The Only Cutting I’m Planning is a Ribbon

OFF THE RECORD

The Only Cutting I’m Planning Is a Ribbon

Today, Kylee and I spent part of the day getting files ready for our move. We worked on operating systems, organization, and how things will run in the new office. We were finally doing things I have been trying to get done all year, which was exciting enough that I briefly forgot we still have to physically move all this shit.

I could see it coming together. A smaller office. Clear responsibilities. Systems that allow us to find information without launching an investigation into its disappearance. A workday with some possibility of an ending. These may not sound like dreams to everybody, but after the year I have had, organized files and a manageable workload are practically beachfront property.

Kylee is now my only legal assistant. There is a lot behind that sentence, and some of it still hurts. But today, we made progress. We talked through problems and worked on solutions. I could picture the office I want and the life I am trying to build around it. For a little while, I was looking forward instead of bracing myself.

This year has included the end of a relationship I thought would last, private pain becoming public entertainment, and a hospital stay when I knew I needed help. I checked myself in because I could not handle everything happening around me on my own. When I came home, the person who claimed they would never leave did not come home.

Coming home did not magically put my life back together. I have been doing that part alone while raising children, practicing law, running a business, defending alleged murderers and answering questions from people who apparently assumed I had been issued an instruction manual.

I have bipolar disorder. I believe my diagnosis, and I take it seriously. I also have ordinary human reasons to be sad, frustrated, angry, or overwhelmed. Sometimes I am grieving. Sometimes the workload is too much. Sometimes I disagree with somebody. A diagnosis does not mean every decision I make can be dismissed with, “Well, you know how she is.”

That is a remarkably convenient way to stop listening to someone.

The practice had grown and grown until our way of handling the work became unmanageable. I was trying to put systems in place and establish clearer responsibilities. From my perspective, too many instructions were being treated as suggestions. Those tensions had been building for months.

My father and I are different people. I respect him enormously, and I understand the respect others have for him. But I cannot run a law firm if doing what I ask is optional. I am still responsible for the work, the clients, and the consequences when something does not get done. Eventually, I had to put my foot down.

On a difficult morning, I sent an email containing a very dark joke. I should not have made it. I can acknowledge that without surrendering the rest of the truth. These were people I trusted with my life, and I spoke with a familiarity I would not have used with the general public.

Later that morning, the employee and I saw each other and spoke in person. She had seen me, spoken with me and at that moment, before I put my foot down, she was apparently convinced I was just fine, as no concern for my safety was ever expressed (until her termination). Afterward, I went to my desk and read her email response. I considered it disrespectful. I told her that if she spoke to me that way again, I would fire her. Her response challenged that warning, and I followed through.

That happened by email. We did not have a screaming match. I did not storm through the office firing everyone in sight. Another employee subsequently came to me yelling, and I told her she could go too if she wanted. She left.

There are things I could have handled better. I know that. I was tired, I was in a mood, and I had reached the end of my patience. But I am not going to agree to a version in which my diagnosis turns every boundary into a symptom and every employment decision into evidence that I have lost my mind.

Let’s just call this what it was. I was in a bitchy mood. My legal assistant was in a bitchy mood. She challenged me, I took it as a dare, and I followed through. Was that my finest management moment? No. But these people have known me for years. They know “I dare you” has never been a particularly effective strategy for getting me to back down. Tell me I can’t do something, and my first instinct is to do it twice. I can own my temper and my stubbornness without agreeing that the entire exchange was a psychiatric event.

A few moments later, my daughter, who was at the office, said, “Mom, I hear people arguing in the hall.” I looked at her and gave a little laugh. “Baby, I don’t think they’re arguing. I think they’re talking about me.” And there, in one uncomfortable little conversation, was the problem. I was expected to be the employer when it was time to write checks, make difficult calls, or pay the $10,000 to correct an employee’s error. That responsibility landed on me. Yet I was sitting in my own office with my daughter, listening to conversations down the hall that were about me, as though I had no authority in the place I was responsible for keeping afloat.

Then another employee came down the hallway to tell me what I should and should not do about someone else’s employment. She wasn’t screaming. She was yapping at me, and there is no more accurate word for it than yapping. This was someone I had once described as the most godly woman I had ever met. I meant it when I said it. Seeing how she addressed me when she disagreed with me was painful in a way I had not expected and not at all the embodiment of Christ that is publicly portrayed.

Much the same way, I understand that everybody is not going to like the way I talk, the jokes I make, or an offhand comment on a day when I’m sad. That’s fine. I can take responsibility for something I should not have said without pretending my personality is going to suit everybody. Nobody is being forced to be around me, and nobody is being forced to work for me. If working with me is not for you, you are free to leave. But that freedom goes both ways. You cannot insist that I keep employing someone who blatantly disrespects me or flatly refuses to do the work I assign. You get to decide whether you want to work here. I get to decide who works here, too.

I was tired of carrying the responsibility while having to argue for the authority to do anything about it. I was tired of paying for mistakes and then being treated as the problem when I insisted something change. There was room to disagree with me. There was room to tell me I had handled something badly. But there also had to be room for me to say, “This is my office, and this is my decision,” without my diagnosis becoming the explanation for why I had finally said enough. I could keep signing the paychecks. I could keep covering the errors. Apparently, the trouble started when the doormat stood up.

After the termination, that morning’s email was sent to another person I would have trusted with my life—someone who had professed love and concern for me, who has sworn an oath to serve and protect.

He did not come check on me. He did not call. He did not text. He did not contact the coroner about the danger he supposedly believed I was in. His response was to report me to the Department of Children and Family Services.

