RSS Feeds
Doctors' Daughter
As a small child, I often stood on the stairway in my home, looking up at the pictures of my mother. O.U. School of Medicine, class of1945. I counted the 69 sepia-toned faces many times, always coming back to my mother's in the oval composite photograph. My mother is one of only three women, and her countenance is serious and composed; the hair in a long, wavy cut typical of the period. In an old picture from the local newspaper, written the year before my birth, my mother is sitting at a desk, wearing a white lab coat, staring out at the camera from her desk at the sexually transmitted diseases clinic where she worked. “Young Doctor Works in Town,” reads the headline.
“How come you never worked as a doctor, Mama?” I asked frequently. I often went on rounds with my physician-father in the early morning at the community hospital in the small southern town where we lived. In one minute flat, he could tap a chest, letting the straw-colored liquid rush through the brown rubber tubing to puddle in the glass vacuum bottle on the bed. The nurses stood by at attention, in their starched white dresses and peaked caps. In the small emergency area, my father would casually flip his tie over his shoulder and insert the needle for the lumbar puncture that would diagnose the subarachnoid bleeding in his patient. Afterwards, we would drive home to the house, where my mother would be standing in front of the stove, scrambling eggs for my three brothers, who sat watching Saturday morning cartoons. My mother was always home.
“Well, I loved you children and felt you needed me at home.” The answer was always the same. “You would start sucking your thumbs or the babysitter would quit. ” …
