There is a moment in Kevin Costner's Field of Dreams when Doc Graham abandons his dream of playing baseball to walk across the border of heaven and earth to save someone's life. It may be THE moment in the movie, although my son argues that the true moment is when Ray's dad agrees to play a catch. Either way, I leak like a sieve throughout the movie, a timeless film about nostalgia and dreams, and a little about reconciling the losses we have endured.
I was five when I decided to become a doctor. There wasn't a moment of wavering from the time my sister was meant to be born in our two bedroom apartment to a midwife (with me watching). Not throughout elementary school, when my friends wanted to be MTV VJs or famous actresses. Not in high school, when I spent every spare moment writing poems and essays and novellas, when my mother urged me to be a writer, to be the next SE Hinton, as if there could be such a thing. And not in college, when I took eighteen credits per semester to squeeze in my calculuses and my biologies and then stayed up all night working as an usher in a movie theater (for $4.15 an hour). It was what was embedded in my soul.
My daughter was born when I was twenty one. At the time, I was embroiled in a bitter argument with my college, who had lost transcripts and was demanding money I didn't have for me to continue with my education. Becoming a mom won out. Once she was born, the school seemed trivial, and all of my efforts became refocused. But throughout all of my pregnancies, throughout any illnesses I had, even running down the corridor of Albany Med to hold my grandmother as she died, I felt that I was split into two. The dichotomy of Kerensa. The smells of a hospital, and the way the scrubs looked as they turned a corner with purpose, it all felt like a life left unlived for me.
Several years ago, after my sister earned her nursing degree, alongside women twice my own age, I revisited the idea of going back to school. My children were old enough to suffer through TV dinners on nights when I had to study, my husband adept enough to care for them when I had to attend labs. I filled out paperwork and worked the numbers to decide if tuition, registration, application was feasible. I envisioned a life with me coaxing a newborn into the world, a flaming spark of life with infinite possibility. A life of me crying alongside a grieving mother, having known myself the feeling of loss when the heartbeat within has stopped.
But ultimately, something halted my journey, and even now, a decade later, I have forgotten what it was. Maybe a panicked thought of my age, or of the age I would be when one journey would end and another would commence.
Occasionally I will be in a hospital, and I will see a patient on a gurney, and I will feel drawn to them in a strange magnetic way. Or a friend will tell me about something that ails their children, and a diagnostician inside of me will emerge, with the mother in me merely along for the ride. But I will always feel the pull. Especially now, as the world is enveloped in a pandemic and so many doctors and nurses are sacrificing their everything to fight on the front lines. Like soldiers. And I wish I could be alongside them, in the perilous fight, with ramparts streaming gallantly and all.
But then I think of the line of white landscape rock. The line that Doc "Moonlight" Graham had to cross to save a little girl, and the dream he walked away from. In the movie he says that the real tragedy would be if he were to give up even five minutes of being a doctor, not sacrificing his life as a ball player.
I have spent twenty one years as a stay home mom. A life of little fanfare, and almost no public recognition. I will not get a raise or a promotion, and I will not leave a legacy save for the minutiae my children will take with them in their adult lives. It is not a life of greatness or a story they will make movies about when I pass on to my cornfield. But on this Mother's Day, it is imperative for me to recognize the significance of the choice I made. I could have had my five minutes on a ball field, wielding a stethoscope, but like Doc Graham, I chose a life that was meant for me, a calling louder than the lure of the glory. And every time, every single time, I would choose to cross the rock to be the me I was truly meant to be. If Heaven, or Iowa, is a place where dreams can come true, I have already lived here for more than half of my life. I am not sure everyone can claim the same, but if I have learned anything over the last two months of isolation and quarantine, it is that somehow, without even knowing I was doing it, I hit a home run.
I was five when I decided to become a doctor. There wasn't a moment of wavering from the time my sister was meant to be born in our two bedroom apartment to a midwife (with me watching). Not throughout elementary school, when my friends wanted to be MTV VJs or famous actresses. Not in high school, when I spent every spare moment writing poems and essays and novellas, when my mother urged me to be a writer, to be the next SE Hinton, as if there could be such a thing. And not in college, when I took eighteen credits per semester to squeeze in my calculuses and my biologies and then stayed up all night working as an usher in a movie theater (for $4.15 an hour). It was what was embedded in my soul.
My daughter was born when I was twenty one. At the time, I was embroiled in a bitter argument with my college, who had lost transcripts and was demanding money I didn't have for me to continue with my education. Becoming a mom won out. Once she was born, the school seemed trivial, and all of my efforts became refocused. But throughout all of my pregnancies, throughout any illnesses I had, even running down the corridor of Albany Med to hold my grandmother as she died, I felt that I was split into two. The dichotomy of Kerensa. The smells of a hospital, and the way the scrubs looked as they turned a corner with purpose, it all felt like a life left unlived for me.
Several years ago, after my sister earned her nursing degree, alongside women twice my own age, I revisited the idea of going back to school. My children were old enough to suffer through TV dinners on nights when I had to study, my husband adept enough to care for them when I had to attend labs. I filled out paperwork and worked the numbers to decide if tuition, registration, application was feasible. I envisioned a life with me coaxing a newborn into the world, a flaming spark of life with infinite possibility. A life of me crying alongside a grieving mother, having known myself the feeling of loss when the heartbeat within has stopped.
But ultimately, something halted my journey, and even now, a decade later, I have forgotten what it was. Maybe a panicked thought of my age, or of the age I would be when one journey would end and another would commence.
Occasionally I will be in a hospital, and I will see a patient on a gurney, and I will feel drawn to them in a strange magnetic way. Or a friend will tell me about something that ails their children, and a diagnostician inside of me will emerge, with the mother in me merely along for the ride. But I will always feel the pull. Especially now, as the world is enveloped in a pandemic and so many doctors and nurses are sacrificing their everything to fight on the front lines. Like soldiers. And I wish I could be alongside them, in the perilous fight, with ramparts streaming gallantly and all.
But then I think of the line of white landscape rock. The line that Doc "Moonlight" Graham had to cross to save a little girl, and the dream he walked away from. In the movie he says that the real tragedy would be if he were to give up even five minutes of being a doctor, not sacrificing his life as a ball player.
I have spent twenty one years as a stay home mom. A life of little fanfare, and almost no public recognition. I will not get a raise or a promotion, and I will not leave a legacy save for the minutiae my children will take with them in their adult lives. It is not a life of greatness or a story they will make movies about when I pass on to my cornfield. But on this Mother's Day, it is imperative for me to recognize the significance of the choice I made. I could have had my five minutes on a ball field, wielding a stethoscope, but like Doc Graham, I chose a life that was meant for me, a calling louder than the lure of the glory. And every time, every single time, I would choose to cross the rock to be the me I was truly meant to be. If Heaven, or Iowa, is a place where dreams can come true, I have already lived here for more than half of my life. I am not sure everyone can claim the same, but if I have learned anything over the last two months of isolation and quarantine, it is that somehow, without even knowing I was doing it, I hit a home run.
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