Mother scholar.
The phrase rolls off the tongue with the force and ferocity of a curse word—blunt, unsparing, weighty. I didn’t coin the term, but I inhabit it. A vessel for the seeming contradictions of tenderness and skepticism, integration and dissection. Of being simultaneously maternal and cerebral in institutions that reward detachment, autonomy, and efficiency.
As I sit in reflection this May—a month of devotion to motherhood and due dates for faculty activity reports—I’m struck by how both feel like an act of submission for evaluation.
I am a physician coach, medical school professor, and mother of three, inclusive of a disabled child. I live and work at the intersection of competing expectations. My advocacy is not theoretical. My scholarship is not abstract. My pedagogy is shaped by parenting a child who defies categorization. How do I fit the many parts of who I am into a series of drop-down boxes and bullet points?
When my son was born with a congenital cytomegalovirus (cCMV) infection, I quickly became the only person in most rooms with both intimate knowledge of his body and scientific expertise in his condition. Scientific, not clinical—there is a difference. While my son has a wonderful team to treat each of his many siloed diagnoses, physicians and related service providers generally have low knowledge of CMV transmission and congenital infection, even in states that mandate CMV education during pregnancy, even in specialties that support and manage hearing differences.
My son’s diagnosis exposes the limits of the system, a space where clinical authority often fails to meet lived reality. And so, I stepped up to bridge the gap. I am not a physician. I am a scientist and I am a mother. And in that dual role, I began to re-learn what it means to look at a body—not as a site of dysfunction or something to fix, but as a whole, complicated human ecosystem: interconnected and interdependent.
The many parts of who my son is.
Of who I am.
Of who we are to each other.
And I began to pay closer attention. In medicine, we teach to observe, but not always to see. We teach to ask questions, but often from authority, not from curiosity. I have witnessed case presentations that totally overlook the personhood of the patient. Medicine has become so focused on performance that we lose presence.
When did we stop teaching doctors how to say, I don’t know?
When did we stop asking, Tell me what this means to you?
These are clinical skills, and human ones. And they require vulnerability.
My family, and especially my disabled son, teach me this every day. He is neither tragic nor inspirational. He simply is, and he lives with pride. In that pride, he offers something back—an invitation to expand our understanding of competence, connection, and being humble to uncertainty. Parenting has meant unlearning the cultural scripts that told me what a body should do and relearning how to attend to what a body is doing—with strength, grace, and joy. This kind of transformation doesn’t lend itself to curricular checkboxes. It is the long and slow work of shifting my gaze, and it has changed how I teach, how I coach, and how I lead.
Looking at this annual activity report, I felt the familiar guilt—the pressure to fit in motherhood “where convenient,” as if caregiving is an extracurricular. But it is central to all parts of who I am. Not a side task, but a lens. A practice. A source of wisdom.
Academic mothers navigate constant role conflict. Our competence is quietly questioned. Our time is always under surveillance. And yet, we persist—developing resilience, seeking support, leaning on one another. I live in the constant toggling between tasks: the classroom, the hospital room, the Zoom screen, the journal article, the IEP meeting, the invited lecture—they all blur. I don’t live in separate worlds. I embody a spectrum.
Physicians will recognize this rhythm. The feeling of never quite finishing the note, never giving the ideal amount of time to the patient, never quite getting to the bottom of your inbox—or your stress. Each task feels only half-done. And so you fall short. Daily.
This is not a call for balance. “Balance” suggests symmetry, stasis. We live in motion. In flux. We manage complexity not because we are superheroes, but because we must. And we do so with resilience, creativity, and the occasional surrender to the mess.
This essay is not a personal indulgence. It is a call to medicine to realign itself with humanity. To allow us to bring our full selves, not as liabilities but as assets. To recognize that caregiving is not a distraction from professionalism, but a deeper expression of it. To build systems where the labor of care is not invisible, and the work of healing includes the healer.
There are events that bifurcate a life. Not in half, but in parasagittal slices like the body cleaved open in anatomy textbooks. Motherhood, especially of a disabled child, is such an event that opens a window into parallel lives: who I might have been, who I am now, and who I’m still becoming.
My life has diverged from certain academic norms, and in that divergence, I’ve found clarity. I never want to go back to being less intentional in my relationships—with physicians, with colleagues, with students, or with my own family.
These years have changed me.
They have taught me to stay in the room.
To ask better questions.
To live into the answers.
So call me a Mother Scholar.
Not as a curse. But as a whole person.
Present. Unfinished. Fully alive.
Kathleen Muldoon is a certified coach dedicated to empowering authenticity and humanity in health care. She is a professor in the College of Graduate Studies at Midwestern University – Glendale, where she pioneered innovative courses such as humanity in medicine, medical improv, and narrative medicine. An award-winning educator, Dr. Muldoon was named the 2023 National Educator of the Year by the Student Osteopathic Medical Association. Her personal experiences with disability sparked a deep interest in communication science and public health. She has delivered over 200 seminars and workshops globally and serves on academic and state committees advocating for patient- and professional-centered care. Dr. Muldoon is co-founder of Stop CMV AZ/Alto CMV AZ, fostering partnerships among health care providers, caregivers, and vulnerable communities. Her expertise has been featured on NPR, USA Today, and multiple podcasts. She shares insights and resources through Linktree, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and her academic work includes a featured publication in The Anatomical Record.