Shortly afterward, an attorney approached my father while he was eating lunch and told him she was representing this person against me in court.

Those are the actions I am left trying to reconcile with the claim that this was about concern for my well-being.

The people inside my office shared the email. The person receiving it set something in motion that reached my children. Somewhere in that chain of people who supposedly cared whether I was safe, an actual conversation with me never happened. I cannot know every private intention, but I know nobody in that chain came to check on me.

From where I stood, this was another kick delivered by people who were saying they believed the dog was already down.

I do not need a prettier phrase for it. I need people to understand why I am tired.

Then yesterday, another employee came to the office and spoke with Kylee. She described what had happened—who had said what, who had done what—and followed it with a message for me: please tell Judith I would never have done that to her. I love her. I would never betray her like that.

I keep coming back to those words. Someone who knew the circumstances understood why I would experience this as betrayal. She wanted me to know she would not have participated in it. After all the explanations offered for what happened, that distinction told me more than another argument ever could.

It also hurt. There is a particular kind of heartbreak in hearing someone say, “I would never do that to you,” and realizing how badly you needed that to be true of other people.

And here is the part that would be funny if my children had not been caught in the middle of it: the person outside the office who received that email had spent months encouraging me to make the very kinds of decisions I am making now. Apparently, the advice came with an expiration date I was not informed of.

Meanwhile, the people inside my office who sent it to him had spent months telling me how terrible he was. Yet when there was something of mine to forward, suddenly everybody knew how to work together.

That contradiction was glaring. I did not have to draw a diagram for my parents, my attorney, or friends in the legal community to understand why I saw this as a coordinated effort to hurt me. I cannot speak for what any government worker concluded, but I could explain the sequence plainly and the words “unfounded” were used.

One of the participants of this hit job used to claim to love my children, yet not only has he not checked on them one single time in over 6 months, he also took the first chance he could to harm them in an effort to harm me. The other participants had witnessed me survive the first attempted hit job of the year and continued to remind me for months that I was a good mother, yet they too took the first opportunity they could to hurt my children in an effort to hurt me.

The people who had warned me about him chose him as the recipient. The person who had encouraged these decisions treated them as a problem once I made them. Somewhere in that remarkable change of alliances, checking on me never made the agenda.

I have always absolutely despised the expression “turn the other cheek.” I believe in defending yourself and the people you love. I have never appreciated being told that someone else’s cruelty creates an obligation for me to demonstrate excellent manners. Apparently, being hurt comes with homework, and somebody who did not witness a damn thing will be grading your response.

Normally, I have a response. I am a lawyer with a mouth and an unfortunate ability to remember exactly what was said. There is probably an exhibit list forming somewhere in my brain even now.

But I do not want to do this anymore.

I surrender. I quit. I give up. You win. I bend the knee.

If you need a rib, take a rib. If you need a kidney, take a kidney. Whatever you need from me, put it in writing. I will sign on the dotted line and give it to you freely, without a fight. If you need me to get on a stage naked in the middle of town and scream every bad thing I have ever done, fine. I am a terrible person. There. Whatever admission finally satisfies the appetite.

I have no counterattack waiting. There is no grand finale in preparation. I am trying to get through my work, get home to my children, and have enough energy left to be their mother. Some evenings, washing my hair requires a level of commitment I would prefer to reserve for major litigation.

If the objective was to run me out of town, the boxes are being packed. Anyone who needs to claim that victory can have it. I have neither the time nor the inclination to attend the trophy presentation.

I have spent enough time explaining myself to people who keep finding new reasons to hate me.

There are people who love me without requiring a defense brief first. There are people who can hear that I am struggling and respond with kindness. I want to have enough of myself left to spend time with them, to recognize the good in my life while it is happening instead of noticing it afterward through a fog of everything else.

There are other lawyers who have responded with kindness and an effort to help. They are in the next town over, where my new office will be, waiting with open arms for me to get there. That welcome means more than they probably know. When you have spent so much time feeling unwanted, having someone actually look forward to your arrival can undo you a little. I have felt driven out by people whose actions toward me have felt full of hate. But there are people who love me waiting at the other end of this move. I am running toward them, too. There is something about knowing I will be embraced when I arrive that makes it a little easier to pack another box.

Today, Kylee and I got things done. Every file prepared and every decision made brought us closer to the new office. I enjoyed talking about how it would work. I caught myself getting excited about what comes next.

And then I thought about my ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Because I am absolutely having one. There will be a ribbon. There will be photographs. There will be a pair of scissors so unnecessarily large they look like they require their own liability policy. I intend to stand there and celebrate this dream, even if I cry through the entire damn thing.

I want my children there. They have seen enough days when their mother was trying to hold herself together. I want them to have a picture of a day when she was happy. I want to be able to look at that picture years from now and remember how excited we were, where they stood, whether somebody complained about their shoes.

I want ordinary memories again. I want a good day that I do not have to explain or defend afterward. I want to laugh and remain happy long enough to forget to be careful.

That is how much this little office means to me. Somewhere between its files and furniture and unfinished plans, I can see a woman I have missed. She still has ideas. She still makes inappropriate jokes. She still gets excited about things. Today, sitting there working with Kylee, I recognized her.

I had almost forgotten how much I liked her before I spent so much time hearing what was wrong with her.

So take the victory, if you need it. I am going to keep packing. The only cutting I am planning is a ribbon, and when I stand behind it, I will know how much it took to get there.

My children will be looking for me to smile.

For once, I want it to come easily.

Judith L. Hampton

Attorney At Law

Hampton Law Firm, LLC

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