Sacrifice and Love

I don't think anything can prepare a person, wife, or family for what it means to be an intern or have one in the family.  It's like when people try to describe what life is like with your first newborn.  You will never fully be prepared because you can't until you've done it before.   For the uninitiated the first year of a medical residency is called the intern year.  It was horrible.  I think the hard part about it is that, as a wife and mother, you do everything alone.  Everything.  Even though you are alone, your spouse is still physically there one some level.  And you have to get used to it.  You adapt and you figure out how to do it alone, but then he's there and you figure that means he'll be able to function in the role he used to have in the family.  He can't.  He's too tired.  Tired doesn't even seem the right word for the exhaustion I saw in my husband at times last year.  But whatever it is, he's not there.  And when that realization hits you it sort of feels like the rug that you are carefully treading is pulled out from under you and the family sort of falls apart.  So in order to avoid that feeling you stop expecting anything, but because you stop expecting anything you stop offering anything either.  You quietly pull away a tiny bit.  Walls can be built up so easily in silence during intern year.

I think every relationship, marriage, and family has struggles and challenges that they have to work out and that was ours last year.  We worked at it though.  We worked hard to occasionally break down those walls that were built so we could make it through.

And we made it.  I am so glad we made it through last year.  I feel we are stronger now that I ever though we could be.  We are a team and each does what needs doing to keep "us" together.

That's why when he has to get up at 3:30 every morning and isn't home until after 8 each night (like the entire past week) it somehow doesn't seem that hard this time around.  I am prepared to do it on my own, to share with him what he missed that will keep him with us, and to leave out those parts that he doesn't need.

And there is one other amazing thing about not being an intern. This year he occasionally gets weekends!  Not every weekend, and not on every rotation, but occasionally, like last weekend, he has an entire two days off.  It feels like such a luxury to have him around for two days in a row.  And he jokes, and makes me laugh and plays in the snow with the kids and the whole family is a bit tipsy on the happiness that comes from having our whole family together.

So here's something that I 100% appreciate and hope to never take for granted about my husband.  Since the beginning of medical school and to an even greater extent in residency he has cut out activities that aren't essential that take him away from his family.  He has told me that his work takes him away from us so much that he doesn't want to take more time away.  Yes, it is a sacrifice for him, but he does it because he loves us, he loves me.  I think that focus he has is a great part of why we managed to grow together through the year last year.