College Mom

Rebecca Trotzky-Sirr

To Myself
On the Day
I Graduate
Medical School:

 I remember being warned not to enter medical school. "It sucks your soul, and changes you for the worse," they preached. So, I hesitated and told myself that it couldn't be done. "It's impossible," I began to believe, "for someone like me to become a physician."  So I put myself to sleep repeating the same stories that are still whispered behind your back: a high school drop out, juvenile hall detainee, young single mom, welfare recipient (in that order) cannot climb through the back windows into halls of power.

Slowly, I remembered that earlier the same people said I couldn't have a child "and" finish school.  The same critics conceded that while I "might" be able to finish school, in order to raise a child properly I "had" to be married to a manly jerk. They said that, in order to nourish the child with support from the government, I had to drop out of a four-year college and drop into the almighty low-paid (but productive!) service industry workforce. They were wrong.

Girl, you did it. Phase One Complete. Smile for the camera, and pick up your now ten-year-old boy-child.

For a while, yes, it was tough. All the coffee in the world wouldn't be enough to compete against seemingly perfect childless students with their 4.0 GPAs and opportunistic volunteerism.  And really, the whole school thing seemed inane after living in Chiapas & fighting for justice in my city's streets, in the squats, at road blockades, and tree-sits. Being a single mom working for social justice while in medical school is like sitting alone at the school lunch table in junior high, very isolating. But, by high school, it was cool to be weird. After four years in medical school, is it accepted to be a single mom who cares about justice?

Many of the same revolutionaries that I went to jail with & laid down with are the ones who most failed to grasp the complexities of my life. The black-and-white revolutionary credo that spoke to me during my years of direct actions, provide little clarity on the daily issues of my life as a mother. Activists continue to exclude women & children from the revolution by not having childcare at meetings, by focusing on confrontational media-sexxxy street battles instead of building supportive communities, and by forgetting that many women & kids struggle for basic safety.

It took having a child of my own to realize that "carefree" is a codeword for "childfree."

When our movement fails to include families and the daily complexity of caring for another person, we become isolated from our broader communities. In the United States, revolution becomes incongruous with daily life. Revolutionaries, like many other humans, grow up and have kids.

As a new mom, I lost my voice-both in the movement for social justice and larger society of the United States. The struggle for justice barely heard my voice as a young, poor single mom. Activist houses refused to open doors to families like mine claiming, "Children take energy away from the real revolution." At times, members of the activist community criticized me for utilizing the very few resources available (See also my favorite urban myth: "Accepting welfare is accepting the government"), while doing nothing to broaden these options. Too few created alternatives that were transformative and empowering for both parents and society as a whole.

Being a mom is a foundation for radical organizing, because in order to survive we have to transform these limiting judgments into power.

Motherhood is continually soul stretching. As women, we aren't allowed to ask for help for ourselves, our voices are silenced. But for our children, our relations, and our neighbors, we will fight. We fight hard. The stories that filter to my ears direct me to a broader movement for women's liberation, based in medical service:

I will provide empowering healthcare for young women.

In medical school, I am judged (and self-judged) as too this or not enough that. Educational institutions close the door to single moms. Everyone from teen pregnancy prevention campaigns to presidents of the United States popularize the fact that having a child as a young woman limits educational options. In my entire medical school, there is only one other single mom. After four years, have you accepted medical school's tacit claims that mothers aren't doctors? Do you still fight stereotypes and misperceptions, and try to pull more single moms into medical school? Wrestling an institution can be a losing battle, as your perceptions change without you even noticing. Have you acknowledged where you've changed?

Deciding to enter medicine, like choosing to become a young single parent, was a battle.
I don't enjoy competitive multiple choice tests based on biochemistry factoids and short-term memory feats.  Neither do I enjoy the social isolation of single mothering: feed-diaper-clean-repeat cycles. On this day of graduation from medical school, can you say if I made the right choices?

When I chose to be a parent at nineteen, they told me in hundreds of ways that my body was not mine.
My decisions needed to encompass the wants and desires of everyone else. The space for acceptable sexuality and reproductive choices is continually limited, by society and by our allies in social justice movements. Our stories of reproductive choice are silenced.  We are told that we stand alone, either in the choice to parent or in the choice to terminate a pregnancy. In this isolation, we grow afraid. Today I pray for you that as a physician you can provide community services-- from supporting teen motherhood to providing young women the options to terminate an undesired pregnancy. It will not be a lucrative or easy track. As you stand there shaking the hand of a dean who charged $120,000 for the privilege of a medical diploma, have you sold out of your dreams? Or is this buying in?

Medical school teaches that individual physicians make the difference between life and death. Welfare schools me otherwise, reinforcing the structural nature of poverty; no matter how strong my bootstraps, I will never stand tall enough, move far enough. Individualism is a lie medical schools like to teach; poverty & motherhood are truths revolutionaries like to ignore.

How will you rectify walking the line between my impending relative wealth of becoming a physician and my current reality of raising a child below the poverty line?

I broke my neck on the glass ceilings, of activism and of academia. Now, I walk with a limp that may not be noticeable to anyone but me. My scars are visible, but only when I am naked. In the transition to physician, will you wield power and privilege as a weapon? Today, I carry privilege heavy on my back, like I carried my son as I scaled the walls of the ivory tower. I know I will win few medals, few accolades, few honors, and fewer elections. My job in women's health will not be extremely well-paying, if paid at all. But as a mom, I am used to it.

--Rebecca Trotzky-Sirr in medical school at the University of Minnesota.

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 Volume 1 Issue 2: Summer 2007  copyright by College Mom Magazine and Katherine Arnoldi. All illustrations on this site are by Katherine Arnoldi.