so you're a grown up who wants to go to medical school, part one

Hello wide world out there. It's been a while. So much has happened since my last post... breakups, organic chemistry, new apartments, travel coast-to coast, new roommates, a nephew (who is the best), and the dreaded MCAT (which was the worst).  Woven through it all, the good and the bad, are the thousands of meters* of yarn I've knitted these past two years. I can now say, in glorious past tense that I applied to medical school... the first round of applications anyway.

Getting into an MD program, what was two years ago an unbelievably daunting endeavor now feels close at hand, dare I say, achievable! I thought I would chronicle my journey here for any interested individuals by answering the questions that I had two and a half years ago when I realized I was a grown-up who wanted to go to medical school.

Who are you and why do you want to be a doctor?
I'm Maura. I am 27 years old. I have a BFA in Acting from the University of Minnesota/Guthrie Theater BFA Actor Training Program. I live in Chicago. To pay my rent, I teach knitting and work in a local yarn shop called Nina.

When I moved to Chicago, I was hired as a standardized patient at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. Standardized patients are actors who pretend to be sick to train doctors. My favorite part of the mock physical exams with the medical students was the "moment before." When rehearsing a play in acting school, we'd pour over the details of our "moment before." We'd ask ourselves, "What happened right before I, as the character, walked into this room? Where had I just been, who did I see, what did I last eat?" But as a standardized patient, the "moment before" I relished was something different. I loved the anticipation of the moment before the student doctor entered the room. What would that very first moment feel like? What was the essence of the intangible energy that would fill the small, windowless space as soon as another human entered it? Would I feel a sense of calm wash over me or would my flight or flight response be triggered immediately by a brusque misstep? I quickly realized that being a doctor required much more than a wealth of medical knowledge. It was the students I saw who possessed effortless communication skills, a facility for empathy and the courage to look me in the eye and tell me the truth who I knew would one day become someone's beloved doctor. It was in those mock patient rooms that I realized I wanted to achieve my goal of having a challenging career meaningfully serving others, not as an actor, but as a primary care doctor.

What is your goal as a medical practitioner?
My goal is to provide primary care medicine to underserved populations in a unique setting that emphasizes proactive physical and mental health lifestyles. My background in theater, adeptness with communication and human emotion, and passion for healing will make me a powerful force in my patients' lives. Seeing myself running a clinic 15 years down the road, I imagine having monthly walks with my patients, smoking cessation and weight loss support groups and a basket of yarn and knitting needles in the waiting room, as a stress relief suggestion! Some might say I am too idealistic, that the state of medicine is too dismal for anything like that. However, if I am able to successfully execute one tenth of the ideas I have for changing primary care, I will be proud to know that I made my patients' lives better in small, but significant ways.

How did you complete the required pre-requisites to enter medical school?
I enrolled in Northwestern University's Pre-Medicine Post-baccalaureate Program. This is a 2-year night school for career-changers like myself. We attended school two nights a week and all day on Saturdays. Year one was general chemistry and physics; year two was organic chemistry and biology. If you are like me and have to complete all of the pre-med coursework, I would strongly recommend attending a post-bacc program if one is available in your city rather than taking your pre-reqs a la carte. My reason is this:

I couldn't have done it alone.

Nevermind the seven years of attending medical school and residency... getting into medical school is a big time commitment. Attending a post-bacc program to complete the science requirements allowed me to have age appropriate, brave comrades on this journey. My lab partners were other grown-ups with jobs, kids, partners and pasts who were sacrificing emotionally, physically and financially alongside of me to do this. We were each other's cheerleaders, tutors, counselors, knitting buddies and, above all, friends.

