She also said that, at 20 weeks, being a tall woman, she isn’t really showing and just looks fat.  I remembered sticking my belly out and holding my back in those early days, so that everyone would know I was pregnant and not porking out on snacks.  It’s funny because these days I do the opposite – hunch over, trying to hide my belly, hoping nobody asks me when my baby’s due.  (I’m not having a baby – we’re clear on this, yes?  Therein lies the problem . . .)

In a similar but tangential vein, anybody have any good workout music ideas?  I’m a bit sick of my mix.  I’m a club-music kinda girl, at least for running.  It would horrify my former bandmates, but in my workout mix I love Top 40 – I’m all about Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Jay-Z, Usher, and the All American Rejects.  Anything with a danceable beat.  I need some inspiration.  All of this daily running makes a girl’s iTunes database grow tired quickly.

The woman decides she wants a change.  She begins cutting things.  Soda.  Cream.  Sugar from her coffee, and eventually half and half.  Meat.  Then salad dressing, sauces, mayonnaise on sandwiches.  She exercise 40 minutes a day, 4-5 days a week – either running or cycling first, then lifting weights.  She takes the stairs, always, parks far from the store’s front door, always chooses to walk instead of drive.  Eventually, she . . . she begins to look at her alcohol consumption.  Even this, this heavenly crutch, eventually has to go.  In two months, she winnows down five pounds.

The man goes to the gym a couple times a week for a couple weeks, and then one morning chirps from his perch on the bathroom scale – “Hey honey!  I lost five pounds!  Awesome!”

And then the woman shoots the man.

The end.

In 2009 I was in my fourth year of working in an untenable job.  I’ve already password protected or deleted most of the posts I wrote while I was working there.  I think it’s wise to leave that stuff in the past – all I’ll say is I still sometimes think I need therapy to process everything that went on there.  I was in a very extreme situation that had to change.  I tried very hard to find work in the same field (of Human Resources), but between the recession, my being shackled to a fellow professional with his own geographic limitations*, and an unplanned pregnancy (ever interviewed while heavily pregnant?  how about in a manufacturing setting in a rural community? they laugh you out of the room), I was unable to get out into a new job.  I was willing to take a step down, in both authority and pay – willing to take a step UP if somebody would let me! – but it was the beginning of this terrible recession, and my resume was one of hundreds and thousands on each hiring manager’s desk.  I only got a handful of interviews, and all of those jobs (also in manufacturing) would almost certainly have put me in a similar situation anyway.

Meanwhile, several things put law school on my radar.  Some of these are ridiculous, but I swore I’d be honest with you.  The first small thing was that I read a detective series by Margaret Maron which follows the hijinks (professional, personal, and crime-solving) of an awesome female lawyer-cum-judge named Deborah Knott.  (She lives in North Carolina in the area where I used to live, which is why I LOVE this series.)  This was clearly fiction, but still – reading about a lawyer’s day pricked my ears.  Like Deborah, I’m good at a mile wide and an inch deep (this is probably why I struggled in my Masters program, which requires the opposite).  I work best on lots of different projects that are in different stages of maturity.  I work best when I am totally flexible and can come and go as I please (within the limits of the work demands, of course!) Deborah had all these things in her (admittedly fictional) job.

The second small thing was that I received tons of working mom magazines at this time, and almost all of them listed law firms and law jobs as best for working moms because of their flexibility.  In addition to the flexible schedule (you have to work a zillion hours, but you can also leave the office for a kid function pretty easily), many Big Law firms had excellent benefits and maternity leaves at this time.  (The Great Recession has since killed many of those, as it has for pretty much every field.)  Even Fortune Magazine, Business Weekly, and many of the other HR and business mags that I saw would routinely include several law firms in their Top 100 Places to Work lists.  My former workplace would easily have fallen on the Worst 100 Places to Work, and I was really worried about jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire with a new job.  It seemed that I had a better chance of having personal satisfaction at a law job than I would in a manufacturing environment.  I also knew that the law would probably be just as sexist and non-mom-friendly as most other fields – but that there was no WAY it could POSSIBLY be as bad as manufacturing, which is a very conservative industry and way behind the curve in this arena.  I think I maybe could have had it worse if I was trying to work on an oil rig . . . but otherwise, my old job was as bad as it gets.

