Moms and Forgetting

Something adorably funny and oh-so-typical for our family happened to my mother this week. Dad reports in smatters:

“[My Mom] was doing an on-line recertification quiz late last night. It was one of those things where they ask you the question, immediately tell you if you’re wrong, and if so, they give you references to the right answer. She got one wrong and looked at the reference. It was a paper she had co-authored herself.”

Oh, the comfort I draw from such stories!

I’m just going to get it out there: I have a horrific and unreasonable Mommy complex.

1. I antagonize my mother at strange times for no significant reason.
2. I love, respect, ask for, value and am interested by her advice. And yet I am unthinkably skeptical the moment she offers it.
3. I am afraid that she’ll direct my choices for me even though she’s always encouraged me to be strong and independent (see 2).
4. I am afraid that I’ll become her, because we went to the same prep school and did some of the same things and now I’m in med school and interested in basically the same field of practice that she’s in. I’m worried that I choose these things because I already know what they look like from watching her, not because they are what I really want. At the same time I'm afraid I can't live up to her.

What’s crazy about being worried about being so much like her is that she is awesome as a role model and a mom. She is awesome in all ways! I mean, she is actually the kind of person that I do want to be. She is a great doctor. She’s very well respected in the community where I grew up as well as in her field. In fact, I had no clue how impressive and unusual her practice was before I started med school. She is a family physician who provides a huge range of care even beyond what the majority in her field do, such as c-sections. When I tell my classmates about her, they usually respond with “I had no idea that was even possible!” For the most part I’m probably more worried about living up to her example than anything else. This is why my dad's story is so awesomely comforting. I have always thought that I learned things best when I had to really articulate them to someone else. Thankfully, the educational method at this med school of mine makes me do that quite a bit. Hence, it has been really frustrating to realize that I can explain something quite well to a friend and then see it on an exam a week later and not really remember what it was. Knowing that not only do my mom and I share an amazing ability to underestimate how long things will take, over schedule, forget meetings, leave important items in restaurants/on trains, double-schedule, repeat conversations we’ve already had… but we also share the awesome ability to forget information we taught to others.