When I first began the program, it was hard, it was so hard. Years of yoga, neutral mask and circus skills had turned my brain to artsy fartsy, sensitive mush. Besides the physics and the chemistry just being difficult to master, I went through an additional crisis of faith. After turning down an offer for a play because I was in school, I rapidly spiraled down the ever so helpful “But did I give up my dream??” rabbit hole and I worried that I would grow to regret that leaving acting. A month in, I decided that I was going to leave after the first quarter was over. I confided this to my lab partner, Ciara. She asked me what I was going to do if I left. I said, "I don't know, work in the yarn shop forever?" She looked me square in the face and said, "You can do that when you retire but now you should become a doctor." Months later, I taught Ciara to knit and she is now nearly as obsessed as I am, but she was right. This is my purpose now. That was just one instance where we few, we happy few believed in each other when we didn’t believe in ourselves. As time went on, I pushed away thoughts of quitting … and my brain got stronger like the muscle that it is and the learning came easier and the concepts clearer as more and more lines from Shakespeare were evicted from my brain and replaced with chemical formulas, theories of physical space and organ systems.

We weren't always smiling as we are in the pictures above, but we did smile and laugh a lot, if only to keep from crying about a low grade or a frustrating assignment. There is talk of pre-meds being ultra competitive saboteurs, ready to cut one another down at the first chance. My experience was anything but that: this determined, diverse group lifted me up, buoying me forward through the hurricane of organic chemistry molecules, endless powerpoint lectures and botched Saturday morning NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, something I understand, believe it or not). Besides providing wonderful peers, the program provided advisors, a student Pre-Health club, volunteer and job opportunities and a clear trajectory that took a lot of the guesswork out of collecting the pieces of the puzzle required to submit a competitive medical school application.

What was your MCAT experience like?
There is no secret to success on the MCAT. To prepare, I studied 20-30 hours a week for 4 months including a few hours on Christmas Day. I took the Kaplan live online 12-week test prep course. I took 6 practice tests made available through Kaplan. These tests are essential for building stamina and learning how to pace the 60 minutes of each section. However, because the score you ultimately received is a scaled score based on your fellow test-takers' performance, the practice test scores seem to be poor indicators of the score you will receive on test day.  The highest single practice score I received was a 506. The most helpful test was the one released by the AAMC itself. If your prep course does not come with this test, as Kaplan's does, I highly suggest buying it. I took the 2015 MCAT on the first possible test day, April 17, one day before my 27th birthday. In the end, I scored in the 96th percentile and received a 517. I am so grateful to never ever have to take that test again.

That's all for part one! Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks!

xoxo.

*As I'm a scientist now, I use the metric system.

"Father Tom to ground control..."

The fall of my junior year of college, I arrived in London to study abroad. I was fully neurotic, perpetually anxious and absolutely no fun at all. Here I was in LONDON and I was supposed to be having the MOST AMAZING EXPERIENCE OF MY YOUNG LIFE. Yet, for almost for no reason at all, I was sad. Really sad, so sad that I wanted to leave, go back to America, get married to my Canadian boyfriend, give up all my dreams and never have to make another decision again.

On a particularly bad day two months into my trip, a day where I almost booked myself a ticket back to the States, I decided instead to go to church. I was raised Catholic and being in a church anywhere in the world still feels like coming home. I’d like to say that I was wandering my neighborhood and out of the London fog rose a steeple and below it, a old wooden door with a round knocker and I found my solace there. But it was 2009 and what really happened was I googled “Catholic Church near me” and walked the .3 miles there. I knocked on the door, which did really have an amazing medieval knocker and a short, gray-haired priest opened the door. I said, choking back tears, “Hi, I’m Maura I’m an American and I’m really sad but I’m Catholic, so I thought I’d just drop by.” I gasped for air. There was a pause. He blinked and then said, “Umm, hello, Moira, why don’t you come in for tea and a biscuit and a chat, because you've just dropped out of heaven and I have not a clue who you are..."

He took me into the rectory and I told him everything, how I started having panic attacks, how I was scared about living here and mad at myself for being scared, and how all my friends just wanted to party, but I felt like it wasn’t real life, I wanted to leave, to leave the acting school I had worked so hard to get into, to drop out, to do something else, to become someone’s wife who wasn’t even asking me to, by the way, someone who wanted me to stay in London, who loved me because I was strong. I finally paused. I had nothing else to say so I took a sip of tea.

He looked up at me and said, ever so gently,

"Moira, you have one million dollars in your hand

and you are about to drop it to reach for a paper clip. 

