Where is the green grass?

The grass is always greener, right?   I’ve been ruminating on this for the past few weeks.

Why do we use this phrase to placate ourselves when we covet something that someone else has? Is it something we tell ourselves to justify the guilt we feel over choices made, or not made, because we can take pity on ourselves that what others have is better than what we have. Does it allow us to feel ok being unsatisfied with what we have right in front of us, and put most of the “blame” so to speak, into the cosmos, as if life somehow makes the grass greener over there.

How many of us say “ I would just be happier if …” (fill in the blank)? For me, historically I would complete that sentence with “…if I just had more time.”  

I have spent most of my adult lifetime rushing from one thing to the next.  Rushing through college, medical school and residency.  Then finally working as a full time obstetrician gynecologist, I became expertly trained in the art of running from room to room between the pt with preterm labor in triage, the busy labor floor, the ectopic in the ER, all the while juggling the pull of messages from the office or the call center in the background.  Then layer in over the years becoming a busy mother of 3, trying to maintain a household, figuring out how to get healthy food into bellies (theirs and mine), being an active part of my community, and trying to feel like I had some semblance of a personal life. 

On top of this, I found myself often stringing together multiple acts that in hindsight were insane, like training for and running my first marathon when my middle daughter was 2 yo, or staying up all night working on homemade Halloween costumes for the local village parade because I was certain that homemade was better, and I was probably too embarrassed to look like I had to outsource that, but always feeling in the end that I never had enough time. (But outsourcing my childcare was fine. I will freely admit that I have had the distinct privilege of having had 3 women in my children’s lives over the past 2 decades who have been unbelievably AMAZING in every way, in fact I am sure my kids are better off for having had their positive influence – but that is another blog post!)   

The countless bedtime snuggles missed, the field trips not gone on, the family dinners left early, or frankly, the number of days in a week that I just would not see my kids or my husband because of work. The missed dinners with friends, the yoga classes I could never get to, the volunteer committee gatherings I was never available for. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love being an Ob/Gyn, and feel certain that if I had it to do again, I would have ended up in the same medical specialty all over.  But the schedule is grueling, and physically demanding, and like many women in the world, I put everyone else’s needs before my own.   

I was certainly very accomplished, and from the outside, I looked like I had it all under control.  But I often didn’t feel happy.  I would often think to myself, I would just be happier if I had more time.  Time to organize my house, do projects, make things, just hang out….

But what is happiness? Is it really something so easily achieved? By just coveting what we don’t have?  The problem with this ideology is that it relies solely on perception and comparison, of what I have to others.  And in doing so, it doesn’t allow for the space to be present, and recognize the value of what is right in front of you.

Life for me has taken an abrupt 180 deg turn in the last year.  After almost 25 years of practicing clinical ob/gyn, and growing an amazing practice in upstate NY where I have worked and lived since I left residency, I unfortunately developed a medical condition that made it unsafe for me to keep practicing and I had to leave work.  All of sudden I was faced with an OCEAN of time; wide open, deep, and terrifying.  

It has been a big adjustment for me to figure out a new rhythm to my day to day life.  On the one hand, I have nothing but time to devote to anything I want. Granted, alot of it gets sucked up by mundane household administration like laundry, dishes, and driving my kids around.

But I can finally clean out the closets, be home everyday when my children get home from school, volunteer more freely in the community, have lunch on a random Tuesday with a friend in town, work on DIY craft projects, get rid of clutter, work in my garden, exercise, sleep a full night in my own bed, spend time with my mom since my Dad died, the list is endless…..  And don’t get me wrong, I love having the opportunity to do any and all of these things, but interestingly, most of them are still always on the ‘to-do’ list. 

When I am being unkind and hard on myself, I look back on a day, a week, a month gone by and think – what did you do? What did you get done? Because even with a wide open schedule, I find the time just goes once I start filling it with things. 

When I was working, it was very easy to measure my accomplishments by number of patients seen, babies delivered, surgeries performed, consecutive hours spent in the hospital on call over a weekend – you get the point.  Now, I don’t have the same metrics logging in my productivity.  There is no one to monitor or measure my productivity except me

Have my years of training as a physician left me with a tainted sense of value? Am I only as good as the number of value units I accumulate?  Should I be attaching some value to unloading the dishwasher, and cleaning up the house, or better yet – writing?

I feel privileged to have this opportunity, and am fervently an optimist/glass half full kind of girl, so I look at this abrupt end to my first career as just a pivot point, and a chance to evolve into something else, that I never had the time to develop before.   But I find myself repeatedly asking myself the question “am I happier”?  Now I have the time I always so desperately wanted, but where is the green grass?  

Looking back, was I unhappy? Or just tired, and busy, and missing out on having the choice to be home for bedtime. Or is it, as I am beginning to realize, that the grass is always greener where you water it.