On Happiness

Lawyerish is writing a lot about happiness these days.  After a lovely six month maternity leave of which I am uber jealous, she went back to work (as a lawyer, in case her blog’s title didn’t clue you in), and she seems to still be shaking out how she feels about not spending all day long with her little snowflake.  For the most part, she’s coming up happy.  Happy enough.

I think I’m about to get an offer for a summer job.  In LawFirmLand, this means an offer for a full time job after school is over, as long as you perform marginally well over your summer tenure, i.e. don’t show up to work hungover and throw up all over the managing partner’s shoes.  It’s a firm full of really pretty fabulous people, in a gorgeous new building with fantastic views of the river and Gulf and the city, and it has a great future.  This great future is evidenced by the fact that there is tons of work – tons and tons.  They recently added several laterals, and are looking to add a bunch of law school graduates to their bench as well.  In a Great Recession, this is a Decidedly Good Thing.

But they work a lot.  See reference above to “tons and tons” of work.  A theme of my interviews last week was the number of hours I’d be expected to put in (11-12 a day), which is sort of what you expect if you want to be a lawyer making six figures, but I guess the difference is in all of my other interviews they worked very hard to reassure me that this whole Lawyer Has No Life business was exaggerated and they’re all super happy and work-life-balanced and etc.  I don’t know whether the one is exaggerating the work load, or the other is exaggerating the excellent work-life balance, or a mix of the two.

There is hope.  A bunch of lawyers from an infamous regional If-Your-Kids-Still-Know-What-You-Look-Like-After-Your-First-Year-of-Work-Then-You-Aren’t-Billing-Enough-Hours firm just transferred to the firm I may have a job with, and they are way happier.  This is a clue that “my” firm (not mine yet!) is an awesome place to work, or at least a better place to work.  And I genuinely like everyone I met there.  And every office has this huge beautiful window, and plants, and there is a gorgeous break room that looks like an Italian coffee place.  (Not that I’ve ever been to Italy.   So I guess maybe an Americanized version of an Italian coffee place, but still – not institutional plastic chairs and blinking fluorescent lights!  They have an espresso machine, and a soda machine, and granite topped tables, and an entire wall of windows that look out onto the gulf!  This is at least some indication that the firm values us as humans, yes?  Maybe?  Am I reaching?)

So, I went into law school with my eyes open, and none of this is a surprise of course.  But I spent last Wednesday afternoon outside with the boys, drawing on the sidewalk with chalk and blowing bubbles and watching Jack show Liam all the colors of chalk, and watching Liam laugh his head off every time his big brother talked to him.  And I had that tug in my heart that most parents feel, that tug of AUGH I wish I could have this all the time, why couldn’t I just be independently wealthy?  Five minutes later when Jack was doing the limp noodle tantrum thing and Liam was fussing, the tug mysteriously vanished, but you know what I mean.  I don’t need every afternoon with the boys.  I don’t need all day every day.  I think it’s good for them to be with other people for at least part of the day, and good for me, too.  But I fear the unknown, the worry that if I decide to take an afternoon off on a perfect fall day when I don’t have a trial to prep for or a motion that’s due, that I’ll be chastised, or fired.  Or that I’ll never have a day when I don’t have a trial coming up or a motion that’s due, that I’ll be so busy all the livelong day that I’ll never have a moment to catch my breath, and organize, and drink an espresso at a granite topped table in front of a view of the river.

This is the number one unasked question that all of us have in interviews.  They say “Do you have any questions for us?” and I say “Here’s a question that proves I spent hours researching your firm!”, but what I actually want to say is “Do your kids still know what you look like?”  “What’s your day to day schedule?”  “How many nights a week do you have Family Dinner?”

“Are you happy?”