I’m Back (Brain to follow shortly)

It’s hard to reach this keyboard with the babber in a sling on my chest…but darn it that’s not the toughest thing I’ve done in the last 3 weeks…Quick – while he’s sleeping – BLOG a BLOG…

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Sigh…It’s hard to keep track of events in the legal world when I am (quite literally) drowning in pooey nappies and permanently attached to a sucking machine…But that’s not the toughest thing I’ve done in the last 3 weeks…I have my own family blog subject right here, sleeping in front of me. 

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So I guess the question is: has motherhood brought me new insight into the plight of my clients? Only time will tell I suppose, and lets face it whilst these first three weeks have been pretty INTENSE I’m guessing there is a WHOLE lot more to parenthood than I have so far experienced first hand. But there are a couple of things that were blindingly obvious right from the moment he popped out (that’s such a misleading phrase, as if it’s as quick and easy as popping a cork):

 

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Firstly: I never subscribed to the view that first hand experience of parenthood is a pre-requisite for practice at the family bar. And I still don’t. But what I do think I will have when I go back to work is a deal more insight into why ‘what happens to the kids’ makes people act so darn CRAZY when they separate. They take you over these little people, systematically drain all your time, your capacity for interesting conversation or intellectual activity, and render you emotionally captivated. Nothing is ever the same. I knew it would be this way and yet I didn’t really understand it.

 

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And secondly I think also I will have far more empathy for parents in public law (care) cases in future. It is so HARD looking after such a tiny tiny person 24 7. I’m a woman of a solid family background, good education, and relatively intelligent BUT – even when I’ve planned my pregnancy and taken time to read all the books and websites, absorbed my parents own parenting style, taken advice from everyone I can think of…even when I’ve got a healthy and relatively (I think) undemanding baby, and a fantastically supportive husband and family to help me out – this three weeks has been the hardest I have ever worked. It is easy to see how people find it hard to manage, particularly where they are single parents or have more than one child. In fact I wonder at the moment how young single mums ever manage – those that do must have some remarkable strength of character. I suspected it before but now it is plain to me that many of us ‘good enough’ parents would also fail if put in the same dire circumstances as some of the poor parents we see struggling in the care system – isolated, unsupported, broke – how would you cope? I wouldn’t.

 

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I end here both because I’m running out of my brain power reserves and because he who must be obeyed is waking for a feed….ttfn

5 thoughts on “I’m Back (Brain to follow shortly)

  1. Welcome back, and congratulations! A cliché, but now your troubles really begin!

  2. Ben Fearnley

    Blogging and caring for a baby at the same time? s.37 report I think..

  3. shhh…don’t tell the health visitor…

  4. Thanks! Can’t believe he’s almost 6 weeks already!

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