PT-LawMom

Sorry for the four-post day and the generally downer themes. Here’s my last depressing post of the day. It’s my wedding anniversary on Saturday. Chapin and I will have been married seven years! We had a whole romantic weekend away planned, a first in four years of having a child! Pumpkinhead has never spent the night away from us before. Unfortunately, due to the aforementioned bad service provider, I am stuck at home dealing with the mess the provider made and we’re having to postpone our weekend. I’ve also missed two classes and am really behind on this week’s material. Guess this is the part that makes it hard. I can handle law school and work, but throw any monkey wrenches into my careful plan and it all goes haywire.

The Supreme Court today struck down as unconstitutional two school districts’ plans to keep their schools’ racial makeup in balance. I haven’t had a chance to read the almost 200-page opinion yet, but my initial reaction is that this seems wrong. When I was in high school, we had probably 23 African American kids in my class of 740 students. Many of those students were bussed in on ONE bus from the far reaches of our district so that we could have a more “balanced” school. The districts in today’s opinion set limits of no less than 15% and no more than 50% African American so that the schools would be more representative of society at large. I would like to think they would have bussed in white kids to majority African American neighborhoods to make that happen.

That said, I’m a parent. I want my kid at the very best school he can attend and, believe me, we’re paying the school taxes to prove it. But I also know that his elementary school is 12% African American, 7% Asian and 18% Hispanic — much like the country’s makeup. I feel confident that he will be exposed to a variety of kids. But at least we have the choice. We lived in a majority African American neighborhood of DC (in fact, I swear we were the only White/Hispanic couple for miles). One of the reasons we left was that we knew our kids would be underserved at the local schools. Teachers don’t want to teach there and the really smart kids who are in those classrooms are shortchanged. It’s a very sad situation and I fear that the Supreme Court just made it worse. Instead of banning minimum/maximum diversity plans, perhaps they should have been making them mandatory.

I was very disappointed to read that it’s likely that immigration reform will be shelved until after the 2008 elections after today’s Congressional sessions.

One quote from the NY Times says:

“The price of failure will be hundreds of more people dying in the desert,” said Eliseo Medina, an executive vice president of the service employees union. “The price of failure will be more workplace raids and families separated as breadwinners are arrested and deported. The price of failure will be more public anger at the broken immigration system. More states and cities will pass punitive laws that target immigrants.”

I think that the price of failure will be that more states and local communities will pass discriminatory over-reaching local laws and ordinances which will harm Hispanics and other immigrants, both legal and undocumented, in ways we can’t even imagine. I am feeling the same sense of dread I felt the day they announced that Bush had been chosen by the Supreme Court to run this country.

Working in a law firm before attending law school is both a positive and a negative experience. On the one hand, you get to see what lawyers at different levels actually do every day. Especially as a secretary (versus a paralegal), I get an inside view at the nitty gritty of their daily lives. I know for sure which tasks I won’t enjoy and which ones I will most likely take on with relish.

On the negative side, sometimes the harsh reality can get a little too difficult to deal with. I’ve pulled the all-nighters required with a huge filing in litigation. I’ve seen the corporate associates with three levels of bags under their eyes after a particularly difficult week before a closing. I have to remind myself that I’m not going into the area of law that my current attorneys practice. My first boss in the legal field got divorced right when I was starting with him and he said, “The best advice I can give to new lawyers is to remember your priorities. Family needs to have some one-on-one time that is free of client demands.” With that in mind, I hope to make it through law school and come out on the other side with a clear sense of my goals and an intention to say “no” when necessary while still playing the game. Long hours are inevitable no matter what.

So here’s the depressing thing. One of my associates is leaving this week (announced Tuesday that her last day would be Friday). She’s only been practicing for about four years and she’s my age. When she told me, she said, “I went into BigLaw because I had ‘Big Debt’ and I wanted to pay all of that off. I thought I could work a few years and then move on to something else. But you know what? I’m done. I don’t want to do this anymore. I never imagined I would get burned out before I could ever explore any other options. It’s not the people. It’s not the firm. It’s just the unpredictability. I hate going home Friday night thinking all is calm then getting a 9 p.m. call and having to stay up all night to get something to the client. I just can’t do it anymore.” So she’s leaving and she doesn’t plan to practice law in the future.

