Poets among us

I've been posting a lot about music lately. I think it's because music is helping carry me through the day, keeping me in my chair in my office (which my daughter calls a castle) doing what I'm supposed to be doing while my flowers are blooming and my daughter is going down a slide in the sun across town.

On my lunch break, when the breeze is just strong enough to lift my hair off of my collar, it's really REALLY difficult to walk back into the building when I'd much rather turn around and bust my daughter and husband out of their routines and head south. I started sailing as a 4-year-old. Wind was always something that picked me up and carried me somewhere. Now, it's just a reminder of all that stands still.

Jason Mraz has this beautiful phrase in You & I Both when he sings,
"See I'm all about them words
Over numbers, unencumbered numbered words
Hundreds of pages, pages, pages forwards
More words then I had ever heard and I feel so alive"

I love those lyrics. I love words. I need words like other people need sleep.

I turn to music, often, because it's a way to have poetry in the day while doing something else you have to do. Ingrid Michaelson's music is, in my mind, great poetry and has me thinking about so many things.

She writes in her so-beautiful-i-can't-listen-to-it-without-crying song, Breakable:

Have you ever thought about what protects our hearts?
Just a cage of rib bones and other various parts.
So it's fairly simple to cut right through the mess,
And to stop the muscle that makes us confess.

And we are so fragile,
And our cracking bones make noise,
And we are just,
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys.

You fasten my seatbelt because it is the law.
In your two ton death trap I finally saw.
A piece of love in your face that bathed me in regret.
Then you drove me to places I'll never forget.

And we are so fragile,
And our cracking bones make noise,
And we are just,
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys.

And we are so fragile,
And our cracking bones make noise,
And we are just,
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls-
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls-
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys.

I have listened to this song so many times and it always surprises me about how many different images come to me each time.

Have you ever thought about what protects our hearts?

I think about it all the time Ingrid. I think about how breakable we all are in a literal sense when I look over medical records and accident reports and photographs of injuries, coroner reports and witness statements about losses. Splintered wood. Singed property. Shattered lives. Unrecoverable damages. Everyone's losses. The purpose of torts (which is a word for broken) is to put people back together again, as best as possible, to the way they were before the break. But it never ever can. It's like trying to reconstruct a wave before it breaks at the shoreline. The lawsuit is almost never about the cracking bones. It's about the sense of broken spirit. Of feeling disrespected. That the frame you have built up for yourself has been shattered.

When I drive to work, past certain intersections which I know are prone to accidents, I see the names of former clients on street signs. I hear their words. There's a stretch of highway in a rural area that curves. I spent months reconstructing the events before the impact. It has been several years, but I can still drive past the scene, no longer blackened with tire marks and burned grass and pinpoint every detail. It "resumes play" like a DVD exactly where I left off and the words from each witness in the chain who treated the driver whisper out of the blades of grass.

And then there's how breakable all of us are, boys and girls, men and women on the inside. I catch a lot of shit for being too sensitive. I don't really know how else to be. I sense someone else's vulnerability and I don't know how to pretend that I don't see it.

I cleaned out my basement last night. I have many of my grandmother's things that no one wanted when she died. Mostly scraps of fabric and newspaper clippings. In the boxes, there are 1 inch squares that I recognize as pieces that later became my curtains, her dress, my dollhouse bedspread, her table cloth, a quilt she made for my future child. Looking through the box of small parts of her, I find it so so so so so so hard to let go of a single scrap. She has died all over again and I am left in pieces trying to make something of them: these scraps of her past and my future.

My daughter, who is named for a poet, asked me what I do at work.* That's just it. I try to put pieces together that were never meant to be put together and make something we can all live with until something else tears at the seams. I am so thankful for music to hold on to while I try.

Here's Ingrid singing Breakable:



**To hell with Bee Movie telling my child that her mommy is a blood sucking mosquito. I'm sure Jerry Seinfeld is glad to have his attorney keep his wife out of copyright infringement trouble. I could rant about that for 6 pages, but this is not a ranting blog.

To Be Heard

That's what we lawyers say when the judge calls a case name in court. We stand up and say, "To be heard." I really struggle with whether or not anyone is ever heard and whether I am hearing the things that will be most pivotal in my life. Am I listening enough?

Looking for Terra Naomi performances to figure out which album to get, I found this young musician covering her and was just blown away. Amazing. Her cover of This is the First Day of My Life by Bright Eyes is great too (and recorded in what appears to be her garage).



