I’m still alive…after a trying finals period (trying only because of my own procrastination, but trying, nevertheless), but I just hit “send” and turned in my last paper.  It was the final for my “Semester in Practice” seminar, which I attended on Friday mornings after spending Tuesday-Thursday interning at the Harvard Office of the General Counsel.  Nominally it was to be a professional-responsibility-focused paper somehow related to the internship.  Mine was about my first experience as a “working” mother, and I set up the legal, historical, and socio-economic framework for being a twenty-first century working mother; discussed some books on the topic (The Two-Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi and The Feminine Mistake by Leslie Bennetts); summarized the main impediments to being a mother working in the legal profession, which include the billable hours-based structure of the profession, as well as the ironic misnomer of the “part-time” option (relying heavily on Lauren Stiller Rikleen’s Ending the Gauntlet); and then, finally, tried to come up with my own strategy for being a lawyer-mother, which came down to the idea of “redefining Superwoman.”  Appropriately, I finished it yesterday, my first Mother’s Day, which I spent at my own mother’s house, watching her whisk my baby up and down the stairs, out for walks, and in and out of the high chair as I pounded out the rest of the paper—trying not to feel guilty.

Our weekend in NYC/Summit was great, though–Tim and I spent Friday night in the city, having dinner at 5 Ninth and staying at the New York Palace, which was a bit over-the-top for me taste-wise, but was in a perfect location on Madison Ave. (how appropriate, again!) directly across from St. Patrick’s.  On Saturday morning we slept late, Tim went to the gym while I read the Times in the big bed, then we strolled around for a bit before heading back out to Summit, where my baby was waiting for me at the train station with her grandparents.  Last night we had a family dinner and birthday party, with aunts and uncles and sisters and lemon cake.  And now I head back up to Boston with a full two weeks of nothing before graduation and bar review.  My conception of “nothing” is quickly filling up with to-dos, but I’m going to try to carefully carve out some pure nothing-time, nonetheless.