Twenty Year Old Me Would Need A Drink

SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY, I BECAME EXACTLY THE KIND OF WOMAN YOUNGER ME WOULD HAVE QUESTIONS ABOUT

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Every now and then I wonder what twenty-year-old Judith Layne Hampton would think if she got dropped into my life for twenty-four hours. Not because I have any desire to write her a letter about believing in herself, chasing her dreams, or trusting the journey. Twenty-year-old me would have hated that shit, and frankly, thirty-eight-year-old me does too. I mean I would actually like to put her in the passenger seat, hand her a cup of coffee, tell her to buckle up, and watch her slowly realize that whatever she thought adulthood was going to look like, this was absolutely not it.

The lawyer part would not shock her. She would probably look around, see my name on a law firm, and be appropriately pleased with herself for about thirty seconds. Then she would start asking follow-up questions, which has always been where things go downhill in my family. Yes, I became a lawyer. Yes, I own Hampton Law Firm. Yes, Daddy is still “Judge Hampton” to half the people I encounter while remaining simply Daddy to me, which is a particularly strange thing once you become a lawyer yourself and discover that the man other attorneys approach with professional reverence is still perfectly capable of speaking to you in a tone that instantly reminds you that you are somebody’s child.

Then I would have to tell her that I started out prosecuting people and now spend a substantial portion of my life defending people accused of felonies. She would almost certainly stare at me long enough to make the silence uncomfortable and ask what the hell happened. The answer would take longer than she wanted. Life happened. Experience happened. Sitting at both tables happened. So did learning that police reports are not scripture, defendants are not a species, victims are not plot devices, prosecutors are not villains, defense lawyers are not magicians, and almost nobody fits neatly into the role somebody has assigned them by the time the case reaches court. Younger Judith had opinions. Current Judith still has plenty of those, God knows, but she has learned the irritating habit of wanting the facts first.

I suspect younger me would also be disappointed to discover that owning a law firm is substantially less glamorous than television led us to believe. There are important meetings and serious clients and days when I get to do exactly the kind of work I imagined lawyers did. There are also days when I am simultaneously attorney, employer, accountant, marketing director, technology department, human resources, purchasing agent, crisis manager and the woman standing in the middle of the office asking why in the name of Jesus Christ nobody knows where a particular document went. Apparently “owning a law firm” means that if the toilet stops working, congratulations, Counselor, the matter has been assigned to you.

Then she would meet my children. This is where I think twenty-year-old Judith would need to sit down. I have three children. Three. I know. I was there too. There is physical evidence that I have, at various points in my adult life, participated enthusiastically enough in sex to produce multiple human beings, although the scheduling logistics of adulthood would now lead a reasonable person to question how any married couple on Earth manages to create children without sending a calendar invitation first. Younger me probably assumed sex at thirty-eight would be sophisticated and spontaneous. Nobody tells you adulthood will eventually have you thinking, “That sounds lovely, but I have court tomorrow and somebody still needs a bath.”

She would meet JB and learn that my six-year-old has appeared in law-firm content attempting to pronounce usufruct, a word that sounds less like a Louisiana property concept and more like something you would be embarrassed to discover in your husband’s browser history. Louisiana law is full of terms like this. Naked ownership is another one. I spent years earning a law degree so that I could professionally say phrases like “usufruct over the naked ownership” with a straight face while the twelve-year-old trapped somewhere inside me tries desperately not to ruin everything. Twenty-year-old Judith would find this hysterical. Thirty-eight-year-old Judith still does, which is probably proof that some forms of personal growth are overrated.

She would also discover that I have somehow become the kind of mother who uses her children as unwilling focus groups for legal education. Most six-year-olds are learning spelling words. Mine has been asked to say usufruct into a camera because his mother thought it was funny. This probably explains more about growing up in my house than any family biography ever could. My children know that Mama “goes to court.” They know I own an office. They know Nan. They know sometimes something funny they say has about a fifty-fifty chance of becoming content. They are completely unimpressed by the fact that I am a lawyer, which is healthy because an inflated ego cannot survive long when someone who cannot reach the top cabinet is shouting for you from the bathroom.

Twenty-year-old me would probably expect thirty-eight-year-old me to feel much more adult than I do. She thought adulthood was an arrival. There would be a house, a career, children, respectable furniture and some mystical internal transformation in which you stopped feeling like yourself and started feeling like A Grown Woman. I hate to disappoint her, but apparently you can own a law firm, argue serious matters in court, employ people, raise children, handle real money, sign documents with significant consequences and still occasionally look around for the adult in charge before remembering that everybody is looking at you.