Someone give this girl a record deal. I love the posters on her wall and her seriousness and the fact that she closes the door before broadcasting to millions. I love that the ceiling fan is on and that she runs her own camera. But mostly, I love that she puts it out there as honestly and purely as possible. They teach you not to do that - little too loud - too smart - too strong - girls are not supposed to be. I love this because it is so full of everything that it is to be a girl in a time of contradicting expectations. Don't listen to them Meghan. Don't lose that. Be heard.

As an aside, I wish they sold this Terra Naomi cover of Sublime's Santeria, but it's only available on Youtube. She writes this was recorded in their hotel in Castlebar Ireland after a show. Enjoy.

On Writing & Confidentiality

Rebecca Walker mentioned in a lecture I attended once that she tries very hard in her writing to be honest, but to do no harm. I struggle with that too and primarily with feeling that so many stories I have to tell are not mine alone and that I am somehow stealing part of another's individual experience. Our lives are all tangled.

Anne Lamott says you have to write as though everyone you are writing about is dead. I can't do that. But having read her work, I don't think she does either. She seems to be careful with people too, though probably more ruthless when commenting on herself.

There is that concept in the law that my rights end where yours begin. This is a problem for a writer. What belongs only to me and no one else? Very little.

I haven't written here in a few weeks because everything I have been wanting to share has involved the intricacies of other people's lives and deaths and I'm hesitant to share other people's stories without their consent. I'm left with only cliches about how life is precious, how the balance of work-family is kicking my ass but I'm enjoying the ride, and that, as O mentioned in last month's magazine, "Parents, I bow to your endurance!"

What I can say is that I'm inspired to write by people like the brilliant Jonathon Safron Foer who has said that he writes the kinds of book he would like to read, but can't find. Lately, I have come across novels that have titles that are exactly the title I would write, in fact much better than anything I could come up with, but inside the cover, it fizzles.

As the weather turns colder, my body reminds me of every broken bone, every muscle tear. Injuries I forgot I ever had, my body remembers. There is a novel called What The Body Remembers (by Shauna Singh Baldwin). It's a lovely book, but not at all what I was looking for and I left it feeling this title could have been cultivated in so many different ways.

The body having a separate memory from consciousness is a concept with endless story telling opportunities. All of our bodies are this way. Infinite possibilities.

When I saw the cover, I instantly thought of my mother begging us as children not to bump into her chair because the jarring sensation made her re-live falling from the attic, through the Pink Panther insulation and hitting the concrete garage floor. She was looking for baby clothes that had been stored away because she had just learned she was pregnant with me.

When my father came into the garage and found her, he knelt down, held her face in his hands, Viet Nam still fresh in his mind, and told her, "You're not going to die." They still can't get through the story today, 30 years later, without a bottle of wine and tears. I remain amazed that through the course of the pregnancy, her broken pelvis healed in time to deliver a 9lb 12 oz baby. The intensity of that trauma is most likely blocked out by the mind. But the body remembers.

Getting Mother's Body (Suzan-Lori Parks) turned out to be a literal title about retrieving the physical body. Now I love Suzan-Lori Parks. I'm excited she won a well deserved McArthur and to hear her talk about studying with James Baldwin is inspiring. She compared his students to flowers, all turning to face his sun and all more radiant in his presence... or something like that. She's amazing and I raced out to buy her book. But the title had a million places to go, and chose only one.

I foresee feeling this way again about a new film Things We Lost In The Fire. What an amazing title. Bret Lott teaches that writing is all about making choices. This title made all of them and none all at once. Damn. It could be anything. And, it should be said, there is a beautiful 2001 album by Low of the same name and I hope they are getting some kick back for coming up with such an amazing phrase.

This title made me think of *Fran, a Southern comfort food cook who now has a low country restaurant. When she showed me a recent grease fire scar, conversation drifted to stories of other fires. She told me that she kept a journal every night of her children's lives for 15 years that was lost in a house fire. Her husband passed when the boys were young and most of her photos of them together were gone. She told me about the pages and what the journal looked like with a hollow expression on her face of loss beyond measure. Watching the news this week, I thought about her and her journal and all of the things lost by each family- the vacuous nature of things lost in such a disintegrating way.