Thirdly, I was making this decision around the time of the last primaries and the presidential election.  I surveyed the women of the field.  I was more impressed by women with law degrees than those without, and felt a kind of obligation to be a well educated and smart female voice in my community.

Fourthly – and I recognize that this is silly – I thought that perhaps I’d be less likely to encounter the dismissive and demeaning behavior that was a regular part of my working day if people thought I was a lawyer and were afraid of me being able to sue them.  There’s a power dynamic at play, and I wanted to adjust the scales a bit.

The final reason, the one that was The Actual Reason, was that a quick glance at law school statistics showed that most graduates were employed within 9 months of graduation, and most of those employed were making $150,000 or more.  My husband and I were already deep into student loan debt.  I hated the thought of keeping the status quo – which is to say, leaving home at 7 am, driving an hour and a half to my awful job and dropping my lovely kid off at daycare on the way, working til 5:30, driving an hour and a half home, being too exhausted to enjoy my child when I got home at 7 or so, and still having to make dinner, tidy the house, prep the daycare bags for the next day, do laundry, blah blah blah.  Making what I made, and working as far from home as I worked, I was spending no time with my kid, and having pretty much no money to show for it after loan payments came out.  If I could make six figures and live close to work, I could pay down those loans aggressively, and we would have some chance of perhaps possibly one day in the very distant future having the possibility of not being weighed down by the load of a home-mortgage’s worth of debt.  I could also afford the kind of support services that I think all working moms would love – saving me precious weekend and evening time to be able to enjoy my children and relax (rather than get the laundry and dishes caught up).  I now know, of course, that the school employment statistics I was looking at are total BS.  But at the time, I was still just messing around, only 10% serious, so a quick look is all I gave.

So anyway, things were coming to a head at work, and I got job rejection after job rejection, and I remember tentatively mentioning to my husband during a long drive one day that I was thinking about escaping my job by heading to law school.  I just wanted to ponder the possibility, I said.  He was enthusiastic.  I decided to do more research.  It was mid-November.  Within a matter of minutes of googling I learned there was only one more chance to take the LSAT in order to get scores in enough time to go to law school the next fall.  (I could not have lasted longer than that at my job, I’m telling you now.)  That chance was two weeks away.

I shrugged and signed up for the LSAT.  I’m good at standardized tests, and I did well on this one.  (If I hadn’t done well, that would have been the end of that road, and I’d have thought up some other way out of hell.)

I hurriedly applied to a handful of schools – all in cities where my husband was applying for jobs.  We agreed that I’d only go if I got a full scholarship.  We weren’t willing to add significant amounts to our student loan debt.  Making six figures wouldn’t help our dire student loan situation if we doubled down on the debt to get there!  At this point, it was still kind of a lark.  The expenditure on the LSAT and apps was minimal.  I wasn’t committed.

Then I got a full scholarship at two schools, and suddenly this was real.  And the thought of having an end date for my terrible job was just like a million angels singing the Hallelujah Chorus while I lounged on a beach and sipped martinis and also lots of other positive and excellent imagery.  I was drunk on the possibility of Getting Out.  I read about a zillion blogs on why you shouldn’t go to law school, started reading all of the MILPs blogs, read Planet Law School II, and in spite of all they said I made the decision.  By this time I knew the real (dire) employment statistics for lawyers, but I didn’t care.  I had faith in my ability to work it out, and also pinned a lot of hopes on the recession ending while I was in.

After a few more awful days at work, we decided to take the leap.  We decided that I’d figure out during my first year of school whether I liked being a lawyer or not.  If not, I wasn’t paying tuition, so no harm done.  I’d have gotten out of my awful job, and I could start looking for another immediately upon the realization that the law sucks.  But if it didn’t suck  - well then, I’d keep going.

I liked it.  I stayed.

