I Know I’m Pretty, But Did You See The Small Empire?

THOUGHTS OUTSIDE THE OFFICE

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It is midnight on Friday night. Technically, it is Saturday morning, but I have not slept, so I refuse to recognize Saturday’s authority. Until I have removed Friday’s bra, washed off Friday’s makeup, and briefly lost consciousness, Friday remains in effect by emergency order.

I walked through my front door around 10:00 tonight after leaving my office at 7:45, driving to Ruston to retrieve my children, getting everyone home, and beginning the calm, responsible process of packing three children for the spontaneous Great Wolf Lodge trip I surprised them with tomorrow. We are leaving at 5:00 a.m., because I am apparently both a loving mother and a complete fucking idiot.

The children are thrilled. They have now fallen asleep peacefully on the couch, dreaming of water slides, wave pools, overpriced chicken tenders, and magical childhood memories their mother is manufacturing through love, guilt, caffeine, and decisions that would not survive even casual professional review.

Meanwhile, their mother is standing outside at midnight staring into the darkness like a Victorian widow waiting for news from the war, except the war is an indoor water park in Texas, and I voluntarily entered my credit-card information.

I have a serious appointment with my doctor Monday. My health is doing poorly. That is about as much as I intend to say publicly right now, except that “poorly” is the polite Southern-lady version, and the word “critical” has recently entered the conversation with entirely too much confidence. A new medication made me sick as a dog Wednesday. My body has issued several formal warnings, requested emergency injunctive relief, and, I believe, retained independent counsel. I responded by working harder and purchasing admission to a humid building filled with chlorine, wet carpet, and six hundred children screaming beneath an enormous bucket. This is why women generally live longer than men, but perhaps not women like me.

All week, I have left the office around 8:00 at night, gone home, handled whatever motherhood required, and worked again until approximately 4:00 in the morning. I take what can only legally be described as a nap, wake up between 6:00 and 7:00, and begin again.

When I say I am working, I do not mean I am sitting peacefully behind a beautiful desk, slowly reviewing one tasteful leather folder while soft jazz plays and someone named Margaret brings me tea. I mean balls to the wall. I searched for a more ladylike substitute, but “bosom to the wallpaper” does not communicate the same level of urgency.

Every second belongs to someone. Clients, courts, judges, staff, children, deadlines, phone calls, emails, criminal cases, estate planning, successions, real estate, boundary disputes, guardianships, intake problems, billing questions, website problems, app problems, phone-system problems, and technology problems created by technology that was specifically purchased to solve the previous technology problems.

I own and operate a law firm, and I mean I operate it. I manage employees. I still handwrite payroll twice a month. I design and order my own letterhead. I rearrange and freshen my own lobby. I print my own cover letters, make my own copies, and carry them to my receptionist so that she can put them in the mail. Apparently, delegation is a management principle I support strongly in theory.

I also have a completely separate job as a contract felony public defender in Lincoln Parish. Three lawyers divide the felony caseload for the entire parish, and my portion belongs entirely to me. My private staff cannot access those files, manage those cases, answer those questions, or rescue me from any part of it. In that world, the lawyer is me, the staff is me, management is me, and the emergency contact is unfortunately also me.

I sit across from people accused of murder, violent offenses, crimes driven by addiction, and things most people would rather never discuss. I examine evidence, explain the law, protect constitutional rights, and speak intelligently and honestly to human beings whom the rest of the world may have already reduced to the worst allegation ever made against them. It is difficult work, important work, and most assuredly not work I accepted for the luxury public-defender compensation package and complimentary yacht.

Then I come home and become the mother of three children whose lives do not pause because their mother is exhausted. I have help, and I will never diminish the people who help me. But help is not the same as permanent responsibility, and it is certainly not the same as consistent financial responsibility.

