Government

The Chaotic Art Of Midlife Lawyering

Raising small kids while managing your career with aging parents is neither cute nor quaint.

By Eden Davis Stephens  
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Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Eden Davis Stephens back to our pages. Click here if you’d like to donate to MothersEsquire.

As a member of the Sandwich Generation, I’ve often wondered what kind of sandwich I am. This metaphor infers that I, as the “filling” between two pieces of carbohydrate, am the delicious, Instagram-able reason one gets ordered or made.  I understand it is a reference to the location of where one is generationally, but raising small kids while managing your career with aging parents is not cute nor quaint. If there is an apt sandwich analogy, it’d be the panini, where you’re systematically squeezed and burned till your insides melt.

My introduction to this phase of life happened seven weeks out from my second C-section. I was going back and forth down the highway to see my hospitalized dad after a major organ decided it had had enough. I carried infant and infant gear with me to help my parents sort his post-op care. I timed my driving stints between nursing. Three years later, my mom’s neurological system cried uncle.  I would leave the house after cleaning up the potty training accidents of my toddler to then go clean up my after my mother while her assigned nurse chased another patient through the hospital courtyard. I brought my daughter’s special program application with me to fill out as I sat with my mom, making sure she didn’t impulsively disconnect herself from her monitors or schedule a piano lesson to teach while still in the hospital.

I had the “silver lining” of being on maternity leave during my father’s health event. Even though I was recovering from my own surgery and caring for a colicky baby, I didn’t have to think about work. On the second round of parental care, I scheduled visits around dockets and hauled my laptop with me to type up administrative hearing decisions after I made food for the week. While each parental health event was immensely taxing in every way, I found the experience to be relatively easier since I could discuss them publicly and get support. The abstract grief of my miscarriages or losing a cultural connection with the passing of my Chinese grandmother has been a different, lonely story. Society’s unwritten rules of what gets immediate empathy and real-time consideration are painful and confusing.

Working in the adversarial system is challenging even when everything in your personal life is going right. Overly aggressive (bullying) practice is unfortunately conflated with zealous advocacy. Study after study has been produced, concluding attorneys are psychically drained by terse interactions with judges, clients, and opposing counsel. Additional stress arises from hourly billing, slashed budgets in governmental agencies, and the general need to keep an office financially afloat.    While I have seen my share of artfully worded clapbacks and courtroom tantrums, the rules of professional decorum mean most of us are perpetually stuffing down thoughts and feelings. The law is no place for our authentic emotional selves.

Recently I had a particularly challenging month, physically. Yard work begat poison ivy, which begat a vigorous round of hives, which begat a medication-induced mental fog. To think clearly so I could complete writing assignments on time, I walked back a lot of the anti-histamines. I became One Big Itch. The contact of fitted professional clothing felt like needles on my skin. This was simultaneously occurring with the Beginning of the End of My Reproductive System. A massive allergic reaction in addition to a 23-day menses wore on my mental well-being. Constantly uncomfortable and worried about long-term health implications, I became far less patient and far more distracted. Yet, I didn’t feel like I was able to share these very gross and very real setbacks at work. I just tried to push through, because I didn’t want to fully explore where this fell on the “things we don’t talk about and/or believe” scale. I didn’t have the bandwidth.

More and more, I read or hear from contemporaries looking to release the professional pressure valve. Cries to find positions that have better “life balance” are growing louder in every circle. I am allegedly in one of those balanced positions, but in the past two weeks I have heard the phrase “drinking from a fire hose” four times to describe onboarding to a new legal position in my office. This is not sustainable. The choices in the legal realm seem to be Dire and Not-as-Dire. If we as a profession want to truly improve our collective mental health, a paradigm shift must occur. We come to the office to manage the world’s high-stakes problems that are emotionally intense and expensive. But all parts of life are also happening, both seen and unseen, adding and exacerbating the fraught pressure. We are human beings trying to get through the long conflict-filled day.  With so many lawyers in the sandwich generation, legal work culture needs to consider more than some additional work-from-home days, a suicide awareness campaign, or mere referrals to counselors. As life continues to blend and blur, acknowledgment and acceptance of the personal has to come from within. A collective reckoning also needs to occur about the endemic pride of this profession, where we prioritize staying stressed and heightened in the name of productivity. These issues seem large, inevitable, unsolvable, but we are the world’s problem solvers. We just need to point the laser beam back on ourselves.

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Eden Davis Stephens is the Deputy Executive Director of the Office of Administrative Hearings within Kentucky’s Public Protection Cabinet. Her parenting wish to not have boring children was granted.  Her creative and headstrong daughters make her excited for their futures, but personally tired in the present. You can find her musings about practicing law while being her true self under the handle “Lawyering While Human”:  @lawyering_while_human on Instagram.

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