I have found that being a mom and being a law student isn't necessarily a good combination. As a parent, you're supposed to teach your children how to behave in polite society. The very decision to go to law school immediately calls into question your ability to accurately assess your child's progress toward that goal.
For example, I have two children. B. is 5 and A. is , and I know that as part of my Duty To Society, I'm supposed to teach them certain things about getting along with other people. As a parent, you teach your children that it is not okay to hit another person. Ever. In law, however, there is the recognition of a right to self-defense. I knew I was in trouble the day B. came over to me and said to me, "Mommy, A. hit me," and my response was "were you doing something that made her feel as though she needed to hit you?" Because as a mommy - that's the WRONG ANSWER. Any mommy knows the RIGHT ANSWER is "TIME OUT AISLINN." So already I'm in trouble because my mommy brain and my lawyer brain are getting into it.
Mommy brain: A. needs a time out.
Lawyer brain: A. had a legitimate right of self-defense, Brianna pinched her hand and took away her cookie.
Mommy brain: So, put B. in time out too.
Lawyer brain: But that isn't fair to A., she was just defending her space. Legally, she's done nothing that warrants a penalty, civil or criminal.
Mommy brain: But you're not supposed to hit other people...
Lawyer brain: Why not? B. took her cookie....
I went into the bedroom and told my husband that he had to deal with it.
Now in the first year of law school you take Contracts. And to paraphrase from Robert Fulghum, "All I needed to know about Contracts I learned in Kindergarten." Contract Law is all about creating economic fairness. This is not something you need to teach to a toddler. They already know what is fair, and how it should be applied, and my children were no different. All they lacked was the proper vocabulary to express it. Uh-huh. And I, being a 1L, needed to practice all this new vocabulary that I'm learning to apply. So, my children very quickly learned such words as negotiation, express term, discussion item, material term, and performance. This went along just great until my 4-year-old decided she didn't want to get ready for bed one night and informed me that "this was not a discussion item." That was when I learned that toddlers don't stop with the concept of economic fairness, they'll apply contract principles to any situation that doesn't seem fair, and they don't care what the rules about that are.
Motherhood teaches you to multi-task. Ask any of the motherhood gurus and they will tell you that downtime is found time - and one of the best places to find time is the daily commute. Now remember, I'm a law student - which is shorthand for obsessive compulsive individual who believes that studying is a competitive sport. And I'm a mom, which means that I spend one bazillion hours a day in the car, which my multitasking brain quickly discovered could be converted to study time. Record the lectures, plug the iPod into the car stereo system, and I easily had two hours of study time. Motherhood gurus take that, I thought smugly. Drive the carpool AND study. Which lasted until the conversation which will forever be remembered in the Greene household as "the great cookie incident."
I was studying the rules on intoxication defense, what are they, when do you apply them, how are they properly applied, and for those of us who are really looking for the extra credit - how long the half-life of an alcoholic beverage is so that when you see it on an exam question, you can - in your head - calculate just how much of that alcoholic beverage is still likely to be in the bloodstream and accurately assess whether or not the individual that is profiled in the question is likely to be legally drunk. That lecture was the number one hit on the carpool chart that week - because the 2L students had told the 1Ls that this was a favorite on the criminal essay exam - pitch a question that has a potential intoxication defense. And midterms were a month away (which in 1L terms might as well be next week in terms of when to start reviewing for them).
So, then we hit kid bedtime - which for my 5-year-old is the time to start seeing just how close she can come to breaking the rules without actually breaking them. And I (being a good mommy trying to accomplish the goal of raising a socially acceptable child) gave her a warning. To which she answered, "the sugar in the cookie that I had for lunch is causing me to be bad."
And then it happened. My inner law student took over. The words came out automatically from somewhere far beyond my socially acceptable mommy persona: "Voluntary intoxication is an incomplete defense. The cookie might be influencing your behavior; however, you are still responsible for it. Moreover, you had the cookie for lunch over 4 hours ago, which means that any resulting influence from the cookie is no longer valid, as sugar does not remain in the system that long so blaming your behavior on your cookie does not constitute a valid defense in this case." And as soon as I finished speaking, I slapped a hand over my mouth because I realized that I did something that is JUST NOT DONE! as a mommy. EVER! And I had one of those moments that every parent has at some point - the overwhelming desire to hit the "rewind" button on life and try again. Because in the immutable rules of mommy hood, you never do ANYTHING that could damage the child's self-image. But before I could say anything, I knew that I was in bigger trouble.... Instead of bursting into tears at my insensitivity, my daughter merely looked at me with an appraising look and asked, "so how long ago would I have needed to eat the cookie?"
We went back to listening to Radio Disney.
