Sunday

Another day, another rambling blog post. I spent a fair amount of time studying the library during law school. That was not always the plan. I started law school with two beliefs I would soon abandon. The first was that I would do the bulk of my studying at home. We have a spare bedroom with a desk, lamp, and a printer. All comforts of the office, mere few steps down the hall from my family. That soon proved to be a bad idea as I needed to get as far away from my family as I could. It was too distracting to hear, for example, one of my two children cry. Even as I trusted their mother, my wife, to handle any situation with utmost confidence, I would too often open the door to see what was happening. It is quite hard to ignore the cries of a young child. And then there were the times where my daughter would knock upon the door. Once she figured out that her fist could make quite a racket, it was hard to convince her otherwise. I lacked the strength to turn away a girl who missed her father.

The second belief was hat I would spend each Sunday with my family. I had erroneously believed that I could manage to get through all of my schoolwork during the week (!), with Saturday available as a supplement to the Monday through Friday "work week." Yeah. That was a mistake. I soon found that I needed, desperately needed, the entire weekend not only get started on the work of the week ahead, but to digest the work of the prior week. And the practice questions. And the review material. And, and, and. It never ends.

I had been conditioned over the prior decade to believe every work week had days off. Not so much in law school. The week has no end. There were no days off. It is all one big blur of work. The river keeps on flowing.

I had a friend or two in school that did spend each Sunday with family. One such individual had two children, a third by the time we graduated, and was a man of god who attended church regularly. Sunday was church for him. He made it work. God left my life a long time ago, but I too felt a strong need to spend time with my wife and children.

But, he did not have similar family responsibilities during the week. My wife is an attorney, and a busy one at that. During my first two years, my wife’s alarm was set for 5:30 a.m. I would get up at 6. She had to be out of the house by 7. I had to be on the road, with both girls in the car, by 7:15 am in order to get them both to daycare and to campus before class began. My drive to campus took me an hour and fifteen minutes, each way, Monday through Friday. My first class was at 8:45 am.

Since I made the mistake of enrolling in a FTT (fourth tier toilet, aka TTTT), class attendance was mandated. Funny thing about the FTT schools, they knock the bottom of the class out of the box to keep their bar passage rate high. More on that later. But, suffice to say, I needed to be there when class began, or I would be considered absent. I was allowed three. Upon a fourth absence, the student would fail the class.

Really. This actually happened.

My eldest daughter was enrolled in a pre-K class when I was a 3L. The only thing that changed was that my drive now took, no kidding, an hour and a half, each way, Monday through Friday. I have spend more time driving an automobile through traffic than I ever dreamed. And by "dream" I pretty much mean "nightmare."

After leaving campus, picking up the girls, and arriving home, I would make dinner. Even with my last class ending at 4:10 pm, and the long drive, I would still be home before my wife. Then, around 7:00 or 7:30 p.m. I would sequester myself in the office (spare bedroom) and get through the cases, briefs, and outlines I needed to read for the following day’s class. I rarely was in bed before midnight. I saw 1:30 a.m. far too often.

As you can probably imagine, this type of schedule will eat you alive. It just isn't healthy to try and maintain that kind of pace. So, I soon began spending my entire weekend in the law library, getting my reading done and allowing myself to use the weekday evenings at home to read brief, outline concepts and handle all the mundane busy work thrown at me by utterly ridiculous classes. What passed for my legal research and writing course was light on substance and heavy on bullshit. It's damn shame, too, because that subject is something I certainly could have learned more about.

Sunday with the family wasn’t possible. I missed an awful lot of my kids growing up over the three years I spent in law school. I’m still bitter about that. Ask me in five years if it was worth it. Because right now, today, as I type this, it doesn't feel worth it at all.