Thanks for the kind thought. Yes, I think it would have been easier had our kids been younger (and/or had we been younger, too). I am particularly haunted by the thought that our oldest will leave home in a few years, and my husband is missing some of this precious (difficult, yes, but precious) time with her. With younger children you can always think "when this is over" and there'll still be a lot of time left.
Also, the type and length of residency probably makes a huge difference. I wish we had taken those characteristics more seriously. When you are new to something and enthusiastic, you think, "it's hard but we can handle it". We can handle it, I guess, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't have been better another way.
Yeah. Sorry about your hardship. Best of luck working it out. But your story brings it hard home to the gentleman posing the question or any of those in the kid game or aspiring to it in your mid 30's.
To them I'd say wtf are you thinking. We're in a downhill slide. Trying to live the nuclear family myth that was and will be only inhabited by those who spawned the notion--the baby boomers.
For the rest of us. This superhero gig of procreating and going broke while pounding out medical school and residency is just ugly business. You'll age badly and look it. To say nothing of your clogged vasculature and fat compressed vital organs. Trying desperately to get trickles of blood during your air choked miserable sleep.
What's so special about your little seed. That the earth needs another pooping, screaming, peeing, carbon consuming plastic producing primate.
They say parenting is the hardest job in the world. If that's the case, being a resident must be a close second. And doing both is a slow suicide bolstered only by meek superhero mythology and the applause of oprah's audience to your symbolism.
And your 30 going on 40. Hate to say it. Well actually I don't or I wouldn't. But for 99.99% of our biological history you'd be on your last throes. So don't let the excuse of so many more interesting things to do than populate the earth allow your fantasy of just not having met the specialist of so-n-so's convince you that your procreative destiny is just around the next bend. If you wanted to marry and babytize your life and were attracted to the proposition or dare I say the proposition attracted enough to you, you would have done so.
Medical school is full on stuff. So is caring for helpless little humans. Have it both ways at severe impact to you.
The people giving you a glimpse of the horrors of multiplicity in these affairs are being more than gentle. Or perhaps looking rosily on their own demise.
Forty year olds doing the parenting thing is biologically silly. To do that while doing something as biologically silly as the practice of becoming a physician is a fools errand.
Romance it and die slowly if you wish. I'll reconcile myself to the end of my heir's line. And sleep like a baby after my yoga class in a lighter field.
I ain't no damn fool.
