On Various Items Occupying Brain Space this Thursday

• Monday, I drop my baby off at a stranger’s house at 7:30 am and don’t pick him back up again until 5:30 pm and holy hell, how on earth do women do this when their kids are 6 weeks old???
• She is a nice stranger, and watches my coworker’s kid, and she is super loving and very active and has a clean house and all this, but still.  This woman will spend more waking hours with my son than I will.  I repeat, this woman will spend MORE WAKING HOURS WITH MY SON THAN I GET TO.  I’m trying not to think about it.
• The LSAT on Saturday.  Hmmm.  Perhaps some practice would be in order?
• I have put 10 "I’m a mom and I’m in law school" blogs on my google reader.  I am eating them up.
• Should I go to law school?  See discussion below, if you haven’t got anything better to do.

After a soul-and-enthusiasm squashing move by a company executive this Thanksgiving, in order to get myself through these long work days I am thinking hard about my next career move.  Taking the LSAT does not mean I will be attending law school – I’m keeping my options open.

If I went to law school, I would prefer to do environmental law.  The election, my pregnancy and new parenthood, and being demeaned and belittled by men in my manufacturing job are all contributing factors to this idea I have that law school is the answer to my career questions.  My heart sings with excitement, but my head (which is starting to know my heart pretty well!) is totally reining me in.  Here are my reasons for wanting to go to law school:

1. I love school.  I am good at it.  I excel at the rhythm of semesters, finals, short term beginnings, middles, and endings.  Frenzy and release.  Winter, spring, summer.  The Four Quarters of corporate life do not suit my working patterns.  Law school is only 3 years, but it would be a fun and energizing 3 years.
2. I hunger for credentials.  External validation.  I want to be able to know, in my head, that when some arsey man-in-charge barrels over me in conversation, discounts my opinion, and calls me a feisty little girl or some such name, that I have something he doesn’t have.  Maybe I see being a lawyer as a way of wielding power?  I recognize that this is not the best reason, but there it is.
3. I long for personal and professional development, which I can’t get in HR.  HR dabbles in psychology, statistics, in public health and law, but without depth in any of these fields.  Everything I’ve read in the HR Body of Knowledge is ridiculously full of holes.  I don’t naively believe that everybody in law is smart and well-read, but I do know that while many HR professionals I’ve met kind of fell into HR (like me), it is impossible to “fall into” being a lawyer.  So there is some minimum standard of education there.
4. I miss theatre, and I love working in the band.  My favorite job of all time was working as a naturalist.  I love to knit, to crochet, to sew, plan parties and make scrapbooks and (obviously) write.  But theatre requires too many hours away from my young children – I’m not willing to be home solely for the dinner hour.  The band is a super fun hobby, but I am not in the place in my life where I could take a huge risk and flit down to Nashville or somewhere and try to make it as a huge singing star.  As a naturalist I worked approximately 90 hours a week and made $200.00 each week – clearly not a viable option.  I have accepted that none of these will be my career.
5. I don’t want to toot my own horn too much, but I think I’m a pretty smart person, and I know I have an open and loving personality that longs to serve, to make things better for people.  As a lawyer, I would have some power to affect large swaths of people, and make tiny little changes to our country’s framework that may lead to broader progress. 
6. “Someone else” isn’t going to fix our environment.  It has to be me.  It has to be you.  With an education in environmental law, I would have the tools, the credentials, and the power to make my home on Earth a safer and cleaner place.  This is for myself, and for Jack.  When he drinks my breastmilk, as he does 7 times every day, he ingests toxins that have built up over 60 years – 30 years in my mother’s fatty tissues, before she bore and fed me – 30 years in my own.  If you tested my breastmilk, chances are extremely good that it would not meet FDA approval as a safe substance to sell on the shelf.  Knowledge is power, and it is obligation.  I cannot ignore this factoid any more than I could walk by a piece of trash in a national park and not pick it up.
7. Some research has led me to believe that, for a working mother who wants her children to be her number one, being a lawyer is a pretty good gig, as long as you don’t want to be the best lawyer in the biggest firm making the most money, which I don’t.  And if I decide I DO want those things, I can pursue them aggressively once the munchkins are grown.  It’s a placeholder, of sorts.

Some reasons why this isn’t a slam dunk decision:

1. Will my creative and social soul be able to handle so many hours of solo paperwork and research, through law school and beyond?  Of dry legal writing?
2. Where will I go to school, if we don’t even know when/if we’re moving?  Patrick’s job comes first, and that may seem medieval but it makes sense for our family.  I’m committed to following him, which seriously limits the schooling option.  There are law schools everywhere, but not all of them offer Environmental Law as an elective, so this whole question may be a moot point.
3. How long will school take?  Will I work as well during this time?  Are there enough hours in the day to be a mom, a wife, a housekeeper, and a student?
4. I would bear more children during my law school years.  Can I be pregnant in law school, and perform?  What if my due date coincides with exam time?  Is this lark going to wreck our family planning?  (I secretly think it would be easier to be pregnant and a new mom in law school than it was in the corporate world, but this may be total malarkey.)
5. We are both so weary of the grad student lifestyle, and I have been eagerly looking forward to being able to have a savings, to up our retirement contributions, and to buy nice fresh food at the grocery, and go out once in a while.  Law school would put those days even further in the horizon.  We will never catch up financially, what with 15 years of post high school education already.  To add 3 more – that’s 18 years that we could have had, let’s say, $35,000 a year average.  That’s $630,000 of lost earnings.  Add $100,000 of student loans, then add additional student loans I may have to take out to get this third degree, and you have nearly a million dollars of money, devoted in one way or another to extra education.  We’ve made good choices for us (money isn’t everything), but that is a pretty staggering figure, and I won’t add to it without being certain that this is my key to happiness.
6. Can I handle a lifetime of lawyer jokes?  And aren’t there enough damn lawyers in the world already?

The mind swirls.  This little pro/con list was helpful, though.  If you’re still reading, thanks for coming along for the ride.