aAs a child, I fondly remember running down Video World’s kid’s aisle with my younger brother. We were excited to pick out VHS tapes for our family to watch this weekend. I don’t remember if it was every weekend or once a month, but movie nights were often enough to make up for my parents’ repeated absences over those years.
My family had recently moved from England to America, and my father and mother, both doctors, were working hard to establish a foothold in a new country. As foreign-trained doctors, they had to study for U.S. medical licensing exams and redo parts of their medical training. These obligations often took them away from home.
Our movie nights brought us back together. We pulled out the sofa bed in the living room and snuggled up under cozy blankets while watching movies like “Peter Pan,” “A Little Princess,” or “Mrs. Doubtfire.” We often fell asleep together.
My mom recently asked me if I remember those movie nights. She told me they were my parents’ way of reclaiming the time they couldn’t spend with us as doctor parents and recent immigrants trying to build a new life for our family. As I celebrate my fourth Mother’s Day, I’m thinking about how I can regain time to spend with my own children, as well as for myself.
As a psychiatrist with work on the east and west coasts, I regularly travel across the country. A few weeks ago, I was waiting to run my carry-on bag through the security scanner when the TSA agent announced that the machine was out of order. All travelers in my line would have to board a new line. “I’m glad I got here early,” said the man behind me, “it’s always easier to kill time than to revive it.”
The words of this stranger have stayed with me. As a doctor and mother, I am constantly trying to revive time. Like CPR, attempts to reanimate time are physically, mentally and spiritually exhausting.
While one recent study suggests whereas the happiest people have about two to three hours of free time a day, living at the intersection of doctorship and motherhood often makes me feel like I have too much to do and too little time to do it. In medical specialties, as I’ve written before, our healthcare systems depend on physicians donating an average of two hours of personal time each night to perform tasks integral to patient care.
Combine this unpaid doctor’s work with the unseen mental strain of motherhood — like making sure we have groceries and my burgeoning kids have shoes that fit, packing healthy school lunches, managing multiple appointments with pediatric specialists, and frantically driving to multiple pharmacies to find a fever medication – and the free time spent outside of actual care is reduced to zero.
This hurried state of being is what sociologists describe as “time poverty.” Living below this poverty line is dangerous to our health, putting us at risk for stress-related conditions, including anxiety and cardiovascular disease. Black women and shift workers like me, in my job as an emergency psychiatrist, suffer the most from “time poverty.”
I deal with it by trying to do as much as I can, leaning into hyper productivity. In between the demands of patient care and parenting, I often switch from one mentally demanding task to the next, multitasking at every turn. I’m learning the hard way that this is counterproductive. My desperate attempt to reanimate lost time increases my stress and robs my brain of opportunities for mental rest and interruptions from constant problem solving.
A more reasonable approach would be to do less with the time I have. A few years ago I read a book called “Workparent: The Complete Guide to Success at Work, Staying True to Yourself, and Raising Happy Kids,” by Daisy Dowling. It gave me the confidence to take a non-traditional job that required me to travel across the country while trying to build a life for my own family.
I recently returned to this book to learn how to optimize my work-life balance as a doctor-mom. Dowling explains that the average working mom makes more than 500 transitions from home to work and work to home each year, and these transitions have a significant impact on how we feel.
“These could be 500 chances to feel torn in two, to come across as rushed and grumpy to your child and co-workers, to be late, to forget your phone at work, to lose your notes from that VC getting, and staying haunted while wondering if this work-aging thing is inherently painful or just impossible,” she writes.Building in conscious transitions, such as listening to music or meditation, can mentally prepare us for meaningful engagement at these dueling domains.For me, that means giving myself time between my last scheduled patient and playtime with my daughters.
I have come to appreciate these moments of transition very much as a form of mental peace. These breaks help me refill my cup while avoiding doctor and mom burnout. By giving me back small amounts of free time, these mindful moments improve my overall sense of well-being. As a mom who works with mothers in one of my other roles, as a reproductive and perinatal psychiatrist in private practice, I encourage my patients to do the same.
While working from home I have an afternoon and evening clinic. In between I take a break to get my girls ready for bed. After bath time, my husband and I socialize with the girls and read them their favorite bedtime stories. The four of us together, all nice and close together, brings back memories of my own childhood and moments with my parents that felt so magical. As my girls get older I wonder if this is a family tradition, and moments of reclaimed time they will also remember with fondness.
Mother’s Day offers us an opportunity to express our gratitude to the mother figures in our lives. The holiday encourages us to honor the sacrifices mothers make to provide for their families. I hope mothers-doctors, especially those most at risk of time poverty, will take small steps to invest in ourselves so that we can remain effective in our commitment to our patients and commitment to our children. Let’s do less and win a lot more.
