Chapter 23: Mommy Doctor

Why you can’t be whatever you want when you grow up (or at least I couldn’t)

From the time I was old enough to get a pony ride by bouncing on his knees, Dad’s told me I can be anything I want to be when I grow up. It’s a mantra of his. It crystalizes his desire for us to succeed where he’d failed, namely by graduating college. Benevolent lie that it is, I’ve heard it so many times that it succeeds at juicing me up with high expectations for my future.

Still, somehow applying to university sneaks up on me, maybe because I’m too busy attending church revivals while my friends are mailing their packets to schools like Baylor and Stanford. My dad isn’t able to afford any of those fancy schools even if I do get accepted. But it’d still be nice to know that they wanted me. Instead, my tardiness and our tight budget leaves me with only one option: enrolling at the local university where my parents went before their oops pregnancy cut their education short.

At the end of summer, Martha and all my other well-prepared friends head off to their glamorous new lives in Palo Alto and Austin and the like. Meanwhile, I take the I-10 for eight minutes, exit at University, and hook it left towards a collection of buildings that are beautifully inspired by Bhutanese architecture but oddly out of place in the Chihuahuan desert. Sometimes while driving, I stare at the rainbow-colored colonias that sit a stone’s throw away from UTEP on the other side of the Rio Grande, and I think about feeding peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to the poorest of the poor with my mother and brother when I was a child. It’s then that a dull but persistent unease comes over me. I wonder if God determines who’s born north of the border and who’s born south, and whether borders will exist in heaven someday.

My classes are large, sometimes hundreds of students deep. But I’m also in a cohort of 30 freshmen hailing from El Paso and northern Mexico. At the ripe age of 18 or thereabouts, we’ve all declared our intention to become doctors, intentions that a remarkable number will carry out given the grueling nature of the schooling and the fact that most of our parents didn’t attend or graduate from college. 

My interest in biology and medicine started with make believe, when at age four I’d dress up in Grandpa’s scrubs. I wore a stethoscope that hung down to my navel so I could “listen” for broken bones, and I once declared, after examining him, that he had a broken stomach. He chuckled at that and it made me blush and wonder what I was missing. Then, during middle and high school, when I pressed the limits of my metabolism through disordered eating, my awe for the flesh’s potential took on a more destructive tinge. How little food was too little to function? How small could I shrink my frame before it looked sickly and disproportionate?

This led me to take AP anatomy my senior year, and I enjoyed poking around the insides of a cat so much that I regularly skipped lunch with friends to do more of it. Ligaments round and long, muscles smooth and skeletal, to say nothing of whiskers--I was entranced, appalled, then entranced again, over and over. 

So the love for the subject matter was there, but I also go pre-med because of the prestige and identity the career promises. If Mom’s artistic vagaries and degree-less résumé is east, becoming an MD is perfectly west. It’ll transform me into an even more rational observer. It’ll call on me to maintain my cool when others are in need. Younger me had looked up “spendthrift” in the dictionary so I could understand what my dad had accused my mother of. Future me will consult the Physician’s Desk Reference to confirm a diagnosis and heal. It’s a role I’ve been formed for, or so I think. So I dive in.

***

“Finally, it may not be a logical deduction, but to my imagination it is far more satisfactory to look at such instincts as the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers, ants making slaves, the larvae of ichneumonidae feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars, not as specially endowed or created instincts, but as small consequences of one general law leading to the advancement of all organic beings--namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.” 

With that, Dr. Walsh, my Organismal Biology professor, closes her copy of Origin of Species and looks over her wire-rimmed glasses at us as she fires up her overhead projector. She pulls out a phylogenetic tree diagram and begins to prattle on, but I’m too queasy to learn anything else. 

Each semester of my coursework is punctuated with moments like this, when I feel like dough being scored. If it’s not evolutionary theory challenging my young Earth creationism in Organismal, it's the similarities between Genesis and other creation myths I’m reading in my Western Cultural Heritage class that are unnerving me. I can’t talk to anyone at church about this without reinforcing their rage at “our godless universities.” But in fact I haven’t found my teachers to be heartless, militant atheists at all. They’re just people passing down the traditions they believe best describe reality. Which makes them not so different from (and at times, no less insular than) our own congregation. 

And I do have professors who teach about an enchanted cosmos instead of blind universe. People like my Molecular Biology lecturer who frequently and rapturously declares his love for the Golgi, an accordion-like structure in cells that sorts protein and lipids for later use. He and a handful of other teachers keep me going.

Ultimately, and maybe because I’m a child of divorce, the beef between scientific knowledge and faith doesn’t feel all that unfamiliar. The squaring off, the he-said she-said of it all, I hate being caught up in it. But I suspect that there’s a third way to look at the world, a way less charged with fear and pride and misunderstanding. And oddly it’s the coping skills I learned from a broken home that keep my worldview in tack and maybe even refine it. 

So what makes me question a career in medicine isn’t metaphysics. It’s closer to home and what truly animates me: trying to fix what went wrong with my mother. I’ve sworn to be less self-involved than Heidi was. But the workload in undergrad is crushing, which means it’s going to flatten me in med school and beyond, leaving little to nothing remaining for needy tykes. 

And, to make matters worse, there’s this whole sleep thing. Ever since I was a child, Mom’s called out, albeit in softer, Jesusy tones, that Katherine minus sleep equals batshit crazy. And that’s why I can’t see how I’ll survive the legendary deprivation that awaits me without accidentally killing a patient or intentionally killing myself, either of which leads back down Shitty Mom Boulevard.

It’s disorienting to learn that Dad was wrong. I actually can’t be anything I want when I grow up. I have demons to restrain, and biological limitations to acknowledge (and honestly, if you saw my Calculus II and O-Chem grades, you’d know I had intellectual deficits to contend with also).

But what truly gives me vertigo is that I have gifts that point elsewhere, something that my mom’s latest boyfriend observes. As a professor of English (more on this later), he suggests I’m less attracted to the mechanics of the body than the aesthetics of describing it. When he points it out, I erupt in giggles and then my face pinks with embarrassment and rage. And I don’t understand my own reaction--it’s as if he’s found a fish hook in the rope-tangle of my intestines, and there’s only one mouth that could have swallowed it.

My mind flashes to a recent lecture, during which a TA referred to a famous geneticist’s experimental design as “elegant.” I have no idea what the experiment was or what it unearthed, only that it was spoken of in terms of beauty. Which leads me to admit the thrill I feel at the language of biology, the way Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes can tell you exactly where a cell swims and how an organ keeps house. 

But right on the heels of this admission comes a bone-deep contempt for my own love of words because it points to an entirely different calling, one less rational and less revered than medicine, one much closer to the artistic sensibilities I associate with my mother. And it makes me hate this man for it, so I ignore the hook in my gut--internal bleeding be damned--and plow forward with my impressive, left-brained, prestigious, ill-fitting degree.