So, three years later, I did find that job.  It was largely luck, and willingness to move to a small sleepy southern city that many of my (much younger) fellow students would rather die than live in.  I worked hard, too, but a lot of people work just as hard or harder than I, and still don’t get this outcome.  If I had it to do again, I’m telling you truly I think I’d research nursing school.  I love the law – I really do!  The research, the writing, the arguing before a judge – it’s all great.**  It suits my skill set to a tee.  I think I’m going to love my law job.  But nurses are in demand, whereas lawyers are a dime a dozen.  Also, I think nursing school is shorter, cheaper, and where you go doesn’t much matter.  And nurses can pick their hours, whereas there isn’t a real part time (or even normal 40-hours-per-week) job option for lawyers.  At least not one that isn’t hugely, almost unfathomably competitive.***  (Congrats to our own LL for making that dream come true!)  The thought of being in demand, for the first time in my working life, is a dizzying thought.  But that’s not the road I chose, and I’m darn committed to this one.  I’m done getting degrees.  I’ve chosen my career.  I’m lucky enough that I was able to get a job doing it, at a firm that I love and (just as importantly) has TONS of work.

A lot of my story involves luck, and not diligent research.  It was luck that I got scholarships (I think the fact that I applied late in the cycle helped, as schools had already received lots of rejections).  It was luck that I liked what I was doing, even though I had never had much experience in law before.  It was luck that I got a great job when so few people do.  It was luck that the job is within a 2 hour drive of my husband’s great job.  Most people going to law school would not be so lucky.

So if you’re thinking about it – think very hard.  I’m almost inclined to say that unless you are absolutely certain this is the life you want and no other will do, then do NOT go to law school for full price.  If you can’t get a significant break on your tuition, don’t go.  Even if you love your job, you’ll hate the loan payments.  They will bring you DOWN, man, big style.  There are lots of other paths to pursue, paths that aren’t crowded with zillions of other jobless individuals with qualifications as good as yours or better.  It isn’t easy to get a job in any field right now, but the surplus of lawyers is not a fiction – it’s a real problem, and with like five new law schools being built right now, it ain’t a problem that’s going to go away anytime soon.  Think HAAAAAARD before you go.

But if it’s your dream and you’re willing to work like crazy, don’t let me talk you out of it.

Signed – me, at 10pm, about to go off and do about 3 hours’ work on assignments, because sometimes law school BLOWS.

*happily shackled, of course, but being a wedded pair of professionals does limit one’s own career in certain ways.

**at my firm, first-years argue motions and take depositions.  Somehow, I landed at Medium Law, where I get the decent salary and also am not relegated to doc review for six years.  Again with the LUCK LUCK LUCK.

***Also, I never want to move again, not ever never never.  And I’d almost certainly have to move to get one of these way competitive in-house jobs.

I am very frustrated.  That’s usually what I say.

Parenting little ones is hard, eh?  I have nothing new to add to that statement.  I want more patience, I want more time with them and also less time with them so I can have more time for me.  I want to sleep well, and regularly, again.  I want the time to do more endurance sports – and when I say more, I actually mean “some,” since I’ve never done more than a very slow couple of half marathons, which most endurance athletes would chuckle at.  I want law school to be over so I can start my job and begin paying off debt NOW!  I want I want I want.

But that’s not where we are now, so it goes.  I love the turkeys, anyhoodle, even if they can be, like, TOTAL DRAGS sometimes.

I am very happy right now.  I say that a lot, too.  I say it when Liam trots up to me with a pair of Jack’s Lightning McQueen rainboots and says “boo’s on?  Nigh Queen?  boo’s on?” and I put his boots on and then he makes me wear MY rainboots so we can tromp around the house together – that makes me happy.  When Jack spontaneously apologizes to Liam for taking his toy, and then they play with it together, that makes me happy (and also SHOCKED because it don’t happen often ’round these parts).  When Liam follows Jack to the potty and sits down on the bathroom scale while Jack does his business – just so they can be together and chat – that makes me darn happy.

I am very happy.  I have no reason not to be!

But I’m also very sleepy.  And that, I think, is fair enough.