Don't let your emotions get in the way of reality."

It was the same advice everyone was giving me, and I don’t know, maybe because this time the voice of God was behind it, I was able to step back out of my self-inflicted misery and actually hear it. After that day, I was able to begin the hard work of patching the dam in my mind to hold back the floodgates of my fears. And with time, like everything, it ended, my sadness ended. Study abroad ended. College ended. That relationship ended.

What Father Tom said to me that day is the best advice I have ever gotten. I am prone to get so emotional, so in my own way, that I find it helpful every so often to look into my palms and see, truly see, what it is I am holding before I panic and let it go. Is it a million shiny bucks, or is it a crummy paper clip?

In the end, even though I was a small sad little disaster, I do think I made the most of my time studying abroad, because I got a truly unique, very British experience that the guidebooks don’t tell you about: English Catholic priests brew a really strong cup of truth bomb tea and they are only just a Google search away.

St. Etheldreda's in Holborn, London

This piece, a rework of an older post, was originally performed at Story Club Southside on February 18, 2014.

On what's really unsettling.

A smart, successful female friend of mine recently posted about seeing Spike Jonze's latest film, Her, on Facebook. She said, among other things, that she found it "excruciating and unsettling." Someone whom I do not know commented on this status saying:

I was struck by this remark because I, on the other hand, loved Amy Adams' "retro-futuristic," practical outfits. I thought her unkempt hair was amazing and her skin seemed flawlessly unaltered. Clearly, we disagreed on the matter, perhaps because we have a difference in taste. But the more I thought about his comment, the more it became clear to me that this was not just an issue of mere preference: I like a frumpy, relaxed style and said troll does not, I like curly hair and said troll does not. The issue is in the word "unsettling." This person found Amy Adams' physical appearance in the film unsettling. Let's take a look, if we dare...

Amy (Amy Adams), Charles (Matt Letscher) and Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) in Her

Amy Adams is 39. She looks her age in this movie. Unsettled yet? She does not wear makeup or straighten her hair.  She dons collared shirts with boxy sweaters over them and carries a leather messenger bag. Her character, also named Amy, incidentally is a video game designer. I don't want to further complicate matters by implying that all ladies who work in tech fields don't wear makeup or dresses either now or in the future. However, as someone who spent ten years acting before enrolling in a Pre-Medicine post-bacc, I can attest that most actresses I know wear makeup most days and many of my science classmates do not wear makeup many days. I don't wear makeup more days that I do wear it now, because my priorities are different and it takes a lot of time to learn the bonding principles of organic chemical compounds... my point is, one should not be unsettled, or surprised even, that a female video game designer in her late thirties presents herself the way that Adams appears in the film.

Perhaps the issue is not how Jonze presented her, but how he didn't present her. He did not present her as a sex object for the viewer's immediate gratification... like David O. Russell did in American Hustle. In this promotional poster, she doesn't look frumpy. She also doesn't particularly look like Amy Adams. She is an airbrushed object, not a woman. Her body is being used to sell this movie to an insatiable consumer. American Hustle's Amy's eyes say she wants you and therefore you are pacified, you feel special, you feel safe, and you definitely don't feel unsettled because then you might walk away and spend your money elsewhere. 

Her's Amy isn't on the poster and she isn't naked in the movie and she doesn't want to have sex with you, thank you very much. We should be celebrating Her's Amy, with all her natural normalness, not tearing her down because she didn't show us any side boob. Glib comments like these are indicative that an actress' most valuable contribution to a film is her physical body. I'm not criticizing Adams for her work as a scantily clad woman in American Hustle. I'm saying it is for her work that she should be valued no matter what she is wearing.

I trust that my friend's friend is a totally reasonable and at least mildly intelligent person. I'm sure if I asked him, "Hey, do you think women should be judged by their looks instead of their character?," he'd say, "No way!" I'm sure if I walked up to him and said, "I'm not wearing makeup or a dress down to my navel, are you feeling unsettled?" he'd say, "No, what are you talking about?" So why did he send this small jibe into the internet ether, even if he was just kidding? He probably didn't realize he was sending it directly into my living room. The hidden and not so hidden judgements in the way we talk about women, especially famous women, twist and distort the way we think about ourselves, i.e., If Amy Adams is unsettling, then I must be vomit-inducing. If women repeatedly hear "harmless" jokes like this one, they quickly become convinced that their value is determined by their ability to visually please others and I don't find that funny.

