During the inspection last Friday, I was uncomfortable walking through the beautiful (and apparently very well made) house we’re hoping to buy. “This is an adult’s home.” Over 3 times the size of our duplex, it can comfortably house our whole family and an au pair and a dog. (John wants a dog. I want John to be happy. And I like the idea of a dog.) I could park the stroller in a garage instead of our dining room. I could get some of our wedding gifts out of boxes and into kitchen cabinets.
“You’re a 31-year-old mother of two. You don’t feel like an adult yet?” John responded.
Something about being the perpetual student…it feels like an extension of adolescence. Do you know that there are adolescent clinics? Not the typical child you would see at the pediatrician’s office, but not someone who has fully embraced the adult medical world either. The range of accepted patients is typically 12-40 years old. 40-year-olds??! That feels like a generous inclusion. Then again, maybe I’ll feel differently when I’m 40 and a mere few years into my first real job. When I was a teenager I thought I would have my whole life in order by age 25, but instead I was filling out applications for medical school.
Residency, from my understanding, is like an apprenticeship. We learn by doing, so we do and therefore learn a lot, never without the watchful eye of one or multiple more senior physicians making sure we don’t make a catastrophic error in patient care. But it does feel like a true job. The salary helps. Despite it being not terribly significant when compared with the numbers of hours I’ll be working, it’s the biggest salary I’ll have in my lifetime to that point (not saying much). And it should more than cover all our childcare expenses, which I’m hoping will take away the pangs of guilt I feel from hiring help so I can spend more money to attend medical school.
Then there are the reams of paperwork I have to complete in order to be credentialed to work–background checks, medical training license application, drug screening, to name a few. And the process of interviewing and hiring a live-in au pair. Yet I still sometimes feel like a little girl playing house. In a few months, I’m going to introduce myself to patients and their families as “doctor,” so I need to suck it up and fake it until I make it.
More pictures from last weekend coming, but for now, here is Evie cultivating her C’ville friendships:
anna in med school 