Eleven and a half years ago, I left my job as a lawyer.  I’m so glad that I did.  I still keep up my continuing legal education credits, and my license to practice law in the State in which I reside, but other than that?  No.  Just, no.  I don’t ever want to have a job like that again.

I was practicing immigration and uncontested divorce law in Chinatown, and don’t ask me about how they intersect, because they do.  It isn’t that hard to figure out.  Then, I got pregnant with my first child, wound up almost dead of preeclampsia and class III HELLP syndrome, and never went back to practicing law after her birth.  Honestly, I wouldn’t have gone back even if I hadn’t had such a hard time, because I hated it.

I hate conflict.  I really do.  While I know that I am really good at working the system and filling out the forms in the right way to get what you want through the byzantine laws and unwritten rules, it was the conflict that kept me up at night.  I knew, before my kids were born, that I couldn’t possibly manage to raise them properly and be a good lawyer.

The same rumination techniques which let me play chess by looking at every angle on the board, every future move, and strategically plotting a course with the least risk of ruin, would play havoc with my ability to multitask properly as a mother.  I’m bad at multi-tasking.  I always have been.  Instead, I hyperfocus like an autistic boss.  I can’t prioritize my kids, and also prioritize my job.  I just can’t.  That’s why I left.

That doesn’t mean I won’t practice law in the future, after I have sufficient amount of free time to hyperfocus on something besides raising my three children.  That doesn’t mean I won’t write laws, or write articles criticizing laws with a suggestion of better ones.  It does mean I can’t do it now.  I can’t work on 100 different cases with competence and efficiency.  That’s not my skillset.

In the mean time, I get to sleep in, sometimes.  I cook 99% of the meals my family eats.  The laundry gets done.  The shopping gets done.  The medical appointments and swimming lessons and soccer practice get done.  I have enough to do right now, and adding a law practice with life or death issues on top of that would be a very bad idea for me.  I really don’t want to be stuck between taking my kid to the hospital and dealing with malpractice claims due to court timing issues.

I miss it, you know.  I miss playing chess with competent players.  I miss the strategy.  I miss the filling out forms properly the first time, but the local school district still gives me the opportunity to do so at least once a year.  When the personality tests come out with me as a “Mastermind,” they’re not kidding.  That’s what I love doing.  Yet, that is not how one raises children, or stays married.

So, from time to time, I work on the problem given to me by an old friend: if I were going to reverse human habitat devastating climate change using the legal system, how would I do it?  Most of the time, I admit that it can’t be done.  Sometimes, though, I have some crazy ideas.  The key to it seems to be to break it down into manageable chunks.  For example, if all you wanted to do was to help leave the oil in the ground by crashing the global financial system using the legal system?  Oh yeah, that’s totally doable.  Banks fail = shipping halts = oil tankers don’t run.  That’s even explained in the movies, like that 1990s flick Sneakers, where the villain explained how you could ruin public confidence in entire countries using rumor alone.

Most of the time I don’t work on those things.  It’s just one load of laundry and one bill paid after another, and one book read to the children and one board game played after another.  Sure beats working myself to death.