We can blame the amorphous and omnipresent, big bad Media for the objectification and sexualization of women and for its obsession with youth and desire. We can do that... and let ourselves off the hook. Because today so much media and content is created by us and we must hold ourselves accountable when that content becomes belittling and disrespectful and small. My friend's friend completely missed the point of a movie about reality versus illusion. Instead of saying, "Amy Adams looked unsettling," he could have said "Amy Adams looked remarkably like the normal human being of average means she was supposed to be portraying." Or he could even say, "She looked frumpy." if he absolutely needed to put an adjective on her. Although I still disagree with him, I don't object to "frumpy." Just the other day, I was wearing one of my boyfriend's cardigans with reinforced elbows and a blue patterned dress I made from a vintage sheet I found at the Renegade Craft Fair. He chuckled when I walked into the kitchen and called me "frumpy chic" and I don't think he found me unsettling in the slightest.

I loved Her. I think it is one of the most complete, beautiful portrayals of the simultaneous miracle and tragedy of love in the modern age that I have ever seen. Amy Adams gave a simple and heartfelt performance. And my friend was right, the film was "unsettling" because it forced me to confront my fears of my increasingly digital future self. The message of Her is less about the future and more about today. People would be more comfortable with an Operating System, a partner that can be bought in a vending machine who lacks a physical form and will love them unconditionally, than with a woman who wears clogs and is too busy working on her documentary to worry about what her hair looks like. 

Amy Adams is an actress who is in a movie where she looks like how I look most days and I like that.

On our other sister.

When I was two, my mother had a baby who only lived for eight weeks. My sister Rachel Ann was born with congenital heart defects so complex that none of the doctors heard the irregularities in her tiny valves before it was  too late. Because I was two, I don’t remember anything about her. I don’t remember her being born, I don’t remember her dying, but I do remember her birthday parties. Every July 9th, we celebrated Rachel’s birthday with a special dinner and a birthday cake, but no presents because there was no guest of honor. The six of us sang “Happy Birthday” in the middle of summer to a little person I was told was my baby sister who died because she had a hole in her heart.

Rachel was present on other holidays as well. Each of us has a different color Christmas stocking hand sewn by my mother. Seven in total hang on the mantelpiece: two for my parents, four for the kids and one for Rachel. Hers is made of soft pink corduroy trimmed in ribbon embroidered with baby blue rocking horses. As the years went on, the contents of our stockings matured with us from Lipsmackers, to lipgloss, to lipstick, to liquor. But like the taste of my mother’s spinach quiche, the contents of Rachel’s stocking never changed. Every year on Christmas morning, her stocking was and is filled with a bouquet of pink carnations. It wasn’t until very recently that I realized that because Rachel died in September, my mother must have made the stocking after she died. That’s why Rachel’s stocking has the baby ribbon on it. She knew that this particular pink stocking was for a baby who would never grow up. Until recently, I also didn’t think about my dad ordering those flowers every year for Christmas morning. A strange thing to do, order carnations on December 20^th, as they are not exactly your standby holiday fauna.

To this day, when we decorate our Christmas tree each year, the last ornament we hang is a small golden tree with five leaves. One leaf has fallen away from the other leaves, off its branch and rests on the ground. As my mother quietly hangs that tiny golden tree, my father puts his arm around her as if to say, “Merry Christmas. It’s okay to still miss her.” After Rachel died, a number of my parents’ friends who lived on the Naval base in Philadelphia with us planted a tree in her memory. We call it the Rachel tree. We visited her tree and brought balloons to her grave during our yearly visits to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, my parents’ alma mater.

