Further to my #MicroblogMondays post, I found this thread on Twitter... honestly, sometimes I feel like a sitting duck as a childless woman... :(
Indeed... :(
Further to my #MicroblogMondays post, I found this thread on Twitter... honestly, sometimes I feel like a sitting duck as a childless woman... :(
Indeed... :(
I love Jody's comment! I couldn't agree more!
ReplyDeleteI have a story regarding young pronatalism from my family.
My niece (now in her early teenage years) asked me when she was around 6, if there was a baby in my belly . I replied that there wasn’t and that it never would be. She replied that I was very selfish.
I know that she had to hear this from her mother.
And I am afraid – that when she is an adult and with children of her own, she will terrorize other childless peers with her opinion. And pass this pattern to her daughters.
What an awful way to think! Sadly, we all know it is very, very common.
ReplyDeleteI remember being a little girl and my mom talking about some neighbors and telling me, "People who don't have children are weird." Even as a child, I knew this was wrong and unkind.
Wow - that's a missed opportunity if I ever saw one. She could have tied her work in a Covid ward into empathy for everyone and taught her daughter a valuable lesson on how everyone has value. (Well, minus a couple outliers.) I mean, I guess she was addressing the biggest fear first, but, still...
ReplyDeleteOh, good grief! I agree with these comments. I do understand the daughter was afraid, and could only empathise with other children who might risk losing their parents. But still ... I've imagined people saying that sort of thing to me a lot. I shouldn't, and I don't usually, but sometimes it creeps up on me.
ReplyDeleteOh, wow. WOW. To not take the opportunity to comfort her daughter but also assert that all lives have value inn the moment is one thing, but to ACTIVELY REFLECT UPON IT later in an article and not address that people without kids deserve to live, too... Ugh
ReplyDeleteWhen I was younger my mother definitely reinforced that not having kids was selfish. We visited my aunt and uncle who didn't have kids in their gorgeous home, and when I commented on their beautiful home on the car ride back she said, "well, it's because they don't have kids. It's easy to have nice things when you don't have kids." The tone was so bitter and the message was "they chose fancy stuff over the responsibility of having children." It wasn't quite "they deserve to die before those with kids," butt it was still a string statement that they had questionable values because they didn't have kids, and I shouldn't look to them as role models.
I found the full article... a "covid ward journal" written by a British journalist-turned-doctor. It's behind a paywall but you can sign up for a certain number of free articles. Here is the link:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dr-rachel-clarkes-covid-ward-journal-the-air-reeks-of-invisible-danger-kncmwv9bx
And here is the relevant section of the article:
DeleteWhen I return at night I unlock the front door and reach for the hand sanitiser. Before I have even rushed upstairs to the shower — this is Mum’s new routine, every night she’s home from work now — my husband, Dave, appears in the hallway, looking stern. “We need to talk,” he says.
My mind leaps compulsively to death and disaster. They have been there, after all, throughout my day on the wards. Dave’s parents, my mum? Has someone succumbed and been rushed into hospital? “No, no,” says Dave. “It’s Abbey. We just need to talk.”
As quickly as possible I try to scrub every speck of infection from my skin beneath the shower. The water cannot be too hot nor too forceful. I know that on one level I am trying to erase what I have seen and heard and sought to palliate today — and that these experiences, whether I like it or not, are indelible. Still damp, hair dripping, I find Dave and he explains what has happened.
“Abbey started to cry, Rach,” he tells me. “She doesn’t want you to do anything at work that could end up killing you.”
My head slumps into my palms. Finn was two years old when I became a doctor. Abbey was born during my second year of practice. In all that time, over and over, my children have suffered as the hospital has consumed too many hours, just too much of their mother. The anodyne phrase “work/life balance” doesn’t come close to capturing the forcefulness with which medicine clashes with parenthood. Who comes first, patient or child? How can you walk out on this young man who has just learnt he has terminal cancer? How many more nights must your baby daughter fall asleep without seeing her mother?
At nine, Abbey likes nothing more than sloths, meerkats, candyfloss, toffee apples and being mercilessly sprayed with the garden hose. I oscillate between delighting in the grown-up girl she is evolving into — all gangling limbs and vehement opinions — and missing the tiny creature I once cuddled for hours. And now I have caused my daughter, this diminutive firecracker I love so fiercely, sufficient pain to reduce her to tears. She does not want her mother to die and she fears that — through my choices, my self-selected pyramid of people with importance — she may lose me to coronavirus. Who do I love the most, I can imagine her thinking. My son and my daughter — my actual children — or these men and women I have never met before who happen, by chance, to be my patients?
“I’ll talk to her,” I mutter to Dave, too ashamed to meet his eye. “What I’m doing really isn’t high risk. ICU is much more dangerous.”
Abbey and I sit on her bed behind closed doors. “Hey,” I say gently, as she picks at the duvet. “Dad said you got upset today?” Her voice is harsh and hostile, completely out of character. “Why do you have to be the one who sees all the coronavirus patients in the hospital? Why can’t it be someone else who doesn’t have children so if they die, it isn’t as bad?”
I hesitate. How can I possibly tell her I have volunteered, that I want to be the one helping these patients? Yet equally, how can I lie to her? I take a deep breath and grope for the right words. “Abbey,” I begin, “I don’t believe I am going to die. I think I may well have already had the virus.”
She cuts in before I can say more. “Well, what if you’re wrong? You don’t know, do you?” Tears are forming in the corners of her eyes.
“You’re right, I don’t know. But I’m not working in the most dangerous part of the hospital. That’s called intensive care, where the sickest patients are. I’m on the normal wards where it’s not so risky.”
We debate back and forth as I try to articulate the nature of duty in terms a nine-year-old can understand, this irresistible tug to use my training to help in a crisis. “Well, what about your duty to me? And to Finn?” she asks defiantly. The more I try to assure her I will be safe, the more stridently she insists I can’t know that. And, of course, she’s right. I can’t. I cannot promise her the worst won’t happen.
I went on Twitter to see if I could find any comments... ironically I found a tweet from her blasting a politician who told a stage 4 cancer patient her life was less valuable...! -- followed by a tongue-in-cheek response:
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/H81151941/status/1351552414541873153