I'll keep writing. Though not about work, or where I live, or confidences shared. It's difficult to leave so much out and get to the root of things, but I have to write. Foer was interviewed about a year ago, when his child was 10 wks old and said:

"How do I put this? I love being a writer, but I don't love writing. An analogy might be, right now, I love having a kid, but man, oh man—it's so hard. Twenty-four hours a day. It's the hardest thing I've ever done. If you were to ask me each step of the way, "Do you feel like doing this?"...

As in: Do you feel like changing a diaper? No. Do you feel like jiggling a kid at four a.m.? No. Do you feel like cleaning barf off your shirt? No. But at the end of the day, if someone said, "Would you have wanted to spend the day any other way?," I'd say that's how I wanted to spend the day. When I write, I don't find it enjoyable page-by-page, but I'm really glad that it's what I do."

Thanks for reading.

Southern Belles with Babies & Briefcases

I went to law school with some tremendous, impressive women. Cerebral rock stars. There were more women than men in my class and they dominated the top of it. After graduation, many of them filled prestigious positions at big firms in the neighboring big city.

Five years after graduation, few of them remain in the practice of law. What is particularly interesting to me is that these women, most of them now mothers, have not left the workplace, they have just left the practice of law. It bothers me because, even on my most challenging days, I believe we need women in the law to effectuate positive change for women and families on a grassroots level.

I have read all of the books I can find on the bigger Mom/Work issue(s) (Naomi Wolfe's Misconceptions, Judith Warner's Perfect Madness, Daphne de Marneffe's Maternal Desire, and so on) and I am noticing that although these books are brilliant and well researched, they only identify the problems. I'm sure that brings comfort to many women who felt alone in the same way The Feminine Mystique helped an earlier generation. But, the books leave my most important questions unanswered. I don't want to just complain about pitfalls in the FMLA.

Generations of women before me have made sacrifices that have allowed me to be in my profession, so I can't complain. I feel terrible complaining about anything related to motherhood because I am blessed to have my daughter in my life.

My question is simply, how can we make the practice of law more accessible to parents and how can I be more efficient in managing the balance?

To try to answer those questions, I've been interviewing former classmates and women who I have litigated with and against, on the subject of how they are managing the work-life balance and why the law is particularly inflexible. The answers have been a fascinating look into the profession.

Rather than tell you what societal issues came up, I think it's better to focus on what is working for some of them. I'm hoping this can be part of a series and when I hear something helpful, I will pass it on.

The greatest piece of advice so far was from someone I had a case against in the past. I called her up and asked her to meet me for coffee one afternoon (her beautiful kids are 2 & 4) and she was so gracious with her time.

She said that she finally had to reconcile the fact that her own Southern upbringing --her definition of what it meant to be a wife and mother, her own expectations for herself in that regard-- and her current career demands are incongruous. Accepting that fact has really helped her.

For her, this came to a head when guests popped in unannounced after she had been in court all day and had just walked through the door to squeeze her kids. She was mortified. "I had to get over that the house was a mess and that there weren't cheese straws on the table and flowers and h'ors d'oevres. It's okay if those things only happen on special occasions."

She and I both want to have time to do those things: to make people in our lives feel special with the kind of the hospitality we've been raised is appropriate, but that our schedules won't permit it. Her guests could have cared less about the cheese straws, or their absence. Once she got that, she felt more free to live her life.

She said a million little things that resonated with me, but that story sort of personifies the inner bind we all feel about living up to our expectations for ourselves. I've read a lot of articles where people feel strangled by the cheese straw type of thing, (or whatever the cheese straw is for them) and that it's a burden put on them by society. I don't feel that way. Those are things I would like to do, there's just not enough time.

Last Christmas, I felt so overwhelmed. I wanted to do every cute felt, snow flake, mittens, cookie, cocoa, knitting, string popcorn, Christmas book, caroling activity in every kids magazine. I wanted to add new traditions for every part of every holiday. I finally realized that it wasn't that I had too much to do, it was that I was taking on too much. I wasn't making any choices. I have found some solace in knowing that I don't have to do every single thing all of the time. Some days there will be cheese straws and some days there will be cheese pizza.

My friend's practical survival tips:
1. Type up a list of birthdays and holidays for the year and keep them on you to work on year round. Keep the file on your computer to make changes as needed.
2. Have one area for clean laundry where you can close the door. This way, if you don't get everything folded and put away, the kids can go in and dig for clothes which they really enjoy.
3. Hire a babysitter some Saturday morning so that you can work on a house project that is draining your energy.
4. Re-evaluate how you are spending your time for each hour of the day. What's working, what's not. Re-group and make a new schedule.

More on this later...