The Emergency Parent

By Tamara Reese

It was five years ago, so I don’t remember what I wore or the content of the small talk between colleagues and spouses. I remember this particular mixer based on a single conversation. We were sipping wine and one of my husband’s co-residents asked me what I do. The person probably wasn’t genuinely interested, but in a room full of highly educated people one would assume there is a conversation to be had with such a prompt. I answered, “I stay at home with our son.”

Silent, blank stare and then a few fumbling words, “Well, I guess that’s important too.” He walked away leaving me to play those words over in my head, hoping I had misheard the condescending tone and inflection.

I could have told him how I volunteer on the hospital child injury prevention coalition, or how I am a published freelance writer. I could have mentioned I was currently writing an IRB for a pediatric trauma surgeon to do an evaluation of her current prevention program.

But instead I decide to give the truest answer – the answer that consumes my waking (and sleeping) hours of the day. The only job even remotely as grueling my husband’s 80+-hour work week.

We started residency when our firstborn son was ten weeks old. I quit my job as an academic researcher, we sold our house, and moved to a city we had never been to before – no friends or family nearby, just us. We realized very quickly that surgical training hours were brutal so we decided it would be best for me to stay at home full-time to give our child and subsequent children some parental stability. That first year was hard on me. Everything I had known about my identity and my relationship were tested. That benign comment from my husband’s colleague stung for a long while as I absorbed what it meant to support someone through medical training. How being a medical family had me looking and feeling like a single parent the majority of the time. But as I embraced my role as a “transplant” to this new city, I learned that while some of our situation was unique to medicine, much of it was not. The other moms in my son’s playgroup all had former lives too – one was a lawyer, one was a veterinarian, one was a financial advisor. Their husbands each worked long hours in their respective fields and these women had made similar decisions to stay home permanently or temporarily to raise their growing families.

When you have a family, the dust settles into a hierarchy. One person will have a more available job, and that person will by default be the “emergency parent,” or the person the kids can count on if they forget their lunch or puke into the block bin at preschool. The person smiling and snapping pictures next to an empty chair at the school play.

This past week I opened my son’s kindergarten folder to find a form from the school nurse labeled, “In Case of Emergency” at the top in bold letters. I looked at the sheet for a long time. There were five lines for contacts to be written in. I thought of the families who might have five different people they could count on to collect their child in an emergency. I’m envious of those families. I carefully filled out the form: on the first line I put my name and my cell phone number. On the second line I put my husband’s name and his cell phone number. And on the third line, I noted our family’s emergency protocol: “In an emergency that you cannot reach Tamara Reese, please page my husband’s medical pager with 9-1-1 and a call back number.” I pray out loud that the school would never need to use our emergency protocol because, let’s be honest; the school would have a better chance of getting a hold of my mailman if my children were ill. I’ve heard of other resident families putting a neighbor, out of town family, a babysitter, even their realtor but the truth is, when you are looking at those forms all you are thinking is, “THERE IS NO ONE ELSE!” All families have a hierarchy, but what this looks like for each family is very different. We have friends in a two-surgeon household and the logistics are a nightmare but it still shakes out to one parent being on line #1.

We now have three children and my husband goes over the emergency plan with me each time I reach my third trimester because we’ve heard stories of doctors missing the births of their own children. We’ve had to use our protocol once when we lived in a two-story walk up and my toddler followed me downstairs to get the mail. It was winter and the door closed and locked leaving us coatless and keyless on the front steps. I had to ask a neighbor I had just met if we could wait in his living room while I tried to reach my husband. Two hours later, I finally was able to get him out of the operating room to bring me the keys.

I never locked us out of the house again. The emergency parent can’t make mistakes like that.

I don’t travel further than a 30-minute radius from my children’s’ school. I interview dozens of strangers to find one qualified to babysit hoping she’s reliable enough not to cancel without notice. I have pick-up alarms and back-up alarms set in my phone for each kid. I have a detailed family calendar with doctor appointments and school plays highlighted. I’m the one who notices when my boys have outgrown their underwear, I’m the one who unclogs the sink and I’m the one who is wiping butts and tears and counters all day. When people ask my son what his parents do he says, “My daddy is a doctor and he helps sick people and my mama takes care of kids.” He says these things with pride, because to him they are both important. To our family, they are equally as important.

We will move next year for a one-year fellowship where we have no family or friends and I will do all of this again. I will choose the schools. I will meet the teachers. I will help my kids work through the sadness of leaving their friends and the inevitable anxiety of making new ones. And when I fill out the paperwork under “emergency contact” I will put my name and my phone number at the top. My phone that is always on me and always with the ringer turned up. And once we are done with training and my husband has settled into his job, I plan on completing my PhD and going back to work. But I will choose my job with full disclosure of my responsibilities as the emergency parent. Leaving a patient sliced open on the operating table to bring forgotten homework isn’t realistic. I am the emergency parent and by doing this it allows my husband to dedicate himself to his training and his patients. We both do important work.

Tamara Reese, MPH, CHES is a stay-at-home Mama and wife to a PGY6 Urology resident. She is a consultant in the field of Maternal and Child Health and a contributing editor to Kveller.com. Her work has been published in academic journals, La Leche League USA, Brain, Child Magazine and The Washington Post. You can follow her on Twitter @oiler02.