I am the primary and consistent financial provider for my children. I always have been. Whether someone helps with childcare, keeps them overnight, buys something they need, or carries part of the load during a brutal week, the continuing responsibility for their home, food, clothing, healthcare, education, activities, emergencies, stability, and future rests with me. The final financial answer is my income.

Children cannot eat good intentions. The mortgage company does not accept emotional exhaustion. The electric bill has never once waived payment because my doctor used the word “critical.” No grocery-store cashier has offered to exchange three children’s food for documentation proving that their mother desperately needs a nap.

That is the context missing whenever someone says, “Just stop working.”

Even if my brain came equipped with a large red OFF switch—and apparently the manufacturer discontinued that feature before producing mine—the responsibilities would remain. I cannot announce that I am prioritizing wellness and temporarily suspend the cost of raising three human beings. Their lives require money every single day, and I am the person consistently responsible for earning it.

There is no graceful collapse available in that arrangement.

Tonight, after the children fell asleep, I stepped outside for a minute before beginning the next shift of my apparently court-ordered labor. I opened Facebook Messenger and counted no fewer than fourteen messages from men who know virtually nothing about me beyond my name, my photographs, and whatever fragments of my life they have absorbed while sitting on a toilet scrolling through Facebook.

“Hey beautiful.”

“Hello gorgeous.”

“You’re so pretty.”

Fourteen men. One collective thought. Not a single intellectual breakthrough among them.

Gentlemen, please.

You honestly believe you have cracked the code? You think you are the first man who has looked at my face and concluded that it is attractive?

Yes, I know I am beautiful. I work very hard at it. This hair does not highlight itself. These eyelashes did not rise from the dead without professional intervention.

There are products, appointments, chemical processes, electrical tools, and at least one woman with tiny tweezers involved in maintaining the final product.

I am not offended that you noticed. I have not invested this much money in skincare to pretend I dislike positive feedback. I enjoy being feminine. I enjoy looking good. I enjoy being admired. Humility is a lovely virtue, but I am not going to stand in front of a mirror after an hour of preparation and act surprised that the operation was successful.

But fourteen men independently reached the same groundbreaking conclusion: woman has face.

Remarkable work.

You passed the vision test. I am still waiting on the cognitive portion.

Fourteen nearly identical applications arrived for a position that was never advertised. Each candidate listed the same qualifications: functional eyesight, access to Wi-Fi, and the ability to locate the heart-eyes emoji. No cover letter. No original thought. No indication that any applicant had researched the position or possessed the operational skills required.

The applicant pool is weak.

One man could have distinguished himself by saying, “You have built an extraordinary amount with almost no margin for error, and I would like to know how your mind works.”

Another might have tried, “Your intelligence is intimidating, your work ethic is mildly alarming, and I suspect dating you would require stamina, excellent grammar, and proficiency in Microsoft Office.”

Now we are making progress.

Tell me you noticed my brain. Tell me you noticed the work. Tell me you watched me take twenty unrelated problems, pull them apart, turn them over, examine every angle, and produce an answer before most people had fully understood the question. Tell me you noticed that I can walk into court looking like I am headed to a board meeting, argue constitutional law, protect someone’s freedom, and return to the office ten minutes later saying something so inappropriate that my staff has to stare silently at their computers until the moment passes.

That is range.

Tell me you noticed that I can appear polished, proper, and entirely respectable, then speak to me for five minutes and discover an F-bomb, a dirty joke, and an extremely detailed opinion about why every office printer manufactured after 2014 is possessed by Satan.

Tell me you noticed that I can discuss murder charges, wills, usufructs, property lines, guardianships, business strategy, childhood wounds, website design, and whether a text containing only “you up?” should be admissible as conclusive evidence of intellectual bankruptcy.

Tell me you think I am interesting. Tell me I am intelligent as hell. Tell me you like watching me think. Tell me you respect the workhorse. Tell me my mind is sexy enough to make you nervous and my ambition is intimidating enough to make you arrive with coffee, snacks, and a clear understanding that “I can fix her” is not a personality.