I wonder what rituals like this do to a kid, when ornaments and plants and graves and poorly attended birthday parties are all you can base your experience of someone on. And this is someone you’ve known your whole life, but you can’t remember. I don’t have any memories of my sister. All I have are memories of the ways in which we acknowledged the fact that she existed. I used to think we just did all of this for my mom, that it was something my mom needed because it must have been terrible for her, so terrible to lose something she grew. So terrible to only get two months with someone she held inside her warmth for nine. She must felt cheated and like she had failed and angry at the God which she so, so fervently believes in. I thought we were doing all of this for her because, honestly, I never really got much out of celebrating her birthday or looking at the few photos of her we had around the house or even visiting her grave. I didn’t know her so I didn’t miss her.

But then I went off to college and I missed the Rachel days. Her birthday came and went unnoticed. I haven’t seen her grave in years. She stopped feeling a part of my life.

A few years ago, during my third year of actor training, I had a dream. In the dream, I was in a Michael Chekhov class doing an exercise. I don’t know if you are familiar with Michael Chekhov exercises but they involve imagining a particular set of circumstances as you walk around the room, like imagine the floor is on fire, imagine you are at a cocktail party with the president, imagine your butt is a magnet, that sort of thing.

So in the dream, my acting teacher said, “Okay, walk around the room with your sisters.” And for some reason, dream Maura asked him, “With all our sisters or just the ones that are alive?”

“All your sisters.”

So the picture changed like a flash, because this was a dream, and all the sudden, I was walking around the room, milling and seething, with two other women. One is my younger sister Claire and the other is a woman, about 20 years old, who looks just like me and just like Claire, but different. And the three of us just walked, in silence, weaving in and out of each other, smiling in awareness of each other's presence. Then it was over.

That’s all I remember of the dream. But I swear, I know, it was Rachel. I’m sorry, I don’t believe that my brain could through random firing of neurons and chemical reactions create that vast an experience. I just don’t. I’m not saying it was a ghost or an angel or a vision or proof of the supernatural. I’m just saying it was amazing and eerie and I know it was my sister.

Shortly after the dream, I asked my mom about the decision to make Rachel such a part of the fabric of our lives. Many families experience a miscarriage or the death of a young child and do not discuss it openly or often as we do. She told me something I’ll never forget. She said, "I wanted you all to grow up knowing that bad things happen, for no reason, things you think you can't survive, but you can, you do. We did.” She said something else that struck me during that conversation, about how people sometimes say things like, “Well, you are a stronger person or a better mother because this happened.” She doesn’t think about it that way. Although she probably did grow in unexpected ways by knowing Rachel, my mother knows that the purpose of Rachel’s short life was not to teach her something about herself or the value and unconquerable fragility of life. The purpose of Rachel’s tiny life was to live, for as long as her little, imperfect heart would allow. It’s nothing but vanity to think otherwise.

I never knew how to answer people when they asked me how many siblings I have. To form the words “I’m one of four” has always felt a little wrong in my mouth. Since the dream, when people ask me how my siblings I have, I usually say I am one of five. In the first photograph of the four of us with the Rachel tree, it is a small sapling standing only a few inches taller than my five-year-old brother. We visited the Rachel tree a few years back. In the photo from that visit, the four of us are sitting in the tree a half a dozen or so feet off the ground. It’s funny, in the ornament she’s the fallen leaf, but in the photograph she is holding us all up the way we carried her when she was a baby. In a way, it’s the only picture of all my mother’s children: two girls, two boys and a tree with deep roots into the earth and lush, extending branches reaching towards the heavens.

 

Jeff, Claire, Stephen and Maura in Rachel's tree, 2001

On my first summer doing indoor science

"Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress."

-Anton Chekhov

For the past few years, rehearsing outdoor Shakespeare has marked the official beginning of summer for me. However this summer is different. I have just successfully finished my first semester of what I will call indoor Science or "Maura Does Science" (MDs). I've been glued to my laptop for the past 8 weeks studying Biology and Algebra online at the American Public University as a pre-requisite for the Pre-Med Post Bacc I will begin at Northwestern in the fall. For someone who has spent ten years memorizing Shakespeare, you'd think my first foray into Biology might've been easier. It's definitely going to take some time before my brain wheels start to turn easily over scientific jargon and theories. I can't tell you how excited I was when I caught a line of Shakespeare in my biology textbook: "That is the rub" (see Hamlet's 'To be or not to be' speech). I'm sure that most of my classmates glazed over that phrase without a clue what it meant. I also like to think fondly of the guy or gal who wrote that section while moonlighting as a textbook author while pursuing an MFA in playwriting. 

