So Many Babies: My Life Balancing a Busy Medical Career and Motherhood

“So Many Babies” describes one overworked physician-mother as she journeys through medicine and motherhood raising three children. Her experiences of finding resilience and endurance throughout her career as a physician and mother will be entertaining and reassuring to other working mothers. Dr. Landers practiced fulltime academic neonatology and encountered exceptional patients and parents while working in the NICU. Each family touched her life in profound ways and their stories provide an exceptional glimpse into life in the NICU.

She became a mother at age thirty-four and, while imagining herself a supermom, learned mothering skills on the fly, dealing with nannies, breastfeeding difficulties, preschools, sibling rivalry, and a gifted child. At forty years of age, she relocated into another job that she despised, with a brand-new baby in tow. She endured an episode of post-partum depression, in addition to managing other trials in mothering her children: one child bitten by a dog, dyslexia, one child bullied, and a daughter’s far flung athletic competitions.

Leaving academic medicine in her later years, she relocated to Texas and worked in a private NICU practice where she established herself as a national expert in breastfeeding medicine and donor human milk banking. Her children provided challenges along the way – ADHD, learning disabilities, an adolescent daughter’s eating disorder, and school-skipping-car-wrecking-tattoo-getting teenage behavior in her youngest. Witnessing complications in some babies from bad obstetrical care, poor outcomes in others, and the suffering of both patients and parents wore her down and she developed burnout. View Less