Balancing the schedule of someone in residency with your own career can be a true nightmare. I don’t want to make it seem easy, because I really have not experienced that to be the truth. I could go on an entire rant about the injustices that arise from this situation, but instead I will try to provide you with some productive information that could actually be helpful. So, here goes.

Put simply – balancing your own career (or almost any type of schedule) along with the medical career of your SO is basically a constant process of creating organized chaos. For someone with a type-A personality, this started off as an actual nightmare, but over the years I’ve figured out a few things that work for me to help navigate it. Hopefully they help you too!

• Expect the unexpected. – I like a plan. I’m a definitely planner. If this is you, you need to get out of the mindset and get out fast. Whether your career is inside the home as a mother or outside of the home in an office, you probably have a more regulated schedule than your SO whether it be by the nature of your profession or by your own design. Whether it’s during medical school or residency, it is often that your SO will have the most erratic and infuriating schedule ever because it will never run on a real schedule. Appointments run late, pagers go off in the wee hours of the morning, and single colleagues living bachelor/bachelorette lifestyles have zero knowledge of what your life is actually like. All of these things can be super tricky to navigate, so you need to always prep for the things you can’t actually predict. For example, when I invite Andrew to work events I always have a plan B for when he doesn’t show up, because he might not. A surgery might go late or morning sign out might take 40 extra minutes – always be mentally prepared for things to not go the way you are expecting or the way you discussed with your partner. It doesn’t hurt to physically prepare yourself for these situations as well – I always have cans of chick peas and hummus mix in the cabinet and tons of extra food in the freezer because it’s hard to know when your home is going to be the place for a pregame or impromptu gathering.
• Think smarter not harder. – Hours are long, tempers are short. Don’t make life harder than it needs to be. At some point, I heard someone talk about organization and the thinking behind good organization. They said that if you want your house to be clean, you need to make it easier for you to keep it clean than for you to leave it a mess. If you’re routine is too difficult to keep up with, you will always take the easy way out. How does this relate to your life with a medical SO? KISS: Keep It Sweet and Simple. If you want your SO to come home and keep their scrubs out of your dirty laundry bin, make a space (a specific bin with a liner in the closet in our guest bedroom) where they can put their scrubs before taking them back to the hospital to trade in. If you want them to stop leaving their Calzuro clogs all over the house thus causing you to trip and be irritated, provide them with a mat for shoes with space on it just for them. The more simplistic the routines, the more likely they are to have brain space leftover at the end of the day to actually complete the task. 
• Their job is not more important. – I also tend to think that Andrew’s job is not more difficult, but that’s a hot button topic in my house. To me, job difficulty is all relative. Am I performing a job that could physically impair someone if I do it incorrectly? No. But is it extremely difficult to perform a 9am-5pm job while also being able to state the inventory of the fridge and every household cleaning supply on demand and keeping all laundry clean, floors swept, etc. Some might say I don’t work as long of hours, but I would argue that, between career work and housework, I am working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It doesn’t matter what you do for a living or what your role in the house is – what you do is important and in no way less-than or less worthy than that of your medical SO. This is probably something not everyone will agree with me on, but I think if you frame your relationship in that way, then you are choosing to set yourself in a lower status and, when you belittle your role, don’t be surprised when that is how you get treated in response. Always remind yourself of your self worth and always take time to pamper yourself. Your SO might be busy or just physically not around, but you can’t let that keep you from doing things that make you happy. 
• Learn how to not listen. – Listening is such an important skill and equally as, if not more important than, conquering the skill of good communication. However, sometimes it is best to exercise your right to not listen. Not every day of every relationship (even marriages) is glorious. Some days you are just irritable and everything your SO says makes you want to steal all their favorite snacks from the cabinet and wrinkle all their laundry (my two favorite retaliation techniques). Sometimes your SO (or even you) might say things out of crankiness or anger that they really don’t mean. It is possible and probable that your SO will come home and will have very little patience left which you will only find out because you will invariably say just exactly that wrong thing that sets them off. This does happen and you can probably tell by the way I’m dancing around the wording of this that it does happen more frequently than you might think. Know when to listen and know when to practice being a duck and letting it all just roll off. There’s a difference between your SO saying, “You don’t respect the fact that I don’t get enough sleep!” in an angry tone and saying, “You’re always angry when I want to go to the gym.” The former is a good one to listen to; Yes, they sound angry but there’s a point to what they’re saying. They are tired and they want to feel like you understand their hours and that they can’t be out every night at the bar until 2am when they have overnight shifts and the bone phone to deal with. The latter is just ridiculous and snappy. Blanket statements saying “always” or “never” are not accurate and typically can’t be substantiated, they just come from a place of brashness and frustration. When the conversation goes this way, you have full permission to go to your happy place and tune out. It is not worth getting riled up over statements that aren’t meaningful.
• Tune in. – Time is truly of the essence because you aren’t going to get a ton of it. Heck, we don’t even have kids or pets and it still feels like there are times when we are really struggling for quality time together. You can’t create time when there isn’t any, though I wish it was possible. You can, however, tune in during the time you do have. If you’re having coffee together, have the coffee. Don’t scroll your phone, don’t talk about bills, just enjoy the coffee and conversation to check in with one another. If you like to watch a certain show or series together, just focus on that. Andrew and I sunk into a bad habit of letting our nightly routine of watching the news together turn into us just on our phones. It was no longer time spent together, just time spent on the same couch doing our own thing. Make the most of the times when you get to be together, because they will be less than you prefer. 

What are your tips? I’d love to hear from other women in the same position!