But something was rotten in the state of the textbook. This photo below was my favorite bit of appalling racism in the textbook:

Subtext: Only straight, rich, white people live in more-developed countries. Those countries also look like Cape Cod or a Gap commercial. They are also much happier than people everywhere else.

Now that my semester is over, I can spend more time crafting with my dear knitting friends and adventuring with my handsome movie star boyfriend (who is currently shooting a big movie I can't say the name of on the internet playing alongside a woman who was in a movie about a big boat that sank because her necklace was so heavy.) I am working on a culinary post I am going to call m2f1 (make two, freeze one) about doubling recipes so I've been cooking a bit more than usual. I just made a stew of Israeli couscous and all of the vegetables in my fridge (small red and yellow peppers, celery, olives, tomatoes and onions). I served it (to myself) with a little bit of Greek yogurt and homemade iced coffee. Delish.

I suppose the biggest lesson from my first semester of MDs was that this endeavor will be very, very challenging. Even people who love science find medical school impossible and  frustrating and tear-inducing. Last week I went up to some girls wearing thick plastic glasses and sideways hats at Filter Coffee who were obviously studying for a med school final and asked them about their experience. They were really friendly and said they hated being med students, but loved people and practicing medicine. As I studied for my Biology final, I felt really comforted by the presence of these hipster doctors. It made me think there's a place for me too. The future of healthcare in this country is in our hands. In my hands. My trembling, passionate, knitter's hands.

I finished knitting the Mara Shawl out of MistiAlpaca Worsted and as I was binding off (finishing, for those of you non-knitters) I found 2 cosmetic, not structural mistakes in the knit 3 purl 2 ribbing on the border of the shawl. I asked the infallible Scot and my wise friend Kirstin whether I should rip out an hour of work to fix the tiny mistakes which no one else would ever notice. Both advised me to leave them as they were. I questioned, "But does that make me lazy because I'm not willing to take the time now to make the shawl perfect forever?" Scot said that maybe for other people it would indicate laziness, but for me it would indicate a release of control, of the need for perfection. Kirstin reminded me of a myth that Amish quilters would leave a purposeful mistake in their exquisite handiwork as a reminder of their own imperfections to keep them humble. And really, the shawl isn't going to ever be perfect. But it is perfectly human, stitch-by-stitch. I left the mistakes in. 

Maura's Mara

So be loving with yourself this summer. Look your mistakes in the face and don't be afraid or ashamed of them. They are uniquely yours. 

HOWEVER, I will say that putting an empty ice cube tray back in the freezer in the middle of summer is not a reminder of your own humility, it's just lazy. xo.

On my godmother.

The second to last time I saw Aunt Monica, I remember waking her up from a nap before dinner on that cold February day. She was very groggy and the gears of her mind took time to begin to pick up speed after being asleep. She blinked her eyes and looked at me quizzically. 

"Who are you?" she said sweetly.

 "I'm Maura," I responded, "Maybe you can't see me. I'll come closer."

As I leaned in, she nodded her head. "Oh, another one."

"The one and only!"

"No," she corrected me indignantly and not without the hint of a scold, "There's also Maura Clement."

At first, I felt saddened that she didn't recognize that, in fact, I was Maura Clement. But then I felt supremely flattered that she would so defiantly defend the real Maura Clement to this other strange imposter Maura.  You see, until the end of her life, even in her more difficult days, Monica was fiercely loyal to those she loved. She would have done anything for her daughters, her husband, and the rest of us who were lucky enough to be her family.