I’m also focusing on wellness for myself.  That is to say, I’m trying to lose this pesky twenty pounds.  I’ve been eating either a Slim Fast or a green smoothie or a bowl of plain Cream of Wheat with dried cherries for breakfast every day, I have fruit or veggies and hummus and maybe a bit of cheese for lunch, and I’ve stuck with vegetarian dinners (for the most part) that are delicious and healthy.  I occasionally cheat – we had waffles for breakfast the other day – but not as often as I used to.  In fact, the other day I walked down to a nearby Whole Foods to get Jack and myself a slice of spinach pizza for dinner – and I resisted!  I got him pizza and a salad without dressing for myself.  That was a feat, people, and I will be proud of myself for a while for that one.  It helps that Whole Foods’s salad bar is the bomb.  Edamame, peas, corn, cooked egg, a smidge of cheese, red cabbage, carrot shavings, radishes . . . on and on with the fresh deliciousness.

*All this said, I am eating too much King Cake.  Damn you, Mardi Gras!  Damn you, New Orleans!*

In addition to eating well, I’ve been exercising pretty regularly since December.  I was running about 40 minutes (so 4-ish miles), 4-5 days a week, and I’ve since added in some gym time.  So the frustrating thing is that it’s been a few weeks now and the scale hasn’t budged, and nor has my body changed (at least as far as I can tell by the way my clothes fit).  But I’m giving it lots and lots of time.  It helps that Liam sleeps a little better these days.  I actually have some energy to devote to this.

My classes are all set.  I’m investigating that bad grade.  I really feel like maybe he missed a page or something, or mixed up my confidential exam number.  But if not – if he got my whole exam, and he graded it, and that’s what I got, then I’m not going to argue.  I just need to make sure it wasn’t a clerical error of some kind – because every one in my study group got As, and even a couple of people who attended ONE LOUSY CLASS all term and didn’t study for the exam til the night before got some flavor of B.  It’s odd.  We’ll see.  If I keep that grade, then it’s almost a blessing, because I did the calculations and there’s no way I can get summa cum laude.  However, I’d have to do extremely poorly to lose magna cum laude.  That would mean that this term would be EXTREMELY low pressure.  That wouldn’t be a bad thing.

The boys are great.  I took them to the aquarium on MLKJ day, and they ran around the fishes holding hands the whole time.  It was adorbs.  Also, we got there right when it opened, and I took them straight up to a new free flying bird aviary, where you go in and feed the birds peanut butter off of sticks, while they land on your head and walk all over your arms.  It’s pretty awesome, and for a while we were the only ones in there.  The boys lost their minds with glee, and I almost took a bird home in the diaper bag as a stowaway, til I noticed the little dude was in there making a nest out of Liam’s precious Puppy.

The Professor is great, too.  He’s teaching a grad level class this term, which makes a nice change from undergrads.  (He likes teaching undergrads, too, but it’s a whole different animal when they’re grad students.)

So, knock on wood once more, and again for good measure, but things are going ok in the RG household.  I hope it stays that way!

“You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery.”

*********************************************

I think of Reverend King, today – to be honest, though, this is only because a speech of his was playing on the radio when I flipped it on in the car.  Otherwise, I would totally have forgotten.  I was driving my children to the aquarium.  Jack wouldn’t be quiet, so I yelled at him, too loudly.*  I wanted to hear.

I think of Occupy Wall Street, also.  I think of underclasses, and struggle.  One man was a catalyst for change.  He didn’t even need social networking to accomplish it.  He was 39 when he died.

I think of the marines who peed on those dead people in a desert pretty far away, and all of the people who don’t think this was bad.  There is a big ruckus on facebook today.  I stayed out of it.  Slaves, fighting amongst themselves.  We holler and screech about urine and disrespect and the flag and what we can expect out of the people we send so far from home into so much danger, and the Powers That Be chuckle at our misdirected fury.  They continue to get away with it.

We need another one like him.  I picture a body literally floating above the fray.  Elevating the conversation.  I hope this person comes soon.

* Jack was saying “Where we goin’ mama, where we goin?” for the fiftieth time, and I said “QUIET!!” and he said “You shout at me, mama?” and I said “I get frustrated sometimes Jack, because you ask me too many questions.  I don’t want to always answer questions, ” and he said, “but why mama?  But why?  Mama?  Why?  Why you fustated? Why?  WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY”

Hometown (to be printed in commencement program): ____________________

I never know what to put for these things.  Luckily nobody cares.

