Before You Get Comfortable

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 enjoys watching people suffer. I'll spend twenty minutes explaining exactly why the software is wrong, complete with supporting arguments and exhibits, as though Adobe Acrobat has retained counsel and we're scheduled for trial on Monday.

Then, without warning, I may turn around, bat my eyes at you, and ask for a hug because I'm tired of being the person who has to know the answer to everything and, for just a little while, I'd really like somebody else to be in charge.

Those two versions of me are not fighting each other. They're roommates.

I can be correcting one of my children, trying a felony case in my head, mentally rewriting a paragraph for a blog article, wondering whether I remembered to answer an email, and deciding the pantry has been organized wrong since the Carter administration, all before I've finished my first cup of coffee. None of those thoughts are related. My brain has simply never believed in taking turns.

If you ask me how court went, make sure you've cleared your schedule. You're not getting the highlights. You're getting witness testimony. I'll explain the judge's expression, the exact wording the defendant used, the moment the district attorney looked down because he knew if he made eye contact with me we'd both lose it, and why the court reporter deserves combat pay. I can't simply say, “Something funny happened today.” That's an irresponsible summary of the evidence.

One thing you should absolutely never, ever do is lovingly tell me to calm down. I know you'll mean well. I know you'll say it gently. I know your intentions will be pure. Unfortunately, the words “calm down” enter my body as formal notice that I have been misunderstood, and I will immediately begin preparing an appellate brief explaining why my current level of emotion is not only appropriate but fully supported by the facts.

If your goal is actually to help, don't tell me to calm down. Give me attention. Give me affection. Sit beside me and rub my back while I finish explaining why the software should be prosecuted. Better yet, offer to take all three kids for an hour so I can disappear into a legal research project that absolutely nobody asked me to do.

I realize that sounds completely backward, but there is something deeply therapeutic about chasing an obscure legal issue until I find the answer. Some women need a spa day. Apparently, I need Westlaw, uninterrupted silence, and a question obscure enough to consume the portion of my brain that was previously preparing to burn the entire world down over a technical malfunction.

My version of relaxing probably deserves its own disclaimer. I am apparently incapable of having a passing curiosity. A passing curiosity becomes a research question. The research question becomes seventeen open tabs. Seventeen open tabs become me announcing at 11:42 at night that I have just discovered something fascinating that nobody else in the house even knew we were investigating. This is often how I recover from spending all day solving other people's problems. I locate a completely different problem, make it mine without permission, and crawl so far inside it that I temporarily forget I was mad.

People who meet me during the workday sometimes think I am made entirely of sharp edges. I understand why. Most days, I am expected to be the boss at one office, counsel at the other, and the person who asks the difficult question, makes the decision, solves the problem, and keeps moving even when I would personally prefer to lie facedown on the floor for a respectable amount of time. Honestly, tell me a woman who can remain perfectly graceful when her days are spent alternating between conversations with grown men about how life in prison is their best case scenario, clients about emergency deaths in their family, software, employee and letterhead issues to an absolute chicken nugget crisis by 7pm, and you’ll be showing me my new role model, because I haven’t found a woman like that yet.

I spend all day questioning, directing, protecting, managing, anticipating, and deciding. After enough years of doing that, those muscles become strong. Sometimes they become so strong that I walk through the front door still wearing the authority long after I have taken off the suit.

It is hard to turn that part of myself off. The lawyer does not politely clock out at five. She follows me home, critiques the wording of emails, cross-examines explanations from children, evaluates the credibility of everybody's version of events, and would like the record to reflect that nobody has adequately explained why the wet towel is on the floor.

But underneath all of that, I get tired of being the strong one too.

Every once in a while, one of my children will look at me completely out of nowhere and say, “I love you, Mom,” or “I'm proud of you, Mom,” and it cuts straight through every hard edge I built that day. Suddenly, I am not the boss, counsel, the decision-maker, or the person everybody expects to know what happens next. I am just their mother, and the armor feels much heavier once I remember I am wearing it.

When I come home, I want to put that armor down. I want attention and affection. I want to soften without worrying that everything will collapse while I do it. I want to stop carrying the masculine responsibility of protecting, directing, fixing, and deciding long enough to settle back into the feminine part of myself and let somebody else carry the weight for a little while.

Then morning can come. I can put the suit back on, walk into the office, and become the woman who knows what to do again.

So before you get comfortable, you should know that life around me changes subjects without warning. There may be a courtroom reenactment before dinner, a prosecution of a software program afterward, an unnecessary household reorganization before bed, and somewhere in the middle I will probably want a hug while reminding one of my children to brush their teeth for the third time.

The mess was only the first disclosure. This is merely part of the fine print buried under the Terms and Conditions section that nobody reads until after they have already clicked “I Agree.”

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Judith L. Hampton

Attorney-at-Law

Hampton Law Firm