Hope in the Mourning

“I didn’t go through eight years of schooling to become a stay-at-home-mom!”  Those are the words I snapped at my husband one evening in our very first house. We were having a house-warming party with some of our friends, including many of my classmates from physical therapy school. Casually, he had said something to the effect of, “I could see Hillary wanting to come home and be with our future kids at some point.”  The audacity. I mean…goodness.  How dare this man assume I might want to spend more time with our future kids than a traditional clinic schedule might allow? Ironically enough, several years later, I did, in fact, tell him that I wanted to quit my job and become a stay-at-home-mom.  There was a time in my life when I said I wanted to be home full-time, but after spending nearly a decade out of high school earning a doctorate degree in physical therapy, the absolute last thing I thought I wanted to do was quit. Student loans alone were enough of a deterrent, at least for a while.  I loved my job. I loved my patients. I worked in outpatient pediatrics, and I developed close relationships with most of my patients and their families. When COVID-19 hit and the entire world flipped upside down, the ways of clinical practice flipped upside down, too. It took about a year for me to reach a point of full burnout. As the world was trying to return to normal and gradually lower social distancing precautions, my husband took on a new position at a new company, and we had a decision to make. We had to either send our son back to daycare (and I had to take on more clinical hours to make it worth it) or I needed