Ungodly, or godly?
May 2024 newsletter essay
Women are joiners. Instinctively, evolutionarily, women want to be part of the group, even if we don’t think so. Even if, on a day-to-day basis, we say, We hate people. Even if, in our heads, we say, We just want to be alone. We do want to be alone. But we also want to be a part of the group. Strength in numbers, validation in a crowd. We were sharing ideas and encouragement back and forth while picking berries or husking corn. Men can do their solo hunting or prepare to take down a mammoth with their buddies. We want to sit in a knitting circle, a book club, a wine-and-whine. Tell me I’m wrong but agree with me.
So here I am, 5:31 am, squealing newborn strapped to my chest, praying that my toddler keeps sleeping till seven and that my wife can get some rest. I’m up anyway, I figured. I’m on the late shift, the one in the wee hours of the morning, and our baby can never get comfortable. She’s too hungry, then too full, she has to poop, and pee, and then she’s too cold. She wants to sleep, but not in her bassinet. So I thought I could put her in the carrier and do my writing like I used to do. Before babies.
To hold myself accountable, I joined the Ungodly Hour Writing Club, which meets at 5:30 am every weekday in May. You can donate a little money to the Writing Co-lab or join for free (I donated a little because I like them as an organization). Paying money holds me accountable. Sitting in a virtual roomful of women holds me accountable. As I’m looking around the zoom, I see mostly womyn-gendered names. And I recall that it was mostly women in my narrative medicine workshops. When I did my Surgery Reviewer Academy, it was mostly women. When I did my Harvard Media and Medicine certificate, it was mostly women. Women want to be part of a crowd. We were engineered that way, it seems.
This is why being isolated at home and nursing a baby seems wrong. Struggling alone in a big house feels wrong. I’m thinking about how I felt in the first few months after having a baby. The way my sister feels raising her six-month-old. The way my wife feels when I leave for work. There is freedom in the solace, I know. Those first few weeks are crucial in developing a bond between mother and infant, staring at each other, sleeping, and not sleeping. But after those first few weeks, you start to miss doing things in the outside world. You miss the company. I’m thinking back to the Ina May Gaskin books I read before giving birth. They brought a school bus caravan of pregnant women and their families to The Farm so that they could have support during and after giving birth. Their kids ran around from one house to the other and were the responsibility of whoever’s yard they were in. It was basically a commune, I know. But our modern-day cul-de-sacs are the closest equivalent, and even then it doesn’t work when people keep to themselves and stay inside their homes.
I say all this even as I have no intention of joining a commune, or coming out of my house at the end of a cul-de-sac, or letting my kids run around with the neighborhood kids. I rarely crowdsource information on Facebook groups and I don’t care about gossip. I’m still sitting alone at my desk, performing the solitary task of putting words on paper. Well, solitary except for the sleeping infant. And I prefer it this way.
But later I will join the living. I’ll take my daughter to the library where ‘Congenial Carmen’ comes out. I’ll laugh with the other moms and chat with the librarians. I'll encourage my daughter to share the ball pit balls and blocks instead of throwing them. I might even exchange phone numbers for a play date I’ll never go to (though I’ll think about it weekly and feel guilty about it).
I was on a panel recently and it was a bunch of us surgeon-moms (just surgeons, to you) talking about how to balance a family and a career. One of the surgeons said, “Burn your guilt center’. Which seems an extreme way of doing it, but she was just saying that you can’t feel guilty about everything. Stop feeling guilty. We’re all out here trying. If there’s anything I learned in the last year and a half, with a growing family, a bunch of transitions, and a lot of unexpected interruptions, is to give yourself so, so, so much grace. I am not forgiving myself for unforgivables, merely allowing space for trial and error, and acknowledging that we’re all still learning.
One thing that occurs to me, is that maybe women aren’t held to a higher standard of holding themselves accountable. Could that be true? We were raised to seek external validation?
I’m watching my daughters sleep now, and everything seems like a lesson. I want them to run, grow, and be healthy and strong. Speak their minds when they feel the need and seek comfort in the crowd when they want to. I don’t know how to teach them that. But I’ll learn.
In other news, I have two more articles published on Doximity, was recently in Las Vegas to be on a panel about physician marketing, and also received the other half of my *meager* book advance. But it‘s still exciting because it means my book is in production! My website is slightly more updated and will include my “Appearances” for the rest of the calendar year. I have the first prototypes of the Constipation Nation stickers that I designed, which will go out to people who pre-order the book and to people who are paid subscribers to the Constipation Nation substack. (You get the same information if you subscribe for free, just no stickers.) We’re moving right along.
Subscribe to get Constipation Nation updates.
Read the Doximity versions of “The Pelvic Floor is Often Ignored” and “Women Physicians Do More Unpromotable Work”. Or if you’re not Doximity members, the original versions will be up on IMMO (In My Medical Opinion) soon!
Read this strangely resonating essay by Daisy Buchanan about women’s relationship with clothes, “Fear and clothing”
Check out Writing Co-Lab
Donate to Save the Booties! Fun Run/Walk
I was interviewed for a Medscape article about Surgery and Superstition
The Surgery and Superstition article I wrote
If you’d like a free subscription to my friend Karyn’s Substack, please message me. I have three to give away.
Until next time!
Always go black tie.
