The Best We Could: Happy Mother’s Day

My favorite columnist is Sharon Randall. She writes about life, family and love in a way that I can relate to – funny, honest and real. This year her column for Mother’s Day, “The mother I wanted to be”, is about living up to our own wonderfully high expectations, and then adjusting them to the capricious demands of reality.

I know that many paralegals are mothers, and that many make lists for everything, from to-dos to get ready for a hearing to essentials necessary to create the perfect birthday sleepovers for our children, which can be infinitely more complicated than getting ready for a simple trial. Index and organize exhibits? A piece of cake compared to creating gift bags for young party guests that are fun, safe, don’t break the family budget and of course, make us look a little like Martha Stewart even if we’ve never made icing from scratch.

When she was a little girl, Sharon Randall made a list of “the attributes of the kind of mother I would hope to grow up to be”. My favorite attributes on the list are:

• I would be patient.
• I would always be nice.
• I’d cook good suppers, not bad, only the things that my children liked to eat.
  

Now, having worked in the legal field for over 23 years and raised one daughter to adulthood, and in the midst of the second round of guiding two more children toward that big shove out of the nest, I can laugh about falling short of the dream attributes for a mom – and sometimes a paralegal.

• I am patient until my children start talking, like a crowd of high-pitched auctioneers over-stimulated by cotton candy and Cheetos, about their birthday party plans for next year before we’ve even had this year’s celebration, and an attorney announces five minutes before time to leave for the day on Friday to host this year’s sleepover for five hormonal preteens, that I need to work two hours late and come in early on Saturday morning to prepare exhibits for a case he took without telling me earlier in the afternoon.
• In regard to always being nice, to quote Sharon Randall, “I was nice. Or I tried to be. But eventually I got nasty.”
• I’m better at getting ready for a hearing or mediation than I am at cooking good suppers, but am learning that cooking food for the week on Sunday night is a good way to incorporate my case management skills into my real life and feed my children “real” food.
  

American novelist Lisa Alther says, “Any mother could perform the jobs of several air-traffic controllers with ease." That statement is also true of any paralegal. But what’s important is that the planes all land safely, we can find those exhibits at trial, and our children grow up and eventually leave the nest – even if they think our parental attributes leave something to be desired. Someday, they’ll look back and laugh, and be grateful that we worked full-time at demanding jobs in the legal field, hosted the chaotic sleepovers for hormonal preteens with beautiful gift bags from the dollar store, and bought those wonderful already-cooked rotisserie chickens from Harris Teeter.