There are moments when I feel extremely competent. Put me in a courtroom with a file I know and a point I need to make, and I know exactly who I am. Give me a complicated legal problem and I will pull it apart until I understand it. Put somebody I love in trouble and suddenly I have the organizational efficiency of a small military operation. But the same woman can walk into a store for one item and emerge forty-five minutes later with six unrelated purchases and absolutely no memory of the thing she went there to buy. Human beings contain multitudes. Mine apparently include appellate reasoning and severe susceptibility to impulse purchases.

Younger Judith would definitely have questions about my appearance. She would probably inspect me with the unforgiving cruelty unique to seeing your future self and immediately want to know what we did to our face. I would tell her that at some point we willingly paid someone to stick needles in it, and she would react exactly as dramatically as she should. Then I would tell her I actually liked the result. She would eventually understand. Vanity did not disappear with maturity. It just acquired a budget and better lighting.

She would probably have questions about my clothes too, and I would remind her that I have photographic evidence of what she wore in the early 2000s, so neither of us should become aggressive. There are constitutional protections against self-incrimination, and she should use them.

What would probably surprise her most is how many completely contradictory things can be true at once. I can walk into court completely sure of myself and later panic over reading something aloud at a family funeral because speaking from my own head and reading words when they matter emotionally are apparently two entirely different neurological departments. I can tell another person exactly what needs to happen in a crisis and then call my mother about something stupid because sometimes I still want my mama. I can be the boss at nine o’clock, somebody’s lawyer at ten, Daddy’s daughter at noon, Mama by three, and by nine at night I may be lying in bed researching something absolutely unnecessary with the intensity ordinarily reserved for federal litigation.

That is probably the part I would have the hardest time explaining to younger me. I used to assume people eventually became one thing. The lawyer. The mother. The wife. The business owner. The daughter. The woman who has her shit together. I did not understand that adulthood is mostly becoming all of those things simultaneously and then being expected to switch between them without anyone providing a changing room.

I also did not know how much my mind would change while some parts of me remained almost aggressively untouched. I am less certain than I was at twenty, but I am much harder to bullshit. I am more willing to change my mind, but substantially less interested in pretending to agree just to make a room comfortable. I understand now that being loud and being right are unrelated, that good people can make terrible decisions, that terrible people occasionally tell the truth, that professional titles do not cure stupidity, and that education gives you better tools but does not exempt you from being an idiot in areas outside your expertise.

I still want things exactly how I want them. I still become obsessed with an idea approximately eleven seconds after having it. I still believe I can do something myself right up until the precise moment I am surrounded by the consequences of doing it myself. I still have a sense of humor that occasionally arrives at the least appropriate possible moment, which is inconvenient in court, worse at funerals and probably one of the reasons I have survived both. Younger Judith would recognize that immediately.

She would probably ask whether this was the life I planned. Absolutely not. There are portions of the last twenty years that younger me could not have imagined if I gave her three guesses and a bottle of tequila. There are people she thought would always be there who are gone. People she had not met yet who became essential. Careers changed. Relationships changed. Families changed. I changed. Some things broke. Some things got rebuilt. Some things turned out better than I deserved, and some things turned out so spectacularly different from the plan that all you can really do is admire the audacity.

But if younger Judith asked whether I had become someone she would recognize, I think the answer would be yes. Maybe not immediately. She would need a minute to get past the children, the law firm, the felony docket, the cosmetic injections, the legal vocabulary that sounds vaguely pornographic and the alarming number of people who expect me to know what to do. But underneath all of that, she would know me.

She would recognize the woman who cannot leave a question alone. The woman who gets mad and gets funny at almost exactly the same time. The woman who can take something deadly serious very seriously without agreeing to be serious every waking minute of her life. The woman who would rather hear an ugly truth than a pretty lie. The woman who still believes that if something is worth doing, it is probably worth doing slightly more intensely than necessary.

I think she would also be relieved to learn that becoming an adult did not require becoming boring. Somewhere along the way I had children, built a career, accumulated responsibilities, survived enough life to know better and still retained the emotional maturity to laugh every single time Louisiana law requires me to say “naked owner” in a professional setting.

That may not be the version of adulthood twenty-year-old Judith Layne Hampton expected. But she would absolutely understand her.

Judith L. Hampton, Attorney at Law

Hampton Law Firm, LLC

Want more from Thoughts Outside the Office? Read more personal stories, observations, legal detours and whatever else happens to escape Judith’s head at hamptonlawla.com.