Monica passed away last night after a three year battle with a brain tumor at her home in Audubon, Pennsylvania surrounded by her husband and her three daughters. I don't think that any of my words can be as good a tribute to her as some of her own can. Here is an excerpt from an e-mail Monica sent me on September 14, 2009 when I was struggling with anxiety and living in London. It is a testament to her unfaltering faith and selfless love. May these words be a comfort to those of us who will miss her until we meet again.

"Trust in the Lord, Maura.  He will never let you down.  I have a recent example... I think you know that for over a year I've been working as the Accounting Manager for local programs at Special Olympics Pennsylvania.  This past weekend was our Leadership Conference for our volunteers who run our local programs all around the state.  I was to give a presentation and run a discussion group--things I haven't done in years!  I wanted to be professional and do a good job, making a good impression on all these folks I have only "met" via email and/or phone calls.  My boss and I have been working on this since April, and needless to say, as the day was approaching, I was becoming more and more anxious about the event.  I was praying the rosary each day, asking for a successful outcome, but was not really achieving the peace of mind I was hoping for.

By mid-week last week, I was becoming overly stressed, when I realized I had been praying for the wrong thing--rather than "success" I should have been praying "thy will be done."  I know I have learned this lesson before, but old habits die hard!  When I finally actually prayed the words I had been reciting all along, I felt a sense of calm--knowing that God was taking care of things, and no matter how they turned out, I could handle it.  It was a wonderful feeling.

Well, the day was a great success, and I am very happy with our efforts and our results.  I find that when I trust the Lord to put me where He wants me to be, I am ultimately where I want to be, as well.  It just takes time sometimes.

I hope you are finding a similar sense of satifaction with your situation.  Looking for the meaning of your being there is a wonderful treasure hunt!  I wish you luck in the journey, but more importantly, I pray the His will be done in your life.

Seek and you shall find, Maura!

Love,

Aunt Monica"

I guess we should have guessed this one was just on loan. She was too good for us.

On becoming a doctor because I like the costume, among other reasons.

On Saturday, my little brother Stephen married his best friend Hillary Walker. The weekend could not have been more perfect---clear skies, joyful fellowship, and Southern goodness. I loved how the wedding was traditional, but also so them. For the rehearsal at  the church, Hillary wore her Civil Engineering hard hat onto which we had fashioned a veil. She wore it all night at the rehearsal dinner at the West End Wine Bar and it served as a great way for people to locate her, being that she is so short. One of my favorite moments of the Mass in the incredible Duke Chapel was when Father Mike said, "This might be the first time I've seen Stephen without some sort of tool on him." Stephen's classic wiry smile spread across his face as he reached into the pocket of his tuxedo pants and pulled out a pocket knife. Everyone burst out laughing. It was clear to all of us that Stephen and Hillary have found a perfect match in each other. They seemed happy, but much more importantly, they seemed sure and content in their decision. No cold feet for them, just feet dancing the night away wearing sassy purple and red Chuck Taylors.

The (new) Clement's

Another exciting piece of news happened this weekend. I was formally accepted into Northwestern's Post-Baccalaureate Program in Pre-Medicine, a 15-21 month night school program to complete the requirements for applying to Med School.  I will begin in the fall. Wait, what? Maura, I thought you were an actress? Where did this come from? This decision has been brewing for almost a year now.  The simplest way to explain this change of direction is to share with you my personal statement which I wrote for my application to the program.

APRIL 2013

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

In the ten years I’ve been a member of the workforce, I have worked an amazing variety of jobs including knitting instructor, marketing director for a storefront theater, classical actor, Segway tour guide, horseback riding wrangler, Shakespeare teacher, burger bar waitress, and nanny. The one common thread through all my many livelihoods is that each one entailed working face-to-face, hands-on with people. I have a passion for people; for communicating with, investing in and caring for people.

When I moved to Chicago after graduation, I began acting as a standardized patient at Northwestern University and Kaplan Test Prep Center. Although I had a facility for math in high school and found my science coursework in college fascinating, I had never considered becoming a physician until I found myself in patient rooms with medical students. I learned firsthand the importance of a doctor’s peerless communication skills and empathetic demeanor because I sat on the other side of these medical encounters daily. One day last spring, while portraying a patient experiencing domestic abuse with a particularly oblivious and cold doctor at Kaplan, I found myself thinking, “I could do this.” Over the last year, “I could do this” has become “I want to do this. I was made to do this.”

