DOCTOR DAD | Tajwar Taher
I hear her before I see her.
“Hey Yasir! Hey Yasir! Heeeyyyyyyyyyy Yaaaaaasssssssiiiiiiirrrrrrr!" My two-year-old daughter calls out to me from across the bedroom. I blink my sleep away, aimlessly thrust my arm out to search for my phone, then check the time.
10:30 a.m.
To me, it’s an absurd time to wake up on a Wednesday. Or is it Thursday? It’s been hard to keep track of the days since I graduated residency and transitioned into being a full-time dad. My first attending gig is set to start in a couple months.
“Baba,” my daughter says, tugging my arm. She recently learned my first name, Yasir, and has been reveling in shouting it throughout the day to capture my attention, but she reverts to calling me father whenever I'm not responding to her fast enough. “Baba. Baba. Pool!”
“Okay, my love,” I say, my voice thick with sleep. I ease myself out of bed. I stretch luxuriously. I appreciate the summer sun angling in through the window, a meditative moment that can only be accomplished when there’s no pressure to be anywhere but here: no rounds to run to, no two or three patients simultaneously roomed in the clinic waiting to be seen, no didactics sandwiched between the billion administrative tasks that have yet to be done.
I still find it remarkable that after a 14-year journey of trying to convince everyone that my entire identity was solely about becoming a doctor—from the internists I’d shadowed in high school, the pre-med professors I’d had to ask for letters of recommendation, on the applications and interviews to med school, to the attendings and residents who evaluated me on my clerkships, in the recruitment events leading up to the Match, on my stump speech for Chief Resident – in just 12 hours after being handed my final diploma, it felt like all my efforts had vanished. My only title today is Baba.
I’m not unhappy about it.
Though currently unemployed, make no mistake: I still have a boss. My daughter leads me through the house and out the back door towards our pool, her hand firmly gripping mine. I don’t ever want to let go. It’s only now that I’ve been freed from the rushing river of medicine that I realize how much I sacrificed by asking for a spot in the raft.
“You have to make time,” my wife chided me while I was on call, in between consults and precepting and writing notes. “You’re not going to get this time back with her. The relationship you establish now could set the tone with her forever.”
“I’m not here at the hospital for fun,” I deflect, bristling. “If I had a choice, I would be with you guys, but someone has to work and pay the bills.”
It’s not completely true. I did have a lot of fun in residency. My training was far from being just work for me. Those fourteen years I spent convincing anyone who would listen that medicine was my passion? I must have convinced myself too. The thrill of placing my first order, delivering another baby, building longitudinal relationships with patients and taking ownership of their care: I had finally become a doctor, the very thing I’d been dreaming of and working towards for so long!
“Jump Baba! Jump!”
I cannonball into the pool, sending a tidal wave over my daughter. She pops her head up and laughs and laughs. We spray water at each other. We race. We play “Ring Around the Rosie” (“Splashes! Splashes! We all dive down!”).
*
“Yasir, you’ll never believe what happened. We were delivering this mom when –”
I raised a hand to silence my former co-resident. A group of us had gotten together a couple weeks after graduation to hang out. It felt like it had been years, but it was already too soon to hear a patient case.
“I’m done,” I said simply, but not unkindly. “I don’t want to hear about it anymore.” I was as surprised to hear it from myself as my co-residents were. After all the hours I had dedicated to the program, it was baffling to see the passion that had fueled me through residency be replaced with this cheerful indifference. I actually relished how much medicine was no longer occupying space in my brain.
For two months I celebrated being totally present with my family. We spent almost every minute of those days together. It wasn’t pure bliss throughout. There were a lot of sleepless nights putting the kids back to sleep, muscling through the days in a sleep-deprived daze and wishing for deafness when the kids couldn’t stop crying in a car ride to Canada. Even then, the fact that we had that time together was something I’ll hold on to in my heart forever.
Going back to work was almost as easy as leaving. I’d been dreading it in the days leading up to my start date. What if I can’t wake up on time? They won’t let me start at 10:30 like I’ve gotten used to! What if I can’t handle being an independent physician? Who’s going to watch over me and make sure I don’t mess up now?
In a refreshing turn of events, I discovered that my worries were unfounded. The work is not too different from anything I’ve done before. Seeing patients on my own is engaging and fills me with purpose. My colleagues are more than happy to help when I get stuck. I even thought to myself, “This feels comfortable. I could see myself being here for 30 years.”
After so many years of living in uncertainty about what the next rung in the ladder would bring while always feeling the pressure to keep climbing, it is so liberating to be at a place where I feel like I can just coast for a while. We are so inundated with talk of burnout and fatigue these days that it feels good to know that, unlike all the cautionary tales, where I am right now has made every minute of my medical training worth it.
*
“Where my Baba go? Baba leave me!” my daughter cried after our summer vacation had ended.
“Baba has to go to his job,” I watched my wife explain to her on the FaceTime call on my lunch break.
My daughter calmed down enough to wipe her tears away and look at me on the phone properly. Rubbing her splotchy, red cheeks, she asked, “Baba is at job?”
I nodded my head.
“What’s Baba’s job?”
“Baba is a doctor,” my wife replied.
“Baba is a doctor?” My daughter looked at me with a piercing gaze. I smiled, expectantly.
She shook her head. “Baba not a doctor. Baba is Baba.”
I smiled. I couldn’t be happier to agree more.
Tajwar Taher completed his Family Medicine residency at Rutgers-RWJ University Hospital Somerset. He works at the Willamette Valley Women and Children's Health Center in McMinnville, Ore., practicing full spectrum Family Medicine. His interests in literature and narrative medicine include the intersections of culture, spirituality and history in shaping identities. Taher's reflections have been published in Pulse, Please See Me and Doximity.