A Burnout Story for Wives and Moms

 

I have been in family medicine for 20 years, a wife for thirteen years and a mom for eleven years. Here is my journey, a burnout story for wives and moms. I started medical school at the University of Minnesota right after college ended and completed a three year residency program at North Memorial in Robbinsdale, MN at the end of medical school.   One long continuous stretch of education that took place before residency reform and before the “Me Too” movement was started.  To get through that process, a person has to believe in a lot of delayed gratification and have a whole lot of discipline – that was my specialty.  I then started a busy full time medical practice that for 14 years included delivering babies and newborn care as well as hospital medicine.   The multi-dimensional model of family medicine no longer really exists in most places.  This makes me a dinosaur.  There are still a few rural doctors who do it all, but I fear they are near extinction.  After all of those years of work and a marriage and three daughters, I faced a really difficult time in my life in 2018.  I think that after all the stress and crazy I endured every day, my brain could no longer function in normal time.  If I didn’t have things to distract me at all times, I just really did not know what to do with myself.  During this period, I was adjusting to a new job with mainly clinic responsibilities and not really much call or other duties.  This was a shock to my system.  So oddly, as the burden of my job lessened, I became more and more burned out and stressed.   

What is burn out?  Burn out is by definition in the Cambridge dictionary as “the state of having no energy or enthusiasm because of working too hard.”  It is complicated and different for every person.  I had the realization at that time that the sum of all my working hours I had already completed was equivalent to a full lifetime career in most other fields.  Medicine seems to claim more burn out than most other careers but I do think plenty of other people suffer from it in non-medical work places.  For me, burn out meant that I could not take care of everything and everyone anymore.  I found my mind wandering when it needed to be focused.  I felt like I was physically drowning a lot of the time.  Any job seemed impossible.  Even the dishwasher seemed like a monumental task that couldn’t be completed.  I would cry in my car a lot and feel overwhelmed every single minute of every single day.  I started to become someone I really didn’t like.  My normal high level of empathy was missing.  I was not listening with the patience I had practiced for years and years of my career.  I was angry and irritable and not fun at home.   I didn’t find much of anything enjoyable.  I knew something was wrong, but felt I could overcome this alone and without making any life changes. If medicine teaches us anything in training, it is that we have to be perfect.  Always.  After a particularly difficult interaction with a co-worker, I decided I was just not going to choose miserable anymore.  I had to figure something else out before my marriage imploded and I became one of those mediocre doctors people don’t really like having to see.  I was expected to tolerate a lot of long hours, difficult interactions and chaos as part of my daily life, but this wasn’t working for my anymore.  I had to come to terms with this new reality and I made some hard decisions.  

I needed time off so I took an eight week sabbatical from work.  I needed a break, not just from work but from home too.  I needed stillness in order to find my answers and my hyper functioning brain was just begging for a rest.  So I didn’t do all of the things that I had always done for everyone which no one really appreciated.    I stopped cooking, loading the dishwasher, cleaning up messes and organizing everything.  I just stopped.  I sat with my dog, Magnus, in our screen porch and I looked at the trees.  For hours.  And for days.  This lasted about two weeks.  I then started to resemble more of my former self.  I started to read books and to work out again.  I wanted to brush my five year olds hair and to participate in life again.  I started to laugh and realized I had not laughed for a long time.  By the time eight weeks was done, I wanted to be a doctor again. I missed my patients and yearned to work and be productive.   I personally feel that every employee deserves a sabbatical every five years.  Productivity would explode if employees in high stress jobs were able to rest for a few weeks at a time without dire consequences and judgement.  

I needed to let go of some house-hold responsibilities.  My husband needed to step into more of them and I needed to stop being perfect and let go of control.  I needed to accept that “my way” is not the only way to complete a task.  It was a lot harder than it sounds and took a lot of arguments and difficult conversations to get there.  Now, I mostly do laundry and organizing but not so much deep cleaning or cooking.  I still handle a lot of the emotional work of child rearing but the piles of school forms and registration for sports and running to practice are no longer my total responsibility.  It is a balance I can sustain and feel sane.   

I never planned to write a children’s book.  About half way through my sabbatical journey the story for “Magnus the Naughty Dog Steals Lunch” showed up in my head fully illustrated and in its entirely.  I had been watching the British Open on a Sunday morning when it arrived.  I got a bunch of paper and wrote it all down as fast as I could, which took about 20 minutes.  I decided in that moment I wanted to see the book published.  It became a passion project over the next two years to see it come to realization.  That was my only goal.  Success as defined by enjoying the process of creation.  The book was published in November of 2020, was a great success and I have now started a second book “Magnus the Naughty Dog Gets a Kitten.”  Ideas and words still keep coming.  I have story and blog ideas several times a week, appearing essentially written in my mind.  Three have been published in the last few weeks alone.  I feel the brain rest I enjoyed during my sabbatical allowed a connection with my younger self.  The young adult who loved to read, write, learn and think about new things.  The person who did not view herself solely as a doctor, wife and a mother, but as a person yet to be discovered.  She has a voice again and quite a lot to say.  

So I welcome you all to my blog.