Motherhood is an exhausting joy. Law school, with its dribs and drabs of manic glory, is mostly just exhausting. Their contemporaneous existence is like living inside a Tetris game. You have to be one step ahead of those pieces; you have to slide them in just right or you suffocate. You implode.
Mornings are cramped. I wake up with a child on my hip. Getting two adults and a toddler out of the house is like lining up kindergarteners for an unexpected fire drill. There is sweating involved. When I’ve done all I can toward breakfast, diapers, teeth, hair, and clothing, I dart from the house with the dread of time closing in on me. I spill out onto the road like an unrestrained water hose, racing gracelessly toward Hartford. Am I wearing my house slippers? Yes. Yes, I am.
Every day is a mini deployment.
The first semester of my first year of law school was incredibly difficult. Its teeth have left marks. My call for mercy is echoing still, swiveling through the same great chasm that swallowed my gusto and coughed it up as madness, sometimes apathy.
The first thing I had to figure out was homework. Quite a conundrum, really, because my time belongs to my 18-month old daughter. And, of course, law school demands that my time belong to law school. The tension between these competing forces is an unavoidable psychological cruelty. But time management is an endurance course that gets easier with practice. Next thing you know, you’re an athlete. Or you’re passing out at the finish line, but you made it there.
I am developing two distinct muscles simultaneously. My capacity for efficient focus has grown tremendously, and that is my intellectual grit muscle. The other muscle is the how-many-hours-can-I-spend-away-from-home muscle. That is an emotional well-being muscle. It’s the weaker of the two. I have worked up to the amount of time spent away from home like you work up to a 5k run, but my capacity for it falters on occasions of overwhelming workload, late night mock trial scrimmaging, and mandatory orientations. The muscle whines when it’s weak. It refuses to perform. But that other muscle, it is strong enough to hold those Tetris pieces at bay, at least until the weekend.
Link to PDF of March Issue:
https://uconnlawprosenews.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/march-issue-final.pdf
