by Steve Christensen

Created on: May 19, 2010   Last Updated: June 07, 2010

If there’s one thing that strains a marriage more than infidelity, it has to be medical school. The nights away from home, the unrelenting fatigue, the divergence of interests, the unreasonable expectations…all are at least as distracting as any illicit affair could ever be.

During the years before I plunged into medical training, our family garden was the center of our universe. If it was light outdoors and I wasn’t at work, we were in the garden. Even when our financial needs outstretched our income and the garden became our principal source of nutrition, that quarter-acre plot served functions beyond the prosaic: Whether toiling along rows of beans or staking unruly tomato vines, we could converse about things that lay outside the boundaries of horticulture – things like dreams, aspirations, and hopes; our children unveiled grand mysteries within the verdant confines of our garden.

When my medical training commenced and we moved into the termitarium that is student housing, we were fortunate enough to be granted a small, rocky patch of ground where we – along with several other families – continued to cultivate a few vegetables and a cluster of flowers.

Whenever we drove past our assigned plot, the kids would point and exclaim, “There goes our garden!”

In a world that was already imperceptibly beginning to fray at its edges, they, too, found solidity in a simple rectangle of soil.

Once we negotiated the dark, interminable days of medical school, we belly-flopped into residency. We uprooted our young family once again and moved to another city, where we rented a home not far from the hospital where I would essentially live for the ensuing three years. The house was nice enough, but it didn’t have space for a garden.

We should have seen the trouble coming.

Whether it was the demands of the residency, my growing cynicism (an all-too-common consequence of medical training), a lack of common direction, or simply the absence of a place where we could meet and get our fingers dirty, our marriage unraveled completely. In the midst of my final residency year, in an atmosphere of bitter disappointment, I moved to a small house where I could be near the hospital (of course!) but remain within easy reach of my children, who were utterly devastated by the divorce.

The first Christmas after our separation was a painful one. I was perched on one end of the sofa, watching the kids open their presents, when my pager

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