Elizabeth Koch

The doctor who is a mother knows that she is one of the lucky ones. On most nights, except the one or two or three a week when she is on call, she is able to frown at the canvas bag of produce that she picked up from the CSA she’d signed them up for, conjure up a recipe that both her husband and children will eat, and fill the small house with steam and sizzle and the ticking of the oven warming itself. She is able, on most nights, to squint into her children’s crocodile mouths and scrub their little molars with an electric brush, careful not to mix up their separate toothpastes. Then she is able to read to them, alternating nights in each one’s bed, Jane Eyre for her precocious third grader, and, for her five-year-old, the one about the boy and his hunting hounds that always makes her cry.

One night, after she turns off the lights and lies down next to her boy, who still likes her to stay until he falls asleep, she feels his lashes flick against her cheek and hears, “Mama? One day, when I was in Kindergarten, I was very lucky. Because when I woke up, you were here.”

And it is true that the doctor who is a mother is rarely at home when her children wake, though she is one of the lucky ones who has some weekends entirely free. What did they used to call them? Golden. She thinks they still are. She tells herself that her son really means the school days, when he must be gently shaken and cajoled and finally picked up out of his bed by his father, who never complains about the lunch boxes and groaning breakfasts and the kids flying down the porch steps for the bus with seconds to spare.

“I’ll be here tomorrow,” she whispers to her boy, pleased that it is still the middle of the week.

She feels him squeeze his eyes shut. “But that means you won’t be here at night.”

“But I’ll be here the morning after that, too.”

“But you’ll be tired.”

She kisses him until he forgets his grumbling. She furtively texts her husband the crying face emoji.

In the morning, she has to ask her husband what he usually packs in their lunches. Her daughter, he tells her, has stopped eating the mixed-berry Go-Gurt and now only likes the strawberry. She will have to edit the grocery order she’d scheduled to arrive that night.

When the breakfast and the calls from the bedrooms about what temperature it is outside and the teeth-brushing are finished, she kisses her children above the corners of their mouths so she can feel their cheeks and noses and lips and the flutter of their eyelids all at once. She spies on them through the screen door as they caw at a raven perched on the maple tree. They do not run for the bus.

After her husband leaves for work, she is alone in the still, sunny house. She does not know what to do. She knows she should sleep, but she clings to her aloneness and the fragile time she is lucky to have. She wonders how many people never have a day off. She wonders if she can somehow balance the scales by busying herself, for she really should clean the house or cook dinner or fix the dehumidifier in the basement that keeps blinking mysterious numbers. She thinks about the other women out in the ether, giving her permission to read a book or watch TV or do some yoga. Self-care, they clamor, You deserve it.

She is not really sure anyone deserves anything.

Soon she has a pot of chicken bones boiling on the stove, recalling how the farmer who sold her the plucked birds “made them run” so there was hardly any fat on them. She roasts root vegetables in the oven. She lowers an acorn squash whole into the Instant Pot. She worries about the missiles flying across the ocean, about the hurricane, about the election. She reminds herself how very lucky she is, and then worries that if she says this enough, it will lose its flavor, like food chewed too long.

And at the end of the morning, when she is exhausted from all the things she should do, she dresses for work. She tries not to anticipate what might come in that night. She packs too much food.

When she walks in, Tupperware thumping against her back, her coworkers greet her. “Must be nice having the morning off!” they say. She thinks she hears them measuring their own luck against her golden weekends, her pre-call mornings. And because a strong doctor never tires, and a strong mother never complains, the doctor who is a mother smiles and says yes, she got some needed rest.

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Elizabeth Koch is an anesthesiologist practicing in Buffalo, NY, where she lives with her husband and two children.