With summer quickly approaching in southern California I am fighting the urge to run. I am sitting in a windowless room, studying. And I don’t mean run away from this life I created forever, just for a little bit. Just to sit quietly, in the sun.
As I inch closer and closer towards this goal of mine, it becomes increasingly apparent that I am fit for my chosen career path in a myriad of ways. I am comfortable enough to love it, but uncomfortable enough to find it challenging. It suits my personality, including all anxiety related neuroses. But there is a small part of me that still wishes I could live on a farm in the middle of nowhere, raising children and corn. I suppose it is down to too many Little House on the Prairie books when I was in fifth grade, but I find that type of lifestyle to seem endlessly calming. And I know that it isn’t true. People that live on farms still have the internet and crime and Facebook and there just isn’t any solution to that.
But what it does make me consider, seriously consider, is bringing children into the mix. Rob and I have talked and talked and it is turning into a sooner rather than later conversation. I am ready. We are ready as a couple. We have been together five years and still aren’t tired of each other in the least. We have come to agreement on things like money and housing and nursing and schooling and so many more ‘ings’ it becomes irrelevant. We both knew going into this relationship that babies were on the horizon.
And what makes me think of this is one year left. One year until, God willing, I graduate from law school. And as insane as it sounds, graduation time might coincide with baby time (once again, God willing). And there is this thought, in the back of my mind, that I have to be a woman who wants a career or a woman who wants to be a mother. You can’t want both equally. And I want both. I suppose if I had to give up on one I would have to choose, but I feel pretty strongly about having both. About doing it all. And if means being a mother means that I skip opportunities for advancement and don’t climb the ladder quite as high as I had hoped, I am okay with it. And if having a career means that I actually need to pay someone to care for my children, then I am okay with that. And I know there are women that are okay with neither of those options. And that is okay. Because as women, or people, for goodness sake, we get to pick what is important.
And for me, I want to be a mother and a lawyer. And I want to see the sun. Is that so impossible a dream?