I enjoy a little tension. I appreciate a well-delivered dirty joke. I am entirely capable of discussing evidentiary procedure while entertaining thoughts that would not survive review by the Louisiana Attorney Disciplinary Board. Proper grammar and improper thoughts can coexist beautifully. But there needs to be an actual person attached to the flirtation.

“Hey beautiful” is not seduction. It is a notification.

It tells me you saw a photograph. It does not tell me you saw me.

Because the face is the most obvious thing about me, and perhaps the least revealing. It tells you nothing about the woman maintaining it, the mind operating behind it, the history carried beneath it, or the three children depending on it to remain upright.

Had any of those fourteen men bothered to become curious, they might have found a little girl who learned very young that being noticed could become dangerous. While other children were sounding out syllables, learning cursive, memorizing multiplication tables, and racing across playgrounds, she was quietly learning how to make herself smaller. She learned that shame could arrive even when she had done nothing wrong. She learned how to leave pieces of herself somewhere else when being fully present became too difficult.

She did not have the language to explain any of it. She was still scraped knees, baseball games, playground dirt, and hair on her legs she had never considered removing. She was still learning what her body could do while beginning to understand that other people might try to assign its meaning for her.

She survived by becoming observant. Then intelligent. Then useful. Then very difficult to dismiss.

Later, you would find an athlete—a damn good one—discovering that her body could run, compete, endure, and win. It could carry strength instead of fear. It could belong to her.

You would find a girl who grew up playing inside her father’s law office, watching and absorbing more than anyone realized. Eventually, she began working beside him. Then, just as she believed she still needed him there, he handed her the keys and essentially said, “You do not need me. I am going to do something else.”

And she did it.

She built.

She built for thirteen or fourteen years through divorce, motherhood, heartbreak, illness, public humiliation, private grief, and long stretches when nobody was arriving consistently to relieve her. She built software systems, websites, online legal services, office procedures, educational materials, and a law practice offering things no one else around her had bothered to create.

She built while raising children. She built while carrying the financial responsibility for them. After her first divorce, she carried the physical responsibility largely alone too. She worked, parented, provided, protected, and continued moving because stopping was never financially available.

Then there were three children. Then came another unraveling, and a kind of single motherhood that did not arrive peacefully with mature conversations, color-coded calendars, and a co-parenting podcast.

It arrived after hell.

It arrived after the children had stood close enough to feel its heat, and their mother understood that protecting them was no longer an abstract maternal instinct. It was now the central operating system of her life.

She became the person who earned the money, made the decisions, maintained the stability, absorbed the emergencies, and convinced three children that the ground beneath them was solid even when she was privately holding it together with both hands.

And then, after seeing all of that—or at least having access to enough fragments to suspect there might be more—fourteen men submitted the same scholarly analysis:

“Hey beautiful.”

Thank God they arrived. The record was incomplete without their expert testimony. Both of my ex husbands were ironically alike in that aspect now that I can look back and see clearly. They both loved 14 different. Hey beautiful messages a day as well, except there’s weren’t to me, unfortunately or thankfully, depending on how you look at it.

Jokes aside, there is nothing admirable about running your body into the ground. There is nothing glamorous about surviving on stress, medication, caffeine, and stubbornness. But there is also something dishonest about pretending the work produced by a mind like mine is meaningless—or that I can simply put it down the way someone declines a second piece of cake.

The work is not cake. It is inside my brain, already rearranging furniture and explaining why we could rebuild the entire office before breakfast if everyone would stop being so negative.

I asked my doctor whether my mind working this way—this relentless intellectual, emotional, and productive overdrive—made me a bad lawyer. He told me it made me the only lawyer he would want representing him.

That was not permission to destroy myself. It was recognition of a difficult truth: the same brain capable of endangering me is also the brain that built nearly everything I am proud of.

