Motherhood Stories: 4 Lessons Nurses Can Learn From Being a Mother

Nurses give long days to patients who often forget them by discharge, then go home to families who need the same care. For many nurse-moms, the two roles teach each other. Four of those lessons, drawn from their own stories.

1. Passion carries over

Faye Rodriguez spent nine years as a salon hairstylist and never considered college, sure she could not pass the courses. That changed when her daughter Jen was hospitalized with severe pneumonia. With her husband working abroad, Faye and her mother handled Jen's daily care, and over 30 days on the ward Faye watched the nurses work and started asking them to teach her the basic procedures.

By the time they were discharged, the salon no longer held her. She started nursing at 28.

"The passion she saw from the nurses awakened her heart as a mother to rise above the challenge."

Now a staff nurse at a public hospital, Faye says motherhood and nursing run on the same current. "You see your daughter in the eyes of a patient, and the caring mother in you is suddenly boosted into action."

2. Time is everything

Joana Salazar planned a career, not children. She chose nursing for the financial security it gave her family as the breadwinner, and figured she would grow old without kids. Then she got pregnant, and by the time her son arrived she was a regular staff nurse. The first sleepless weeks nearly flattened her. "It was more demanding than nursing," she joked.

So she did what she knew how to do. She tracked his patterns: feeding, sleeping, even wetting. The routine became predictable.

"I never thought motherhood would bring more lessons than sitting in a classroom."

Back at work, she applied the same time management to her patients, charting their sleep, feeding, and elimination patterns so she could anticipate their needs. "You just have to embrace it and let it lead your career, and everything follows."

3. Know your priorities

Alice Soriano loves the rush of the emergency room, the control of knowing exactly what to do. Settling down and starting a family added weight to every shift, since going home meant feeding her daughter and setting her up for the day.

The week before her daughter's preschool graduation, Alice was head nurse during the hospital's ISO accreditation season and could barely take leave. Then she saw the look in her daughter's eyes. "I never got to take her on her first day of school, and I could never get those moments back."

She convinced her superiors to grant a one-day leave, and they did. Years of triage taught her to prioritize, but nothing outranked this. Now she understands her staff nurses who want to spend their leave with family. "The joy that comes from family can never be replaced by what our careers give us."

4. Gratitude is not weakness

For six years as a nurse supervisor, Nenita Angeles never showed her staff a soft edge. They called her a terror, a perfectionist, a slave driver. She knew the reputation and never tried to change it, certain it kept her unit efficient.

In late 2008, her youngest son was diagnosed with nephrotic syndrome. She personally attended to her three-year-old through his hospitalization, and there she watched how fond he was of his nurses, how he told her stories about everything they did to keep him comfortable. She started seeing her own staff in them.

Her son did not survive. She returned to work a week after the burial, and her nurses noticed the change at once. No more shouting at endorsement. Calmer at the bedside. At their weekly meeting she told them about her son's nurses and apologized for how she had treated them. "I cannot thank them enough for staying on my team. They accepted me readily after my apologies." Gratitude belongs in the daily routine, because the people beside you make the load lighter.

"Gratitude should be a part of our daily routine."

Having children should not stop a nurse from growing. Treat motherhood as another degree, one that only counts if you pour yourself into it and carry the lessons back to the people around you, patients and colleagues alike.