My first law school final is about five weeks from now. I still cannot believe how quickly this first semester has gone. I can't believe it's almost over already.
For the most part, I love law school every bit as much as I always thought I would. I enjoy the intellectual stimulation, my daily trips into the city, and meeting new friends. It is also as exhausting as I always thought it would be. If I didn't have kids and a husband and a house and a whole other life, it would be a lot easier to handle it all. As it is, I am exhausted. It is getting more and more difficult for me to juggle everything successfully, although I hate to admit that.
I find that from about 4:00-9:00 p.m. every night I feel stressed and crabby and overwhelmed. During those hours I am making dinner, driving back and forth across town through traffic to sports practices and show rehearsals and concerts and games, trying to get lunches made and clothes picked out for the next day, putting Matthew to bed, taking care of the dog, and thinking about all the homework I'm not doing. On the weekends Randy is home and helps a bit, but he's only home for two days before heading out of town again on Monday and I study all day on Sunday, so I feel like we have very little time to really get things done. I manage to do the laundry (Randy also does some and Karly does her own, but there's still a lot left for me) so we all have clean clothes, but I never seem to make it to the house. My house is a disaster. My yard is a disaster. I have fall decorations on the front porch, but I still have summer flowers in the flower pots and peonies and hasta and a whole perennial garden that need to be trimmed and winterized. Halloween is less than a week away and we have candy, but no costumes and one lonely bowl of fall gourds in the foyer.
It is difficult for me to let this stuff go, because for the past 11 years I have been able to take care of it all. My house has always been decorated for any given holiday (not to mention clean), I've had costumes made by mid-October, and I've always been ultra-organized and on top of each day's activities. But now? Well, my homework is done, the kids' homework is done, we're all clean and fed and we have clean clothes. But that's about it. And it's okay, I think. I'm willing to let it go a little bit in exchange for a J.D.
Tonight we got home from football and dance practices and I told Matthew to take a bath. As he was brushing his teeth, I tried to rinse out the bathtub. I discovered, however, that the bathroom faucet handle is broken. It just spins and spins and no water comes out. So I thought I would unscrew it from the wall to see if it was something I could replace myself. I got the screws out about halfway before I discovered that the handle is blocking them so you can't actually get them, or the faucet, out of the wall. I decided to check the internets to see what I could find about replacing a shower faucet. I found lots of instructions out there, but they all involve things like "solder," "pipe cutters," "flaring tools," "transition unions," and "propane torches." Propane torches? Yeah, I'm studying law, not plumbing. I can handle personal jurisdiction and proximate cause, but transition unions and propane torches are out of my league.
And this is my life right now. Last week it was the water dispenser in the refrigerator and the week before that the rear wiper on my van. I always think I'm totally tough and can handle anything until these technical homeowner engineering things come up. How am I supposed to keep up on all of this stuff, cook dinner, clean the house, care for kids AND be a law student? Am I really going to be able to keep this up for 3 1/2 more years?