He told me about a mentor whose mind worked similarly. There were periods when the man slept only an hour or two because he was constantly working, creating, and inventing. People hear about a mind moving that fast and imagine someone hallucinating in a parking lot and attempting to cross-examine a mailbox. But this man invented real medical tools that are still used across the country.

He also crashed.

That is the part people leave out. They celebrate the invention and skip the dehydration. They admire the finished work without asking whether the person who produced it has eaten dinner.

An idea enters my mind. I write it down before I forget it. Then I test it “for five minutes.” The next time I look up, it is 4:00 a.m., I have redesigned a business system, written an article, solved three client problems, planned something for my children, fixed something that was technically not broken, and once again forgotten that human beings require water.

The maddening part is that the work is usually good. It is useful, intelligent, innovative work. It helps clients. It supports my children. It builds my business. It creates experiences for the people I love. People eventually see the result and ask how I accomplished so much.

The honest answer is that sometimes I do not know.

I do not look at the clock, see 4:00 a.m., and consciously decide that work matters more than my health or my family. I look up and discover that 4:00 a.m. has happened to me.

But I do not keep moving only because my brain wants to create, and I do not keep moving only because my children financially depend on me. I also keep moving because I know what waits when everything becomes quiet.

Grief.

Work has become both my engine and my anesthesia. My mind was already difficult to stop, and then life handed it an economic requirement to continue and an emotional reason never to try.

Before certain events and certain people, I felt like a whole woman—a brain, a heart, and a soul that all belonged to the same person. Now, sometimes, I feel like a highly functional brain in heels carrying a briefcase while dragging the rest of myself behind it.

The brain still works beautifully. It can walk into court, run two professional lives, manage employees, raise children, solve ten problems, pay the bills, and convince everyone that the woman carrying it has everything completely under control.

But when the brain stops, the heart and soul have time to catch up.

So I keep moving—not because I believe exhaustion makes me noble, and not because I am glamorizing the damage, but because movement is currently how I earn, provide, parent, create, survive, and avoid feeling everything at once.

I am proud of this mind and everything it has built. I am proud that it has kept a roof over my children’s heads, food in their home, opportunities in front of them, and stability beneath them when almost nothing else in our lives has felt stable.

But I am beginning to understand that saving the woman who built the empire may be more important than adding one more wing to it.

Even if she already designed and ordered the letterhead herself.

For now, the children are asleep, the bags are not packed, and we leave in a few hours. I am counting how many more things I can finish before the 5:00 a.m. bell rings and I enter an indoor water park on no sleep, while adjusting to medication, surrounded by hundreds of small wet people with no respect for personal space.

I did not know whether I would make it through this week, but I will be damned if I stop trying to show up for them.

They will wake up excited. They will remember the water slides. They will remember that their mother surprised them. They will not remember that she packed their bags in the middle of the night while answering emails, working through pain, earning the money that makes their lives possible, and holding the entire operation together with caffeine and profanity.

Perhaps that is enough for one weekend.

Pray for me. Seriously. This may be the final documented sighting of my sanity.

And to the fourteen men currently awaiting a response, I offer this advice with love: raise the bar. Ask me what I am building. Ask me what I am thinking. Ask me what problem I am solving. Ask me how the hell I am still standing. Tell me you see the intelligence, the contradiction, the work, the history, the humor, the damage, the discipline, and the woman making all of them coexist in one pair of heels.

Tell me my mind is sexy. Tell me my ambition frightens you just enough to keep things interesting. Tell me you can handle a woman with courtroom heels, inappropriate humor, two legal careers, three children, an unreasonably complicated history, and absolutely no patience for lazy conversation.

Or, at the very least, skip “hey beautiful” and lead with something useful: “I packed the car, fixed the phone system, answered your emails, brought coffee, and I understand written instructions.”

Now that is foreplay.

Judith L. Hampton

Attorney at Law | Hampton Law Firm, LLC

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