She knows her son is watching. He is an infant, but Cherilyn Davis, MD, Pediatrics, has noticed that he sees when she picks up her phone. He senses, she says, when her face changes as she reads a patient message. So she has made a decision: when she does reach for the phone, she tries to make sure he is settled first, engaged with a toy or a book, in a safe space. It is a small logistical act, but the reasoning behind it is not small at all. It is about attachment, about not breaking something that is still being built.
Davis practices direct primary care pediatrics, which means she is available to her patient panel around the clock. That availability is part of the care model she has chosen. It also means that the line between work and home is not just blurry, it is structurally absent. Her phone is both her clinical tool and the thing her son watches her disappear into. That tension does not resolve itself. It gets managed, moment by moment, with a deliberateness that most parenting books do not account for.
"I am extremely intentional about the moments when I do pick up my phone to work, which can be frequently, since I'm available to my patient panel 24/7. I do my best to ensure he's in a safe space and engaged with a toy or a book in an effort not to break the connection from me and to maintain a secure attachment."
What is striking about how Davis talks about all of this is that she does not frame it as sacrifice or survival. She frames it as repair. The imperfect moments, the distracted glance, the flattened expression, those are not failures to be catalogued with guilt. They are moments that can be returned to. She tells her patients the same thing she tells herself: what happens after the imperfect moment matters too.
"Repairing and bonding with a child if we are overstimulated or distracted during an interaction is as meaningful as the original moment."
Her son, for his part, has no idea she is a physician. He does not know about patient messages or care panels or the particular demands of a practice built on availability. When he is older, she hopes to tell him that she spent her days going into homes to see families and help keep children like him healthy. There is something in that image worth sitting with: the pediatrician who tends to other people's infants, coming home to her own.
The guilt that physicians carry as parents rarely makes it into clinical training, and it rarely surfaces in the professional spaces where physicians talk to one another. What Davis is describing is something more granular than burnout, a daily negotiation between presence and obligation, with an audience of one who cannot yet name what he is noticing but notices it anyway. Whether grace, as she practices it, is a coping strategy or something closer to a clinical philosophy may be a distinction without a difference.
