Project Narrative: Life as a Mother and a Doctor
In this episode of the Project Narrative podcast, Catherine Belling from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine joins Ohio State's Jim Phelan to read and discuss Susan Onthank Mates’s short story, “Laundry” (1994). Mates’s character narrator is a woman doctor, who is simultaneously folding laundry, nursing her child, and thinking about one of her patients who passed away. And the phone is ringing! Catherine unpacks the way the story plays with time, ethics, and identity—and the challenges of simultaneously being a good doctor and a good mother.