The Nuthouse

---

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 small people operating on different emotional frequencies, and one adult woman who is trying to answer professional emails while quietly wondering whether she is still wearing the same shirt she started the day in.

There is no real beginning to the chaos because it does not begin. It is already happening when you wake up. The laptop is open somewhere it should not be. There are work files spread across a table that was originally intended for family meals but has slowly become a satellite office for Hampton Law Firm. My phone is vibrating beneath something. Nobody knows what.

There is always one remote missing, but not in a normal, “oh, check the couch cushions” kind of way. No. Our remotes disappear like they are cooperating with an organized criminal enterprise. I have found one in a toy box, one in the pantry, one inside a purse that no child should have been able to reach, and one in the refrigerator, which I still believe was not an accident but a warning.

At some point every day, I become less of a mother and more of a detective with absolutely no budget, no backup, and no idea what crime I am actually investigating. There is always a mystery smell. Always. It is never something simple, like trash that needs to be taken out. It is always something that requires a slow walk through the house, narrowed eyes, and the kind of silent forensic assessment that would make the Louisiana State Police Crime Lab proud.

I have spent more time than I care to admit standing in the middle of a room trying to determine whether an object is wet, why it is wet, who touched it last, and whether I need gloves before I proceed. Law school did not prepare me for that. Criminal defense did not prepare me for that. Frankly, I do not think any training program in the world could prepare a person for finding a wet pull-up underneath furniture and realizing you now have to establish a timeline.

The six-year-old has recently decided that gravity is more of a suggestion than an actual law of nature. He has no fear of heights, speed, sharp corners, furniture, stairs, or bodily injury.

He is the kind of child who can be sitting peacefully one moment and, thirty seconds later, be airborne for reasons nobody can explain. A few days ago, he walked directly into a door handle hard enough to knock himself out. Not brushed it. Not bumped it. He made full contact with that door handle like it had insulted his family. One second he was moving through the house at the speed of a small escaped inmate, and the next second he was on the floor while I was trying to decide whether I needed an ambulance, a neurologist, a priest, or all three. He woke up annoyed that everyone was looking at him, which is apparently the kind of confidence it takes to recover from getting taken out by household hardware.

Meanwhile, the three-year-old is living in what appears to be a permanent one-woman variety show. She has no respect for timing, privacy, furniture, or the idea that a person might be trying to have a serious phone conversation.

She enters rooms like a celebrity arriving at an after-party, announces herself loudly, spins in circles, and has recently become deeply committed to showing everyone her booty as though she has discovered a hidden talent that the world deserves to witness. There is no buildup. There is no explanation. You can be standing at the counter trying to answer a message about a legal matter involving actual adults with actual problems, and suddenly a tiny person appears behind you, lifts her shirt, turns around, and waits for applause.

The oldest is in that hard, tender stage where the things happening inside her mind are becoming bigger than the things happening around her. She asks real questions now. Questions that make you stop what you are doing because they deserve more than a distracted answer from across the room. She has thoughts that scare her sometimes, feelings she is still trying to name, and a mind that moves faster than she knows how to explain.

There is something deeply unfair about being expected to answer the important questions of a nine-year-old’s heart while somebody else is yelling from another room, the dog is losing its mind over something outside, the phone is ringing, and a work deadline is blinking at you from a computer screen. But that is the job. You sit down. You listen. You tell her she is not strange, not broken, not alone. Then you stand back up, step over whatever is on the floor, and return to the rest of the circus.

I would love to tell you that I move through all of this with the calm maturity of a woman who has a system. A planner. A color-coded schedule. A nice little basket by the door where things belong. That is not what is happening. A few minutes ago, I walked out the back door, turned sideways at precisely the wrong time, lost my balance for no reason at all, and fell completely on my ass. There was no slippery surface. No child ran into me. No dog got under my feet. I simply moved my body in a manner it did not agree with, and the next thing I knew I was lying in the yard wondering whether I had broken something, whether anyone saw me, and whether I could convincingly pretend it had been intentional.

The worst part was not the fall itself. The worst part was the immediate realization that I had become the kind of adult who falls in the backyard for no reason and then has to sit there for a second while her dignity catches up. I did not scream gracefully. I made a noise that can only be described as a chicken being informed of bad news. Then I had to get up, look around, brush myself off, and walk back inside as though nothing had happened, because in this house there is no time to process your own embarrassing collapse. There are still unanswered messages. There are still files to review. There is still something sticky on the counter. The remote is still missing. Somebody is still asking for something. Life does not pause because you have briefly become a cautionary tale.

I am also learning that my brain may need a secretary of its own. Yesterday, I wrote myself a note while trying to plan the next two months of schedules for me and the kids. This morning, I sat down at my desk, pulled out my Post-it notes like the responsible woman I pretend to be, and saw one that said, “Trade Sara and JB for alone time.” My stomach dropped. I thought, “I did not write that. Why would I trade my children? Am I losing my mind?” I immediately looked at my assistant, Tammy "Oh my god. I really am as crazy as people think I am!"

Then it hit me. I meant I was going to take the kids to my parents’ house so they could help watch them while I took each child out separately for some Momma alone time. Perfectly normal plan. Absolutely terrifying shorthand. My assistant was standing there when I figured it out, and I’m pretty sure she had to leave and buy more panty liners.

That is the nuthouse. It is not charming chaos with a carefully edited soundtrack. It is a place where I can go from explaining the legal difference between two documents to locating a mystery smell, checking a forehead for swelling, listening to a nine-year-old talk through something that genuinely matters, and then falling down in my own backyard before lunch. It is loud, messy, dramatic, underfunded, poorly managed, and occasionally one minor inconvenience away from requiring a full incident report.

But it is also ours. It is full of little people becoming actual people, with strange humor, strong opinions, big feelings, terrible timing, and an alarming ability to locate danger in any room. It is full of work that matters, conversations that matter, responsibilities that matter, and a woman trying to hold all of it together with one hand while using the other to dig under the couch for a remote that has apparently been missing since the Obama administration.

So yes, welcome to the nuthouse. Please do not sit on anything without checking first. Do not assume the floor is clear. Do not touch a cup unless you know where it came from. And under no circumstances should you ask me where the remote is, because I have already looked everywhere except the one place it will eventually turn up, and I am emotionally too fragile to begin that search again.

---

Judith L. Hampton

Attorney-at-Law

Hampton Law Firm