"I feel that my pediatrician-mom-brain and my creative brain have finally blended."
neonatologist, writer, and mother of three Susan Landers on caring for seriously ill infants, the pleasures of being a grandparent, and finally having space for creative work
Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. My next book, The Good Mother Myth, will be out in January 2025, and you can pre-order it now!
This is a good creatures interview, a series that explores the intersection of caregiving and creative practice. I’m so excited to showcase people doing lots of kinds of caregiving—people caring for kids or pets or other family members and/or caring for space through gardening or community work or activism—and lots of kinds of creative work.
If you know (or are!) a good creature whose work we should feature, send me an email—you can just reply to this newsletter.
Today’s interview is with Susan Landers, a retired neonatalogist, author, and the creator of the newsletter Moms Matter. I was excited to feature Susan because hers is a story of really complex and demanding caregiving—in addition to raising her own three kids, she spent her career as an intensive care physician, working with really sick and premature infants and their families. She wrote about that experience in her memoir So Many Babies, and in her newsletter she draws on her years of experience as a physician to provide guidance on all kinds of issues parents today care about. Below, we talk about ditching mom guilt and pursuing her own creative work in retirement.
Who do you care for?
Throughout my entire medical career, I cared for premature and seriously ill newborn infants, and their parents. I was an intensive care physician in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), a so-called neonatologist. I encountered thousands of tiny, fragile premature babies, and many full-term newborns who were born with unexpected congenital birth defects, or serious infections. These babies were exceptionally ill, and their parents were traumatized at the time of their birth or diagnosis. I attended the deliveries of and cared for babies born by emergency C-sections for fetal distress, planned C-sections for triplets and quadruplets, babies referred to our center for subspecialty surgical care, and medically necessary deliveries for serious life-threatening maternal illness. Very few birthing situations that I attended were normal.
My job was to diagnose and treat sick full-term and premature infants, and in doing that I inevitably cared for the parents of these infants as well. Traumatized parents have a thousand questions, and each develops various ways of coping with their babies’ intensive care course. Some remain distant, some hover and ask about every prescribed medicine, line, and tube, and some sit quietly by their infant’s bedside waiting and watching everything.
What kind of creative work do you do?
My actual creative pursuits began when I retired six years ago. To sit down and write a book, to collate stories of extraordinary patients, and to contact parents for permission to share their stories, took an unbelievable amount of time and effort. Some of my patients were then twenty-something-year-olds. I also needed to ask permission from my children, all young adults then. I wanted to tell my maternal version of their stories as I struggled to be a good enough mother. Like many working mothers, it took me quite a while to ditch the guilt and admit that I was, indeed, a good enough mother, even though I worked so intensely away from them. The result of my creative work is my memoir, So Many Babies, published in 2021.
What are some ways that caregiving fosters creativity?
My caregiving as a neonatal physician offered me many exceptional stories about these babies and their parents. I met parents who were brave and inspirational, parents who reached out to support others around them, parents who created a tense stir of emotions among the staff, and parents who were desperate to have their child survive at all costs. These stories I incorporated into my personal memoir. However, it was not until I retired from practicing medicine that I found the time to create this book.
What is difficult about being creative and a caregiver?
When I was not practicing medicine (my professional caregiving), I was caring for my three growing children. It was difficult sometimes to turn off my caregiving NICU brain and attend to my healthy children with my mom-brain, but I tried to do that when I was not in the hospital. Any creative pursuit I did during those early years was merely my maternal effort to expose my children to creative things – music, art, dance, plays, and museums. My own creative pursuit with writing was postponed until much later.
It was not until my retirement from medical practice that I had the free time to write. My active physician caregiving job delayed by many years my creative writing efforts.
What is your creative philosophy and how has it expanded with the addition/subtraction of caregiving?
Now that I have free time in which to write, I have enjoyed creating a blog on my website for parents. I also offer lots of free resources for parents on my website, things like developmental milestone trackers, and free developmental checklists. There are free checklists there for working moms who might be suffering from burnout. After paying attention to my website for the last two years, I jumped onto a new platform and created my own Substack newsletter, called “MomsMatter.” This is my love offering to mothers. I have always been an advocate for working mothers. Since I am a pediatrician at heart, I like to give updates on important maternal and child health topics - maternal stressors, maternal burnout, pregnancy and breastfeeding issues, cannabis use, as well as typical childhood issues, such as vaccinations, gun safety, congenital CMV, prematurity, and intensive parenting. Now I feel that my pediatrician-mom-brain and my creative brain have finally blended.
What does a day in your life look like as a creative and a caregiver?
Grandchildren are so much easier to care for than your own children. There is much less pressure to get everything right. Sometimes, I am fortunate to babysit my two grandchildren, take them somewhere fun, or play with them outside in a park. This is a privilege for me, and it gets me away from my computer. On other more routine days, I exercise in the morning and write in the afternoons. Aerobic exercise, Pilates, and strength training keep my mind sharp, and my body fit so that I can create.
Dr. Susan Landers is a neonatologist who worked full-time in the NICU for over thirty years and raised three children to young adulthood. She achieved many academic and professional accomplishments, and she encountered challenges along the way, both in her career and in her mothering. Her children presented her with common problems and some not so common ones, such as dyslexia, ADHD, and an adolescent eating disorder. Susan suffered through one particularly difficult period during her midlife when she developed post-partum depression. That propelled her to make better lifestyle choices and to pivot in her career. She loves to tell stories that reassure younger mothers to know that they, too, can become a “good enough mother” even if they work full-time. She supports mothers with her social media posts, her blog, and her Substack newsletter, MomsMatter. Her recent memoir is So Many Babies: My Life Balancing a Busy Medical Career and Motherhood. Her new eBook is Defeating Burnout – a Guide for Working Mothers.
Dr. Landers can be found on LinkedIn and on Instagram as @DrSusanLanders. You can also find her on Facebook as SlandersMD and on X as @susanlandersmd. Her Substack newsletter, MomsMatter, can be found here. Please visit her blog for parents on her website. In addition, her new eBook “Defeating Burnout – a Guide for Working Mothers” can also be found on her website. Her memoir, “So Many Babies” can be found here.
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Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. You can find my books here and read other recent writing here.
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Dearest Zofia, you have so much to look forward to, all the love that child brings, all the joy, all the patients you will help or heal, all the challenges of medicine and motherhood that you, too will meet. Enjoy the precious ride. It is wonderful!
Thank you for sharing this Nancy and Susan. I am a Neurologist at the beginning of my career and early motherhood, so it is especially interesting for me to read and I am particularly glad to be made aware of Susan's memoir, which I look forward to tracking down and reading.