“Relationships Are Hard (Especially with Doctors),” a poem by Leigh Finnegan-Hosey
“When I met her it felt like I could acknowledge this part of me.”
She says of her first relationship with a woman: “There was lots of joy around it.” Now, halfway through her OBGYN residency, with little time for anything outside of work, this doctor’s relationship was under strain.
Residency was exhausting and emotionally fraught, but she didn’t always feel comfortable discussing it with her partner. “It’s hard to talk about our job. No one really understands what we go through.” She tried her best to show love, but even little gestures took a lot of energy these days. “I can’t see a future outside of our relationship,” she tells me, “but I also can’t see a future outside of residency.”
This doctor wanted a poem that made her feel heard and understood. I got the sense she wasn’t ready to throw in the towel just yet.
Leigh Finnegan-Hosey, Listener Poet
CLP Practicum Poem Cohort 9
November 2024
Relationships Are Hard
(Especially with Doctors)
We met and my soul
threw a homecoming party;
sent out invitations
to the parts of myself that have
gone unacknowledged
“Welcome,” they read, “to the place
where everything belongs.”
I rejoiced in the newfound
spaciousness –
what is freedom but the permission to be more
than one thing at a time?
Now come the bleary-eyed days:
hours strung together by screenings and surgeries,
tripping on hospital coffee
I deliver delirious
each birth an exhausting miracle.
Nobody really understands this work
unless you do it.
Moments of elation followed by utter tragedy –
I bring all of it and
none of it home.
And so life goes: expanding and contracting.
My mind perches on the imbalance between
what I can offer and what you deserve.
Or, I wonder, is this the
rhythm of a heart with more
to give?