I was tired as all hell, because the Baby Fairy granted me a non-sleeping baby this second time around, and Liam straight up doesn’t sleep.  Like, ever.  An hour or two nap, and an hour or two before midnight, but otherwise, my kid is UP and ready to PARTY.  I am over it.  Seriously, like, beyond over it.  It’s been 19 months.  I can’t take this anymore.  I’m going to start drugging this child, if he doesn’t begin exhibiting the same normal sleep patterns as every other human being in this household.  He doesn’t cry – he’s just cheerfully, energetically AWAKE, for about 20 hours out of every 24.  God help me.

I woke up energized despite my exhaustion from having an overnight assignment (which, let’s be honest here, I worked on til 9pm, then went to sleep til Liam woke me up at midnight, and then resumed the assignment at 5am when I finally quit trying to force him to lay the eff down and sleep a bit.  So in other words, it’s not like I stayed up late or anything.  It’s also not like I slept til a normal hour, either, but I blame my child, not my homework.)

Ahem.

I was energized from fear (obviously not from an abundance of restful sleep).  We had the awesome opportunity to argue in front of a federal district court judge, in a federal district court, which (as our teacher pointed out) many 6-7 year lawyers in bigger cities still have never done.  Doing this kind of thing is so important, because the more times you do it, the better you are.  And for sure the first time you do it you are absolutely awful.  No question.  So having the first time you do it be a mock thing, instead of for a real client – AWESOME opportunity.

Our judge was great.  He was tough on the people who could handle it, and for those who blanked and stammered, he was gentle.  After I argued my defense motion to exclude an expert testimony (in a fake case), he gave me high praise, but he praised everybody in our group of 8.  HOWEVER.  Later, at the schmoozy party for all of the practitioners, judges, and students, the judge and our teacher/practitioner came up to me and pulled me aside and said – seriously, you’re amazing at this.  That was the best I’ve ever seen a student do.  Etc. Etc.  My head grew fifty sizes bigger.  I knew I’d been confident up there – I’m a theatre major, after all – but this was very validating.  I’d impressed a federal district court judge, I’d impressed a 6 year practitioner and former tenure track law professor.  Go me, right?

Then I came home, and discovered that all my grades had posted.  All of them were great – except one.  An exam I felt good about, stuff I knew well, a class I was confident in, I got a TERRIBLE grade.  I saw a letter I’ve never seen before on my transcript.  Nothing even close.  I saw my summa cum laude go floating merrily away.  Totally killed my buzz.

Aside from thriving on external validation – which I fully admit as a character flaw – law school grades are important for getting jobs.  Summa cum laude could open doors for me, if I ever want them opened (I love the firm I’ll be working for, but you never know – The Professor and I may want to work in the same city one day).  This grade will drop me very, very far down the scale, and show up as a beacon on my transcript from here out.  I’m married to a professor, so I know how annoying it is when a student questions a grade.  But by the same token, I went to every class, took good notes, worked with a study group, had a great outline, felt like I knew virtually every answer, and get the worst grade I’ve ever gotten by far.  The professor (an adjunct, a local practitioner) was really ticked that he was being forced to curve the class this year.  I’m sort of hoping he was making a point by giving a large part of the class terrible grades, and perhaps the point could be un-made and grades recalculated?

If not, it’s ok.  I have a job.  It’s an anomaly.  I can take the wounding to my pride, and the blemish on my transcript.  But not without checking to be absolutely certain he didn’t get it wrong somehow!  (In undergrad, I once got a D- in the class.  I politely inquired how that could be possible, and discovered that two names had been transposed, and it had been a clerical error.   Could that be so here?)

Anyway.  You win some, you lose some.  Impress a judge, fail to impress a Marine Insurance lawyer.  I’m trying not to be too angry, since it very well could be all my fault.  But still.  It would’ve been nice to float on the praise for a little bit, before I got the deflating grade.  Grrrrr.