Navigating Modern Motherhood and Medicine
My daughter strolls into the kitchen, AirPods akimbo as she listens to a call, a stethoscope wagging around her neck. An OB-GYN in her second year of residency, she beelines for the refrigerator like a child home from school. I find her something to eat and stand back, marveling that the fingers poking around the Tupperware for a decent piece of chicken are the same ones that pull babies out of women’s bodies just a mile down the street.
The Evolution of a Doctor: From Mother to Medicine
A few fine threads hang off the waistline of her scrubs, and I absentmindedly clip them at the base with my kitchen shears as she dispenses discharge information about a patient. She smiles when she hangs up and says, “Momma – I need those; we use the strings to practice our knots when it’s quiet in the OR”. A few years earlier, she might have jerked the strings back with irritation, but now she observes me with amused detachment. Kids grow up, and our roles flicker back and forth in moments like these; I take her hands in mine and flip them over and back – marveling that those familiar fingers can sew up a woman’s body after birth. Or remove cancers from strangers I will never meet.
Seamless Connections: Stitches of Heritage and Healthcare
We thought she’d be a lawyer like her dad, but she took a turn toward medicine after being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in high school. Holding her hands, something came to me in a flash – I was the one who had taught her to stitch. When she was younger, we had spent hours needlepointing and knitting in this kitchen, where she now tenderly wipes away a tear that slips from my eye.
Reflecting on Generational Handiwork and Healing
“What is it?” she wonders, allowing me to lead her into the dining room, where I point to two framed and faded samplers hanging on the wall, glorifying careful stitches that were a central element in a girls’ education in the early days of New England. How had I never followed this particular thread in the strand of history, the legacy of handiwork from our female ancestors to her current profession?
Historical Ties: Ancestral Legacies in Homemaking and Healthcare
Our heritage is invisible until that moment when it is revealed. I had raised my family in Los Angeles, far from Boston, where my mother’s parents can both trace their family roots back to the 17th century. On a recent visit home, I’d visited the cemetery near the Old North Church, looking at family gravestones with a cousin obsessed with our genealogy.
Exploring Female Lineages: A Journey Through Generations
Nothing much gets passed down in families like ours; property and all the drama that comes with it are legacies for wealthier families, whose stories are told in bank accounts and legal transactions. It’s much harder to recover the invisible histories in families like ours. Surviving items are cherished, like a silver pitcher commemorating a great great great grandfather for serving as town selectman.
Education and Empowerment: The Rise of Women in Academia
Our phantom elders were on my mind because my cousin had unearthed a remarkable black-and-white photograph depicting four generations of women – finally, the women! A sepia-toned portrait of my great aunt as an infant posed with her mother, her mother’s mother, and her mother’s mother.
Modern Handiwork: Continuity of Tradition in Contemporary Crafts
My daughter was born on the day that my grandmother died, signaling the end of one generation and the start of another, as she is the eldest cousin. We never got a four-generation photo, but we were darn close. Born at the turn of the century, my grandmother went to the Garland School of Homemaking (later folded into Simmons in 1976), where she learned the art of homemaking.
Inherited Skills: Needlework to Surgery
But when we looked at the simple samplers in the dining room, she laughed and said, “I love that you think my being able to sew gave me a leg up in medicine. There are so many other factors that go into my job!” Of course, I do know – I know exactly how many years of serious schooling came before this residency, and I know that she studies into the night after long days at the hospital.
The Intersection of Crafting and Career
I know that her work will always be emotionally and physically demanding, and I worry about how the juggling of raising her own family will tug at her when that day comes.
Passing the Torch: Evolution of Roles and Expectations
She kisses me goodbye, promising to stop by again soon, and I am buoyed, knowing her generation has a leg up on ours, starting with having been so well educated. Millennials are better at boundaries and asking for help. They push back on traditional gender roles, which may help one day when she and her fiancé raise their children. It’s also possible that their identities are more secure, having benefited from having better role models than we had. Maybe this is what change looks like – two steps forward and one step back.
The Continuous Thread: From Domestic Arts to Professional Success
The torch has been passed. My “Ok Boomer” moment comes with the sweet knowledge that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Mothers know that what is taught in those cozy days of yore, in the forgotten moments of endless ordinary days – the recipes, the jokes, the board games and the puzzles – form a colorful tapestry of childhood. The family heritage is also woven from compassion for others, the structure of decision-making, and myriad other learnings from heart and home that benefit careers and lives.
Parenting as Social Change: Shaping Future Generations
In “Women Rowing North,” Mary Pipher wrote, “I most enjoy now what I most enjoyed at age ten”. If we circle back to those primal lessons, those ordinary moments bear the fruit of enduring memories. Genealogy looks to the past, but raising kids is a bid for the future. Parenting, it turns out, is an agent of social change, threading through the generations and leading us forward.
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