I think this is the number question I get from my readers now. How do you juggle it all? How do you balance being a wife, mother, medical student/almost doctor, and blogger, and still manage to be happy? The short answer? I don't!
Let's clear that up a bit - I am happy almost all of the time when I remember to be grateful, and thankfully I have lots of reminders of just how blessed I am. But juggle it all? That's a concept we need to get out of our heads and redefine for ourselves.
Let's start with one piece of wisdom one of my mentors shared with me early on - "You can have all the hats you want, but you can only wear one hat at a time." These wise words have only become truer through motherhood. When I'm in "doctor mode" that's what I'm doing, when I'm in "mom mode" all of my attention is on Liv. It's something I always have to work on, but I'm getting there. You see, in college, when I was balancing a full-time courseload, working as a residency advisor, medical assistant, kitchen dishwasher, and extracurriculars like basic science research and being the president of a minority pre-med group (and being in a relationship), it was all relatively simple - make lists of everything that needed to be done for every role I was in, and plug in times throughout the week alotted for each of them. With some scheduling and time management, it all could be done.
Fast forward a few years, and "simply" scheduling isn't as easy anymore. Working in the hospital, at least as a medical student and resident, you don't have a set in stone schedule. Sure, you may work roughly 7-5, or 7-7, but for most of us, especially when on inpatient months, you're rotating through a call schedule with days that are dependent on how many patients you admit, how complicated they are, and how efficiently work can get done. With motherhood, well you moms know, naptime is never guaranteed, moods can never be predicted, and you sort of just have to go with the flow! My days of perfectly scheduled blocks of time for each task on my large to-do list are over for now.
With letting go of my sanity-saving scheduling ways came a new way to get things done. I still keep a constantly updated to-do list for tasks that need completing, but I keep it on my phone so I can easily update it whenever I get the chance, and utilize it whenever I have free time. I am currently in love with the app "
Do It (Tomorrow)" It's a wonderfully simple to-do list app that is as beautiful as it is functional, and really just works for my new scheduling and acceptance of things that can't get done today. It allows me to keep my list, cross off things as they are completed, or move them to tomorrow's to-do list (and will do so automatically if it wasn't completed). This little app has been key to my sanity! It has the only features I really need - namely, the ability to rearrange the order of my list (all I need to know priority), can sync with your
desktop (which I rarely use but is nice), and it's pretty enough that I want to check it multiple times a day.

{a make believe to-do list I created to show you how pretty the app is! this is the desktop view, the phone view splits up the pages so you can either look at today or tomorrow.}
Thankfully I'm not alone, and hopefully you aren't either. Having N, our parents, our friends, daycare and a back-up babysitter, that's our village, and there is absolutely no way I'd be doing any of this without them!
We need to be kind to ourselves. Despite having less time and control over my time than I had pre-Liv, I don't feel like I've lost much of my productivity. I have certainly become a bit more of a "pressure makes diamonds" kind of worker and worked on things at the absolute last possible minute, but you make it work. I think that's the real message I've learned from motherhood and I hope to share with you all - you just make it work. Had you told me first year of medical school that I was going to have a child third year I would have laughed in your face and maybe cried a little on the inside and told you it was impossible. But you make it work. We rise to whatever the situation demands, and through this we achieve greatness. It's nice to be in a comfort zone, but we only grow by leaving that comfort zone and taking on the next challenge (or blessing, all of our challenges are really blessings).
I hope this post can help those of you who feel like you're trying to juggle it all. One last piece of advice I can offer is to stop the comparison game! Especially with social media, it's so easy to see another mother or woman's instagram feed and think she has a perfect life! Don't compare your life and all the ups and downs to the little squares that make up someone's highlight reel! I know personally I just don't like sharing negative things on social media, for me it's a space for all my happy memories, but trust Liv throws tantrums and N and I fight and I get horrible breakouts and life is not always peachy, but man, life is still so good. It's all about perspective. Just wanted to share that with you so as we all tend to sometimes get wrapped up in that! I hope you all have wonderful weekends!
**Update** - two more kids and a real job as a resident physician later and I'm "juggling" more than ever, and happier than ever! Read more
in this post.