My extroverted nature, my diverse skill set and specific career goals make me well suited for a vocation in medicine. I feel most engaged and curious when I am working with my hands. I have strong academic and analytic capabilities. I want the opportunity to affect public policy. Most importantly, I want to work where I am needed.  My father and mother both served in the U.S. Navy and raised me with a strong sense of national service. Although a career in the military was not the right fit for me, I have a deep desire to serve my country through my work. While I love performing and storytelling, I do not live and breathe by the fickle limelight. There is not a shortage of classically trained actors in this country. There is a shortage of primary care doctors especially in very urban or very rural locales. I believe in the power of art; but I doubt that making art professionally is the best use of my abilities and my best way to serve my country.  My background in the theater, adeptness with language and human emotion, and passion for healing will make me a powerful force in my patient’s lives as a doctor. I want to treat the physical ailment while fully considering the social, mental and spiritual realities of each individual.

My undergraduate Honors thesis was an interdisciplinary performance piece inspired by poetry, music and theater created during the intifadas, or uprisings, in Israel and Palestine. I am inspired by these political artists who enacted positive change through non-violent expression in extreme situations through person-to-person interactions. Their work embodies the type of doctor I want to be. I will strive to build fruitful relationships with families in a high-need area like Chicago or the Appalachian Mountains in my home state of North Carolina. Because freelance artists surround me, I know many people who do not have medical insurance. I passionately believe that all people should have access to affordable, quality care. With the passage of the Affordable Care Act, our country’s need for primary care doctors will increase as the number of people with health insurance increases by the millions. I am excited about the prospect of being a healthcare professional during this time of policy change. I would be honored to provide healthcare for deserving people who have so long gone without.

Enrolling in Northwestern’s Post-Baccalaureate Program in Pre-Medicine will allow me to prepare for application to medical school in a structured and supportive environment with a rigorous course load. Because my recent coursework and experience is in the theater and not a technical field, I know that I need to revisit and build upon my math and science coursework¸ most of which I took in high school. Collaboration, teamwork and organizational skills are essential tools of any actor, and I believe they are a particular strength of mine. Those skills will enable me to make a unique contribution to Northwestern’s Post-Baccalaureate Program in Pre-Medicine community and I look forward to learning alongside the other ambitious professionals and scholars admitted by Northwestern to the program. From what I’ve seen while working in NU’s Clinical Skills department, I am certain that my success in the Northwestern University program will demonstrate to medical schools the seriousness of my desire and my readiness to meet the rigors of medical school.

This is a HUGE shift and a long road, I know. I have always known that my life's work is to serve where my service is most needed. I do not think a life as a theater professional is that place. I still love plays. I still want to do plays, good plays. But everyone I  know works other jobs to support their theater habit. Truly, I think what I love is going to the theater, even more than I like being in plays. I feel that if I could channel my artistic abilities (my voice, my agile hands, my heart) into a more objective, practical field, I could make more of an impact, because there are less people like me, a need for people like me... BUT I have to pass organic chemistry first. I dream of being a doctor who does a play every year. I dream of creating a family practice clinic with a corgi and baskets of yarn in the waiting room. I dream of having a weekly knitting group at the clinic for young women struggling with anxiety. I have this crazy dream of my mom managing the office and my sister being my nurse and my dad being our  lawyer. I dream of my daughter Clementine saying, "Yeah, my mom made me this sweater, but she's also a bad ass doctor lady. Want to see her in Steel Magnolias this weekend?" My dreams have always been big and  I know you can't have it all at the same time. But life is long and you can have different things at different times. I couldn't be dreaming this way if I didn't have a family who says "We'll help you do this" and a boyfriend who says, "Stop crying in Starbucks. You are smart enough to do this."

Also, as I said in the title of this post, I will look really cute in a lab coat saying things like, "Scapel." and "Wait, how did that cat attack you?"