My firstborn turns ten this week. Ten. I have repeated that number several times because I am still trying to determine how that's mathematically possible. I distinctly remember bringing her home from the hospital approximately six months ago. Yet somehow, Sara Rose is now entering double digits, has opinions about my clothes, can identify when I am being unreasonable, and is old enough to retain evidence of my mistakes for future use. For her birthday, I bought her a purse a

About a year ago, I started doing pelvic Pilates because my lower back hurt. This was unusually responsible of me. My normal medical plan is to ignore a problem until it becomes disruptive, Google it at midnight, briefly diagnose myself with something fatal, and then wake up the next morning and go to work. Pelvic Pilates, annoyingly, worked. My back got better. My abs got stronger. At some point, I looked in the mirror and realized I had developed what I consider the thirty-

A brief warning: this one contains adult subject matter, questionable judgment, and significantly more discussion of nudity than is customary for a law firm website. Proceed accordingly. I overthink everything. I am a lawyer, so for years I called this a professional skill. Eventually, I had to admit that sometimes my brain is less “legal analysis” and more “seventeen tabs are open and one of them is screaming.” Either way, I knew I had a tendency to complicate things. What I

Nobody tells you this part. There is plenty of information about divorce. There are checklists for separating bank accounts, articles about co-parenting, podcasts about healing, and enough women on the internet telling you to rediscover yourself through Pilates and solo travel that I am beginning to think Delta Airlines is funding the entire divorce-recovery industry. But nobody tells you when you’re supposed to let another person see you naked. I feel like that deserved at l

I am going to say this plainly at the beginning so nobody has to read halfway through this article while trying to determine whether I am whispering my opinion behind a decorative hedge: I am on Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill’s side. Plainly, clearly and publicly. That does not mean I believe an attorney general is above the law. It means that when the government indicts its own chief legal officer on sixteen felony counts arising from legal letters she sent while def

Saturday morning, I was sitting on my couch doing absolutely nothing productive, which is apparently when my brain prefers to open investigations no one asked it to conduct. I was watching television, scrolling through the news and reading an article about two people I barely knew existed until the internet informed me their marriage was over. I knew enough to recognize one of the names. The husband works in music. There were photographs of the house, old quotes about their f

If you read Please Excuse the Mess, then you already know what the house may look like when you get here. What I probably should have explained is that the house is not the only thing around here with several projects going at once. I don't experience much of anything at a reasonable volume. I don't get mildly irritated with software. I become personally offended by it. Somewhere in my head, I have already decided the programmer who designed it either hates lawyers or simply

It is fairly easy to like me on a weekend. I can fix my hair, put on a dress, meet you somewhere that does not contain a single stray sock and carry on an uninterrupted adult conversation. I can laugh, flirt, order something I would never bother making at home and create the convincing impression that my life is calm, orderly and routinely accompanied by good lighting. That is not false advertising. It is simply the display model. To be more than a weekend, you are eventually

I Had to Become the Person Who Told Me No There are moments when missing someone is not quiet or sentimental. It is not looking through old pictures, hearing a familiar song or wondering how they are doing. It is an almost overpowering need to reach for them. You want to pick up the phone. You want to type their name. You want to ask them to come over, even if they only stay for an hour. You do not want closure, perspective or a lesson about letting go. You want your person.

Sometimes the hard days win. Today won. I do not enjoy admitting that, because I prefer to believe I am at least stubborn enough to win a Tuesday, but today had other plans and apparently came prepared. By the end of it, I was not having a “hard day” in the cute little way people say that when they had one inconvenient email and needed to breathe deeply in a parking lot. I was having the kind of day where you sit there and realize something in your work life has to change soo

Every day, somebody somewhere is offering a very confident opinion about the terms under which love should be allowed to survive. We have rules for it now. Timelines. Checklists. A person does this, so surely you cannot still love them. A child makes enough bad choices, gets in enough trouble, breaks enough hearts, and somebody decides the love should have expired by now. A spouse becomes distant, distracted, absent in the ways that matter most, and people start talking as th

By the time I walked in the door, my phone was already in my hand to call my husband. I had not even consciously decided to do it. My thumb just went there on muscle memory, like it had been operating under an old agreement nobody ever formally terminated. Then I looked down at the phone, remembered where life actually is right now, and stood there in a hot house with water spreading across the floor while the air conditioner apparently decided it, too, was no longer interest

A Louisiana Saturday Night I was not raised to crawl around in somebody’s yard like a worm being electrocuted. At that point in my life, I was introverted, focused on school, and generally built for a booth in the corner, a small group of people I already knew, and a reasonably clear exit plan. Then I started dating a man who was outgoing enough for both of us and had the deeply dangerous gift of making absolute nonsense sound like a confidence-building exercise. He could loo

I was sitting at my desk yesterday morning, hair fixed, makeup good, dressed like I had my life together, trying to get started on some serious work when I looked down at a Post-it note from the day before that said, in my own handwriting, “Trade Sara and JB for a long time.” I sat there looking at it for a solid minute, trying to figure out whether I had actually lost my mind and decided to start bartering children. There was no explanation beside it. No little arrow. No rem

There are days when I look around my house and think that calling it a “home” is technically accurate but wildly incomplete. A home is supposed to suggest a certain amount of peace, shelter, order, maybe a candle burning somewhere that does not smell vaguely like a combination of coffee, laundry detergent, and something you cannot identify without getting down on your hands and knees. What we have here is more like an unlicensed institution with Wi-Fi, legal files, three sma

By lunchtime today, I was sitting in front of a meal I could not eat, trying to decide whether I needed to go back to work or go to the emergency room. I had driven thirty minutes out of my way because I wanted to have lunch with someone. I wanted the conversation. I wanted an ordinary hour in the middle of an ordinary weekday. Instead, I sat there trying to take a bite because that is what people do at lunch, while knowing my body had already spent the day making other plans

There are some seasons in life when you might find yourself standing in a quiet kitchen, the hum of the refrigerator the only sound, staring at your phone as if it might light up with a message that never comes. Most of us go about our days without taking a moment to really look at ourselves. But somewhere inside the rhythm of our daily life, there can be a space that has quietly been reserved for someone who no longer seems interested in occupying it. That space can belong t

Some people fall apart loudly. I tend to get productive. I make lists. I answer messages too fast. I decide the office needs a new system, the house needs to be reorganized, the problem needs to be solved immediately, and if I can just get enough things handled, enough drawers labeled, enough work completed, enough pieces of life put back where they belong, then maybe I will feel settled too. For a long time, I thought that was simply discipline. Sometimes it was. Sometimes i

Yesterday, our conference room looked less like a law office and more like somebody had decided people deserved a morning to breathe. We had planned a staff day at Hampton Law Firm: a massage table set up in the conference room, candles burning, music playing, biscuits and gravy on the table, and a rotation of thirty-minute massages between the work that still needed to get done. Calls were answered. Files were handled. Tasks that had been piling up got checked off. It was no

I was having lunch with my father one day when I looked across the restaurant and saw someone I once shared a home with sitting across the room. We were not far apart. Close enough to see each other clearly. Close enough that there was no question whether either of us knew the other was there. Close enough that a person could have stood up, walked across the room, said hello, and acknowledged the history sitting between us in some ordinary, decent, human way. Instead, my