Lawmummy wrote a great post this week on those punch-in-the-stomach moments where the law just seems unjust. I hope that I can find a position where those moments are rarer than the moments of pleasure/triumph. Am I completely naïve to believe that I can?

Have any of you gone to receive a service, paid in full before it’s fully completed, and then had the job so fouled up that you basically have to stop mid-service but then have to recover your payment? How do you go about it? What if the service provider feels that they are entitled to all of the funds because of the work done thus far? Perhaps they ordered a part from an outside vendor and will now be stuck with it? I have such a hard time with these things and am in a real pickle right now. I either have to use the current sucky provider or forfeit about $2k and pay it AGAIN to someone else. This service cannot be put off and I have to find a new provider ASAP. The current provider will know that I’m in this bad spot. I’d appreciate any tips people might have to offer me.

Did anyone else catch Pat Buchanan on Sunday’s Meet the Press? He was “debating” the immigration bill with Rep. Luis Guttierez. Apparently Mr. Buchanan debates by interrupting and talking over anyone who doesn’t agree with him and making points that are completely unrelated to those his opponent is making.

This quote from Mr. Buchanan’s side of the debate pretty much says it all:

The real reason the Democrats want this — I keep saying this, and I know this sounds harsh to some people, but — is liberal Democrats don’t like many of the traditions and institutions, the guardrails, the fences, that have made this country great….

Man, there are some happy Germans just waiting up in Heaven to high five him on that comment.
Rep. Gutierrez countered with: “The same argument that Pat makes today are the arguments that have been made in the past — they were wrong then, they are wrong today.” He pointed out that the problems just will not get solved until people put their differences aside and work on a SOLUTION rather than just finger-pointing and name calling. Unfortunately the moderator ultimately had to cut Buchanan’s racist tirade off so obviously Gutierrez’s reasoning didn’t penetrate Buchanan’s thick skull.

So Chapin comes out of the shower last night and gives me a sheepish look. “Um, honey, I have something to tell you.” So I’m thinking, “Uh oh, what did he do?” He walks closer and says, “There was this guy outside cutting the neighbors lawn and, well, it’s getting hot and Sunday is my only day off work…” I think he thought I was going to be mad that he offered the guy $20/week to cut the lawn for him. He’s so funny - he actually said “I talked him into $20″ and I had to tell him that every guy out there charges $20. He was like, “Yeah, but I went over it with him and made sure he knows to get every corner!” I gave Chapin a kiss and said, “Babe, you’re talking to the happy woman who has a team of housecleaners tackling my bathrooms every two weeks! You want to use part of your paycheck to cover your chores, you’ve got it.” (Says she who now has to add “Put $20 under the mat” to my already packed Thursday reminder list which includes “Remember weekly slip ‘n’ slide day supplies for Pumpkinhead.”)

Apparently my classmates are getting the hang of it because suddenly a lot more laptops have shown up and people are taking MySpace and Facebook breaks periodically. One girl was ordering pizza and e-mailing her boyfriend to see what toppings he wanted.

I got my first law school memo back and it had several comments and some deleted sentences! Ack. The teacher said that I did a good job, but that I’m writing too much like a writer and not enough like a lawyer (i.e., transitional sentences where I should just be leading in with the next point because partners don’t have time to read irrelevant words). Sigh… Back to the drawing board.

The reality, as I know from years of working for an appellate brief writer, a telecommunications law expert and now a bunch of corporate guys, is that each lawyer has a different style with sometimes completely opposing grammatical choices. It’s very difficult to keep it all straight, especially when you’re working for conflicting styles at the same time (I have two and my coworker also has two with opposite rules). So my task now, while keeping my attorney’s styles clear in my head, is to follow my teacher’s preferred format and cut, cut, cut. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you should know that cutting doesn’t quite flow with my personal style. That said, having been up against the U.S. Supreme Court’s brief word count more than a few times for work, I know how to do it and I’m up for the challenge.

