The Family Life

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend a question-and-answer session hosted by the Midwestern University OB/Gyn Club on the topic of "Striking a Balance" - the delicate high-wire act of managing both a demanding doctoral education and career with raising a family.

I have four kids myself, ranging in ages from 14 to 5 years old, so I am keenly aware of the challenges that face anyone who tries to keep a family together and healthy while studying or working... or both.

My wife and I got married towards the end of our college careers - in fact, my wife graduated only a month after our wedding - so for the first two years of our married life we had it really easy. I studied, she worked, and at the end of the day we went out with friends, went on dates, went on drives, and generally enjoyed life with very few worries (of course, I say this in retrospect - at the time we obviously felt a bit more stressed about our lives).

That freedom went out the window with the birth of our first child. Never mind my relative inexperience with babies, although as the youngest of two childen in my own immediate family that was a rather significant obstacle to overcome - the addition of a totally dependent human life to our little family changed everything about our lives. Sure, our sleep patterns were interrupted and we suddenly had diapers to change, but in a larger sense we assumed a 24 hour a day, seven day a week responsibility that affected every single thing that we did or decided.

It was the proverbial life-changing event. Quite without noticing it, we found that we had to start scheduling our "date time," staying in instead of going out, catching up on sleep instead of being social, fitting our free time around our new addition after discovering that suddenly homework or job responsibilities that were easily scheduled before had to be wedged in when we could find a spare few minutes.

It is amazing how one baby can so significantly alter a pair of lives. We would learn, of course, that each new child took us further down that road of schedule juggling, asset managing, and freedom restricting - until our entire lives were centered around those young, beautiful kids who had monopolized our lives. Don't get me wrong, we wouldn't trade our kids or our family life for anything... but my wife and I sometimes think back on those days in college and can't even remember what it was like to have that much liberty and flexibility.

Now you take all of that and throw it into the context of a young medical student (or, perhaps, a couple who are both medical students), whose lives are filled with lectures, coursework, lab work, enormous student loans, rotations, residencies, and so forth... and on paper it looks like a veritable impossibility. But the human animal is superbly adaptable, and during the Q&A I learned that the same brightness and creativity that brought these students and medical professionals to this point of their lives helped to creatively address the added challenge of starting a family at the beginning of their medical careers.

The most critical aspect of raising a family while conducting a professional life - whether you are a writer like me or an aspiring osteopathic physician at AZCOM or CCOM - is balance. The scale has family on one side and your professional life on the other. Whatever you add to your life in terms of "overhead" - work responsibilities, date nights, commitment to patients and commitment to children - needs to keep the scales even with each other. So you add carefully, subtract where you must without disturbing the fundamental elements, and try to keep as little weight on the chains holding the scales together as you can.

Raising and keeping together a family in the context of a demanding professional life is not easy, and it is not a decision to be made capriciously or on the spur of the moment, but it is a life that is incredibly rewarding and enriching for those who manage the feat.