Growing up, I didn’t want to be a doctor. I didn’t want to be in the medical field period. I adamantly told anyone who asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up that it would not be a nurse, doctor, or anything of the sort. For some reason this surprised everyone; as if they expected me to say that a health profession was calling my name. No, I said. As a child, I linked this “health world” with not so pleasant memories. I could vividly remember my mother, a nurse, getting a call at night as we were lying in bed, just the two of us. I dreaded the calls because I knew we would have to leave the warm sanctity of our mother-daughter sleep and separate because the hospital, the doctor, the patient was calling. Other nights I knew beforehand I would not get to sleep beside my mother because she had already chained herself to the nightshift in the emergency room. It took her away from me and left her tired and sad at times. The nights when I was somewhere else in another bed I would lie awake because I knew she was awake somewhere. If she couldn’t sleep, neither could I.
When my mom finally quit the night shift, the ER, and being on call, I didn’t hate the medical field so much. It morphed into a mysterious, unknown world my mother spent only her days inhabiting. I imagined what she did and how unknown lives rested upon her shoulders. My hate had faded and curiosity had taken its place. This world was no longer vying for my mother’s time and affections, but molding her into who she was-- to me, at least. She was her days in the operating room from seven until three; she was the nurse friends she brought home from the operating room who became my second mothers; she was the expert hand that nursed me when I was sick, so lovingly and so knowingly. To me, two things defined my mother: her job and me, her child.
Knowing my mother became not enough for me. I wanted to know what she did and how she did it. I followed her to work at any possible chance even if it meant exaggerating an illness. I studied the locker rooms where the nurses would change in front of me in their white tights, blue scrubs, and hats that looked like muffin cups. I sat in the recovery area as patients slowly drifted from unconsciousness to grogginess. I catalogued the clean smell away with every other detail. As high school hit, my mother no longer worked in the clinic I had gotten to know so well. It had been a second home and an introduction to my mother’s world. I had said, Hello. It’s nice to meet you and in return it had said Glad you finally made it. So, at seventeen I returned for the first time without my mother. This time I was wearing the blue scrubs and the hat that looked like a muffin cup. It was the first time for me to step behind the yellow “Stop Here” line and enter the operating room that had been my mother’s home away from home. I fell in love (like mother like daughter). I fell in love with the smell again and newly with the sight of a scalpel cutting skin and the words of the surgeon who explained so perfectly while he cut so smoothly. It was new and yet familiar. It was like getting to know my mother all over again.
Now, I am twenty years old, and when people ask me what I am going to do when I grow up, I know exactly the answer. I know exactly what I want to do and exactly what I fell in love with years ago. Every time I hear the words roll off my tongue, I think of my mother and how loving her brought me to who I am today.
Loving it!
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