing into bed, fingers-crossed that nobody wakes up in the middle of the night, crying. The problem is, I've always known this about myself, that I have too many things going at once because I get bored doing just one thing and as a result, maybe I don't do anything to the best of my ability or maybe I do everything just well enough so that nobody notices any kind of flaws. Occasionally, I feel myself spread so thin that I know I've expanded too much and I need to pull back again and start pruning where I can. This project can be tabled for later, this project should be done not all, because as much as I want to take care of people and take care of patients and take care of everybody out there, my priority is my family, and then after that, maybe myself, and I can't do that when there's nothing left to give. The funny thing is, no matter what I'm doing, when I walk through the door at 5 PM, I literally forget everything. The only task at hand is my second shift: being a mom, being a wife, making dinner, and spending some time with my kids because otherwise what is this all for?? The ambition, the drive, and the success don’t mean anything if my family is unhappy. It's not even leaving a legacy or leaving the money. They probably won't remember any of this because they're so little, or how hard moms worked so that they can buy all the toys they want. Every time I think this, I just remember– I just hope– that they feel loved. I didn’t hear I love you from my parents until I was eighteen, but my kids hear I love you at least eighteen times a day. My parents worked five days a week to spend two days with us, but my goal is to work two days a week to spend five days with my family.
I came home one-day last week and before I could even take off my backpack, with my scrubs still on, my daughter came running up to me, not with a hug and kiss, but screaming, wanting me to pick her up, wanting to throw herself around my legs, blocking my path so that I couldn't move away without her. Having been pulled in all directions all day with patients needing something from me, with the medical assistants needing something from me, it's common for me to feel like I have nothing left to give at the end of the day and so with some irritation, I told her, Listen, Mommy has to make dinner. she clung onto my legs as I put our dinner in the oven and I said Listen, I need to make your dinner. I can't pick you up right now. She clung onto my legs and screamed as I microwaved her broccoli and then, finally, I said, Listen, I need to change my clothes, my scrubs are gross and it's hot and sticky. So I went upstairs and put on shorts and a tank top before coming downstairs when finally, I sat down, she wouldn't sit in her seat to eat her dinner and instead climbed up onto my lap as usual and waited for me to feed her. I fed her a couple of bites and before long the screaming stopped and she laid her head against my chest, quiet. At that moment, of course, I felt guilty because I knew what she needed was me but more importantly, I felt understanding because what she really needed was rest. She needed a moment of calm and her peaceful place was in my arms. I could understand this feeling because I often feel like I need to snuggle with my wife at the end of the day and feel like I want to just hold my kids at the end of the day because of all the external stimulation and talking to people and entertaining different things.
In that moment, I realized I couldn't blame her at all because I would be screaming, too, if I had a day of running around and having to play with my grandparents and my sister and my nanny and all I wanted to do was just rest for a minute in my mom's arms.
For me these days, it's not so much as my mommy as my wife, and I’m back to that dream of myself snuggling up against her on the couch at night watching TV or sharing a sweet snack. This moment of rest is something I look forward to, but these moments end up being fewer and far between. We are pulled in two different directions by our two kids and by the demands of us juggling jobs and classes and home improvement projects so we end up not having that time to sit together and relax and just snuggle. We end up being on a different time schedule, and then we are sitting by ourselves, just scrolling on our phones or playing games, sometimes reading books or listening to a podcast. It's not ideal. It doesn't fill that tank because you're not getting what you need. These are self-soothing tactics that only treat the symptoms but don’t address the cause.
Then this morning, we found ourselves in bed for half an hour, having all four of us slept through the night after several nights of fevers and vomiting and sleeplessness. The kids were miraculously both asleep and we rubbed each other’s backs and whispered to each other, giggling uncontrollably about something funny L had said yesterday. It’s not a lot but we got half an hour to listen to each other and snuggle in bed and rub each other’s backs.
So the next time you're feeling empty, maybe instead of saying, What can I take to fill my tank? Ask yourself, What can you give? And your tank will be filled.
Until next time, always go black tie.
Recent podcast interviews with KevinMD are now up!
Pelvic floor conditions Podcast Interview
Read the original op-meds here:
The Pelvic Floor is Often Ignored
The Unseen Work of Women Surgeons (Just Surgeons, to you!)
If you’d like to support my work or my book, please sign up for the Constipation Nation newsletter and head over to my TikTok or my Instagram. I am also selling a product called RMDY that has been really working for my gut health. You can buy it in my TikTok shop, along with other products that my company, Peaches, recommends.
Other stuff
Read my friend MarthaQ’s meditation on gun violence in schools
Harvard website on How to test your own implicit biases
News about Bridgerton Season 4 lololololol finally, Benedict!
An associated KevinMD post about pelvic floor dysfunction— I am treating a lot of this in my office these days