I really enjoy the articles The Nation puts out, but two from its latest issue really struck me.

The first is a story by Ellen Bravo on the growing trend of children not telling their parents about illness because they are afraid that missing work will cause their parent to lose their job.

First I stopped by the group from Wisconsin and heard Robbie Bickerstaff describe how her son Eric, then age 7, got hit by a car on the way home from school but chose not to tell her for fear she’d lose her second-shift job if she didn’t go in to work. Later an older sibling called her to say that Eric was crying because his arm hurt from being hit by the car and she had to take him to the hospital. When Robbie informed her boss, he was adamant: “Leave and you’re fired.” Her pleas didn’t move him. She did leave; she was fired. Eric turned out to have a broken arm.

I moved on to the 9to5 members from Pennsylvania and shared Robbie’s story. Carissa Peppard, the 21-year-old daughter of activist Kiki Peppard, was sitting next to her mom. “I’ve never told my mother this before,” she said, “but when you’re a kid, you know everything. Whenever I was sick, I’d ask myself, ‘Should I tell Mom? Will we have groceries this week if she stays home with me?’ If I could, I just dragged myself to school.”

This is horrible! As I mentioned in my Father’s Day piece, my very busy Dad always came to pick me up when I was sick (and I was sick a LOT). Looking back, I can see how hard it must have been for him to get away. However, thank God his job wasn’t threatened my my illnesses!! I encourage all of you to visit Working America and sign their various petitions to effect change on behalf of working families.

The second article is by Ellen Chesler and highlights some recent immigrant college graduates’ good works.

Natalya Berezovskaya, the class salutatorian with a 3.99 GPA, was just seven years old when her family escaped political unrest and a resurgence of anti-Semitism in post-Soviet Moscow. When she arrived in New York, Natalya spoke no English, and her father, a chemical engineer, was forced to take odd jobs as a waiter and a delivery man. But Natalya was determined to get ahead. She learned English and graduated from high school as the class valedictorian. As a biochemistry major at Hunter, she volunteered in city hospitals and developed a passion to become a doctor. This fall, she will attend medical school at the State University of New York at Stony Brook on a prestigious Jonas Salk scholarship, which she won for her outstanding research on DNA and cellular disfunctions leading to cancer.

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So there you have it. Each one of these extraordinary young people is likely to bring distinction to his or her family, city, and adoptive country. Not a likely subversive among them. Each one deserves to be treated with basic human dignity and accorded full benefits of citizenship. But never mind.

These are the immigrants more people need to see. This unresolved fight causes so much harm.

If you’ve read my blog, you know I have a fairly liberal view on immigration and immigrants generally. I’m writing on immigration not because I want to debate my views but because it’s my way of speaking out and kind of journaling my off-the-cuff impressions of these events as they take place. Don’t try to comment on my blog entries about those “evil criminal immigrants” because I won’t approve your comment. This is my immigrant-friendly bloggy home, not a place for the right wing to vent about all that is wrong with “those people.”

If you’ve read my “About Me”, I think you have a pretty good sense of where I stand on things. I have immigrant friends, GLBT friends, Muslim friends. My sister-in-law and best friend are both African American (as is my nephew) and my husband is Hispanic. I’m Episcopalian (a faith that embraces both female and gay/lesbian clergy). I believe strongly that women can do anything men can do and that we should be afforded equal treatment under the law and by society in general.

I have a personal relationship with God but I’m not a Bible thumper and I don’t like it when people use the Lord or the Bible to try to make me feel ashamed about my views or my life choices. I believe in living your life as a witness to God in terms of your demonstrated compassion and care of others. If people see you living that way and know you have faith, then you are demonstrating your faith through your actions. Ultimately I’m just a tender-hearted girl. If I want a fight, I’ll find a social justice issue that matters to me and direct that negative energy into a positive outlet. I don’t need negativity here, thanks.

And, of course, for those of you who have only wonderful, constructive comments to make, thank you! My blog life is much richer from your input.