How I Became a Small Town Lawyer

There’s a time when I’ve got to relinquish any idea that I’m going to have another baby, and I point out to myself that I really don’t care, because the only reason I want this baby rather than a cat or a goldfish is so Karl will never go away and leave me, and I’ve become confident after a decade that Karl will stay even without a tangle of family to trip him on the way out the door.

And because I’m a realist, I become enchanted with the benefits of life without more offspring, all that time and money to spend on myself, passion to devote to my professional success, days busy with furious scribbling and flagrant advocacy, commingling at the bar after work with my law partners, long-winded hard drinkers with five o’clock shadows and wives waiting at home, listening to their dizzyingly funny war stories about judges and verdicts and lawyers teetering on the edge of disgrace.

So just imagine how I feel when contrary to all the percentages and probabilities and perchances the sheer contrariness of the universe hammers me and plants its seed in my slightly gone-by belly, and there go my visions of hedonistic fellow traveling and twenty-first century big dick trials. A few months into my pregnancy, my breasts a little bigger, my cheeks flushed, my body heavy, Karl says I think you might be expecting, and I say, ridiculous, that’s how much I have dreamed a different life now and put the baby thing away.

And even months into this, I argue with myself, have the baby, get rid of the baby, why do I have to be Sarah and the olive tree, but in the end though I resign myself to the big F, fate, the big K karma, the big A for afraid to mess with this big E event. My belly gets round and fat. I waddle to work and tell the partners goodbye and then spend two weeks watching television and eating myself amnesiac while I wait for something interesting to happen.

You can’t gloss over labor, can you. Maybe later I will tell everyone I squatted down and laid a baby, me a veritable chicken mother, and if they are gullible and childless they will buy that story, but in truth it was twenty-four hours give or take a century of frantic and ambulatory misery. Karl is with me, and that is sweet, and together we cavort around, like we were dancing on the dining room table, and the living room floor, everywhere but the bed, except I’m not really having much fun but just panting and whining and in pain. And then the baby happens amid the carnage, and suddenly, the aliens invade and force feed me hormones and humble pie. Little pinwheels in my brain whisper love your baby, never let him go.

So my lawyerly ambition gets squeezed into a tiny garlic press of a plan, nurse baby, rock baby, sing to baby, think about baby, put baby in a carriage and stroll, dress baby in darling little sweaters, nurse again. Karl is so good, I should have done this years ago, could have sixteen children by now if I had put my mind to it.

The old schemes are relegated to a back alley, inconceivable to leave baby to the indifferent caresses of paid nannies, inconceivable to dance back to the high life and be hours away from baby, and my new blueprint is so reasonable, so balanced between baby and a sober and parsimonious career path, I will open an office here in town, buy a few books, some pens, embossed business cards, the practice will start slow, perhaps one client here, a consultation there, baby sleeping while I barter my advice.

And I find, indeed, that it is so much fun to practice law like this, even without the buttresses of high-flying partners, even in this impoverished corner of the world, even with baby waiting, fun to wheel and deal in dimes and sorrows and counsel. I hadn’t known I would like it quite this much, hole in the wall lawyering, so many miles away from that other world that I will hardly ever see those sharp funny men during the next twenty years and miss them not at all.