Conventional wisdom has it that first-year law students can only talk about the law, and new parents can only talk about their children. Try being a 1L and becoming a parent in the same year. For the past six months all I've been able to talk about is how my son Andrew is unconstitutional neither facially nor as applied, and how Mass G.L. c. 234A, ยง68 ate all his bananas and oatmeal, num num. I can't be sure, but I think people at dinner parties have caused physical injury to themselves trying to get out of conversations with me. While it is true that being a first-year law student demands at least fifteen hours of your attention in any given day, being a parent of a newborn requires twenty-nine.
I've acquired an important perspective on each of the two poles of my life as the months have passed. Although your latest Property case may appear to demand your attention immediately, it won't actually scream at you until it gets that attention, which is particularly wonderful at four in the morning. Score one for Property. No, you can't always understand why the baby is crying. But spend a few weeks in Civil Procedure trying to figure out if you can get into federal court on a state law claim implicated in the same nucleus of operative facts as a supplemental federal claim, and what the baby wants comes to seem comparatively simple: food, a new diaper, or some company. Score one for Baby. Remember that however difficult the latest parenting challenge may be, you can be certain that once you've gotten through, nobody is going to tell you that 40 other new parents did it better than you and 30 did it worse. Of course, the challenges you master in law school will help you earn money, while the baby will actually contribute very little to the family finances. In fact, if I understand things correctly (and, again, I am new at this), the baby actually will cost more money than he or she brings in (the net loss is greater in jurisdictions with stringent child labor laws).
Despite the constant stress, having a newborn at home made being a law student seem undemanding, and being a law student made raising a newborn seem uncomplicated. And by the way, a baby is a great companion for a One-L. We could bond, exchanging weary glances, conveying the same thought: "All this new stuff doesn't make much sense to me, either - but it's pretty interesting." I was becoming a new person just as my son was becoming a person for the first time. We were each starting to learn a new language (though the new words he's learning allow him to spout less gibberish with each passing day, while the ones I'm learning take me in the opposite direction). And I can't wait until his first year in college. I'm going to call him up all night in three hour intervals to scream "I'm so hungry!" Hey, he started it.
