An Ode to Physician Moms

This year, Mother’s Day celebrations will look unlike the ones we’ve come to know and love. This will be my second Mother’s Day without my own mother since her death early last year. And almost all of us will be without our mothers physically as much of America continues to practice social distancing measures, an attempt to protect those who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.

And an entire subset of mothers will be away from their families this Mother’s Day because they will be in hospitals and nursing homes and urgent care clinics and in laboratories doing their best to care for patients and find answers to an ongoing crisis.

Reflecting on this intense, physically-distant Mother’s Day, I want to celebrate the incredible power and vitality of physician mothers across the globe. Not all women want or choose to include motherhood in their life’s path, and their choices are to be honored and celebrated, too. Those of us who chose to bring motherhood and medicine into our personal journey, come to know a unique kind of resilience. We are required to navigate a certain flavor of pay inequity and discrimination while caring for our patients and for those who depend on us at home. But it is deeply rewarding, as well. To be a mother in medicine is character-building, and in my experience, has contributed to the growth and tenacity of some of the most exceptional physicians in the world.

Many of the physicians who have been clear, urgent voices throughout this pandemic are mothers. Dr. Dara Kass has chronicled what it’s like to go from physician to patient and back again. Dr. Esther Choo, whose new podcast, Doctor’s Log, delivers twice-weekly reports from the frontlines of the coronavirus crisis. Dr. Uche Blackstock has offered incredibly important insight into how racial health disparities are playing out in this pandemic. (Also worth noting on this Mother’s Day: Dr. Blackstock and her twin-sister graduated from the same medical school as their own mother, making them the first black mother-daughter legacies from Harvard Medical School.)

I am a mother. I have three incredibly strong daughters. I am grateful for the amazing physicians I have been fortunate enough to count myself among, navigating a life in medicine and motherhood and supporting one another along the way. We are in good hands with these women at the wheel, caring for those who need it most, innovating and adapting, and leading with compassion and skill to find a better way forward, showing our children—and the world—what we are capable of.  

I am also holding in my heart today those with complicated relationships with their mothers, those whose mothers are no longer with us, those longing to be mothers, and mothers who, for whatever reason, are without their children.

And to the frontline healthcare workers who are mothers—especially those separated from their children in an attempt to protect them from this virus—I thank you. I am in awe of you. I salute you. You are showing us how to do what mothers do best—doing impossible things with courage and grace. Happy Mother’s Day.