By Elizabeth Stuelke
Now, you all might have days like these: days where things just seem to go smoothly, there are no plans, there are things to get done that do, but there are no timeframes in which to complete them. No chasing the kids to the car to get to the gate of some amusement park the moment it opens. There’s not even the need to go to the grocery store. The days I love most with my busy physician family are the days we all do “nothing” together! These days amaze me. These days are the ones I dream about.
I first realized how lucky I was to have these days at all when I went in to work one day at our small college town’s recreation department. I told my then unmarried boss about the bliss I had felt after breakfast that morning when my 8-year-old daughter broke out her cello. Before the school bus arrived, she serenaded her father and me (he on his way out for a 45-minute drive to his radiology residency) and we grinned at each other and her.
These days, four long years later, she still plays the cello, with a little more nagging from us. We still smile at each other over her head. What gets me is how all of us get into these “flows,” as an education guru of a boss I once had termed it for me. These days of blissful flow now start with me sleeping in until around 10 (shocking I know, but I always have been a night person). My husband, now visiting us on weekends from his fellowship 2.5 hours away (woohoo! It’s the last year of training – he promises!), makes waffles with the kids. He taught our daughter how to help him adapt his grandmother’s recipe to their liking, beginning when she was old enough to hold a spoon and not lick it immediately. Our son is in on the act now too. His job is to stir the mixture after she folds in the egg whites. The waffles from the antique iron he found at a fix ’em up shop in Manhattan are perfection. The kids are learning so much from this ritual, as are we all.
From the shared breakfast (at 10:30 a.m., yes!), we go our separate ways. I hear someone getting an instrument out, someone else asking if they’d like to work on ‘their piece’ and then Ave Maria wafts into the kitchen as I clean the breakfast dishes. There is no other way to do this chore! Our son is starting on his daily ‘can I watch…’ and he gets 20 minutes. I get an extra 20 to idle while I read emails and sip espresso.
The kids get together after the recital and put some paper airplanes together for the last of his 20 minutes. They then join us in the kitchen as we write (me) and listen to MSK videos (husband). Our daughter gets out her sewing machine, stashed in a corner of the kids’ shared bedroom. She sews a bag, or some ‘outfit’ for her stuffed or live pets, or a complete Halloween costume (no, wait… that was last week).
Since we’ve sold the house we bought at the beginning of his residency against the advice of experts, we moved into an 850-square-foot apartment. I knew I had to have a yard for the kids and a place to putter in the garden while not at work for myself. It does have a garden and it is in a house, with mostly respectful neighbors. But we still all dream together of our ‘permanent home’ and what it will be like.
Meanwhile, our son tinkers with some paper and wants to make a snail origami; he sets off to learn how. He calls his sister to his aid and makes a snail family. He decorates the sleeping cat with them and takes her picture, making a wonderful stop action movie in the process. I tell him it is truly undignified for a cat to be seen like that and that he should be thankful he wasn’t bitten (and still might be when he goes to sleep). He is undaunted.
I write out some checks for bills, read the latest issue of Physician Family. My husband de-scales the espresso machine, teaches our daughter how to clean the fish tank which holds her aquatic frogs (so she’ll be prepared to do it herself when he can’t make it back to our town for the weekend), and then she begins to design and build her ‘locker-chandelier.’ Since everyone else has one she figures she should have one too, but isn’t it great…? She’ll just make her own. I think it’s a great project and chide my husband into not teasing her too much about lighting the inside of a metal box so she can see the few folders she is choosing instead of strengthening her ability to see in the dark!
In all this flowing, we really do try to keep them grounded, as we feel we both are (and I’m really not bragging – I’m just really amazed!). My husband came late to medicine, and we both came late to this marriage and to kids. Our worlds were very different when we were growing up. We have definite ideas about what it means to be a kid and what it means to ‘have’ things in your life that have meaning. My upbringing was decidedly blue-collar, dad was a letter carrier and later an engineer for the post office. My husband’s dad was the town doctor, but then his parents split up and he lived with his single-parent mother.
Neither of us grew up in an extravagant world or home. We both are conscious of everything we’ve worked to achieve and all we hope to gain in these next years of his first attending position, right up to our not-too-distant retirement. We have a long way to go, but we have come a long way. I am happiest on those days when I can sit back and see it all coming together (at least for now, I tell myself!)
Things will change, I know. And I hope they change for the best, as we’ve planned. But any way they do change, some things won’t: We have a special family, we have an interested family, we have our flow days, and we love to be together. I know we should get out of the house more on those nice days when we’re all together, but when the flow hits we follow it and I am so happy for the times when we all do nothing together. It is a blessing to be idle in our house – we get so much done!
Elizabeth Stuelke has been living with her artist-turned-physician husband, now in his last year of training in Radiology, for 15 years. She has been writing for longer than that. They have two children: a girl age 11 and a boy age 8. They live now in Baltimore and Central PA (respectively, Elizabeth in Lewisburg with the kids). Elizabeth began her career in the arts, has worked in the corporate world, views her kids and family as her creative work for the past 11 years, and now finds herself somewhere that feels like a beginning. Contact her at [email protected], and check out her husband Satre’s most recent artwork at radiologyart.com.