After turning down a tenure position, Sarah Brady struggles to adapt to her new life as the spouse of a physician.
Sarah Brady is a storyteller, teaching artist, and writer who relocated to England from the United States a year and a half ago due to her pediatrician husband's job. To say that science has had an impact on her family would be an understatement.
This story originally aired on July 5, 2019 in an episode titled “Marriage.”
Story Transcript
There we were. My daughters and I had just stepped into the U.K. as residents for the first time. Our next stop was the luggage. We had prepared for this moment. We had practiced with our daughters, walking up and down our hallway at home, pushing one large bag while they pulled a carry-on bag while they wore a backpack. This plan was going to work, until we got to the luggage itself and both of my daughters started weeping and wailing and I knew they were going to be no help.
So I retrieved two luggage carriers and piled on seven checked bags, three carry-ons, two backpacks and began pushing my way through the airport calling out behind me, “Come on. Keep walking. Daddy will meet us on the other side.”
When we got through the doors, I scan the crowd and my husband Aaron was not there. I knew I couldn’t make it through that crowd of people with all that luggage without knocking someone over so I looked to my left and there was a little ledge along the wall. So I pulled those luggage carriers over to the wall and my girls and I sat down. They were still weeping very loudly and I pulled out my phone.
There was a text message. It said, “The bus is stuck in traffic. I’m going to be at least 30 minutes late.”
I sighed and typed, “Okay.”
That was not the first time I ever had to wait for my husband. My husband is a physician, pediatrician, and we have been married for almost 15 years, which has included his medical school, his residency training and his early years as a physician. But when I met him, he was the most on-time person I had ever known in my life.
We went through medical school together. I was teaching at an area university, teaching theater and communications and we were both busy but we were doing what we loved and supporting each other. And then he was almost through with medical school when I found out I was pregnant with our first child.
Then I was offered a tenured position. That tenured position was going to require for me to do PhD work while residency was looming large in our future with 80-hour work weeks for Aaron while I was also maintaining my 60-hour work weeks as a professor while having a new baby. The math did not add up in my mind and so I declined the position and decided that I would take my career a different way, in a performance way, and support my husband and our new child.
On Aaron’s first day of residency, he had residency orientation and there was also resident spouse orientation. Now, I wanted to be a good, supportive resident spouse so I went to this orientation. I was hoping that I would hear things that would help take the weight that I was already feeling off my back.
I remember one woman who was asked. She had been married for 20 years to a physician. She was asked, “What advice would you give to these new resident spouses?”
She thought and she said, “Be careful when you ask your resident to pick up his socks.”
That wasn’t exactly what I was looking for and I felt that weight grow heavier on my back. And at the end of the day when Aaron and I came together, I asked, “So, did you have any breakout sessions on how to be a good spouse while you're in residency?”
And he said, “No, Sarah. We had a lot to cover.”
But I felt that weight grown unbearably heavy because I knew that both implicitly and explicitly, I had been handed the entirety of the responsibility for the health of my marriage and family for the next three years. But I didn’t have the words to concisely express my concerns to Aaron until a few months later.
We went to a gathering with his fellow training physicians and some of us were sitting around a table and reading came up. So I jumped into the conversation and started talking. And one of his colleagues looked at me. “You read?”
I wanted to pull out my curriculum vitae and begin going through it line by line with this person and then I wanted to discuss in detail my 800-pages of primary-sourced documentation that I was sifting through for my current project. But that’s not polite dinner-table conversation so I smiled and said, “Yes, I read.”
I went home and I cried, because I had a word now for what I felt. Invisible. Not as a wife or as a mother but as Sarah, human being with my own gifts and talents and ideas to offer.
Aaron tried to console me. He said, “They weren’t thinking. Just let it roll off your back.”
And I knew he didn’t mean not to understand, but he had never been invisible.
So I started to talk myself into encouragement. I said, “You know, I can do anything for three years, anything at all.” I started to focus on my light at the end of the tunnel, which was the end of his residency training. Then two years passed and he was done.
The following Sunday, we went to church together and we sat in the same place that I always sat whether he was with me or not.
A woman came up to us. “Is this your husband,” she asked.
I smiled. “Yes, yes. This is Aaron. This is my husband.”
“Is he the same one?”
“Yes, yup, same husband, only one I've ever had.”
And Aaron and I looked at each other and he understood.
His first week of working after finishing his training, he was working in the hospital on days. It coincided with our older daughter’s birthday. We decided that we were going to go out to dinner one evening and I waited for the text saying that he was on his way home but it didn’t come through.
So a few minutes later, I sent a text saying, “Hey, Honey. You on your way yet?” No answer.
I waited 15 minutes and sent another text. “Hey, you coming this way yet?”
He replied. “I’m going to be late.”
I sent a text back. “How late? It’s your daughter’s birthday. We have dinner reservations.”
He replied. “I don't know. It’s bad, Sarah.”
And I knew he wouldn’t be late if he didn’t have to, but I still wanted to slam that phone down on the counter. But little eyes were watching and those little eyes, they wouldn’t understand how tired I was of celebrating alone and parenting alone and doing so much alone.
So I did what I did so often, smiled. And we celebrated and we made it through bedtime.
After they were in bed and I heard that key turn in the front door, there was a whole list of things I wanted to say to Aaron. But as he walked inside his shoulders humped and he sat down and he started talking and all I could do was listen. He had been preparing to discharge a child, a child that seemed to have a virus but, as he read through the chart, he got a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.
And so he went to take one measurement one more time and the measurement was way off. So he took it again just to be sure, and it was still off. So he ordered a battery of tests and they all came back and confirmed his worst fears. If he had sent that child home, that child wouldn’t have made it even a few more days.
I went upstairs and I kissed my children while they slept and I cried and I prayed for that other family and for that other mother who would probably never know I exist. But who got to keep her child a little while longer because my husband had missed celebrating his daughter’s birthday.
But I also knew that my light at the end of the tunnel had not come and we could not go on the way we had for the last three years. We were going to have to take difficult measurements of us, of Aaron, of me, of us as a couple, of us as a family because a physician can absolutely save a life, but so can a story.
So we started having those conversations you don’t like to have and making those adjustments that are hard and we kept on through today having those difficult conversations and making those adjustments which led us to that moment four years later, a year-and-a-half ago now, when my children and I were sitting on that ledge at Heathrow Airport waiting.
And then Aaron was there. He took the whole situation in at a moment, helped lift us up off of that ledge, put his hands on those two, massively overloaded luggage carriers and said, “I got this. Let’s go get some breakfast.”
He picked up his socks.