I’m a new law student

How did I get here? What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Oh, the answers are long. Too complicated for an introductory post. But suffice it to say there are reasons. Compelling, purposeful reasons. Child abuse, mental illness, torture, trauma, drama, and the fifty states of the union. The world needs to hear from me. I have a lot to say. But first I need to shut up and listen. Become a top law student so I can become an awesome lawyer on a mission. Law for a Cause.

For tonight, I am an anxious, underworked, overstressed waiting student. I need to wait. In the meantime, I look at my children. Look at the past several years of my life, and look in amazement at the fact that I am, indeed, a 1L. A first year law student with a school to call my own.  A thirty-something, non-traditional, unconventional law student who also happens to be a single mom to three children and the failed adoptive parent of a fourth. Does that make me unique? I need to be certain I’m not so unique as to out myself inadvertently.

I care about too many things. Too many people. Too many problems that seem overwhelming. For tonight, that problem concerns children who are kidnapped and raped by family members. Think Vermont. Think murder. But how many other children are involved? What happened to them? How will that affect them down the road? And what type of justice, and more importantly, treatment,  do we offer the victims? Here is where I differ from most people in society…I want to know what happened to the perpetrator when he was a child. And what type of justice did he receive? What type of mental health problems did/does he have that result directly from his own childhood experience and have clearly been inadequately treated? And how do we solve this problem? Because until we do, crimes against innocent children will continue. And those children will grow up to be troubled.

With all due respect, I know what it is like to be the parent to a child who is heading rapidly towards being a sociopath. Those children exist. They hurt animals, other children, themselves. They destroy property, threaten to commit murder and suicide. Sometimes they are successful.  Sometimes they end up locked up. Sometimes they get treatment. But how that works, I’m not exactly sure. Because if there is a length that a person could go to in order to get help for their desperately ill child, I have done it.  To those foster and adoptive parents out there who feel like you have failed, here I am. I’m going to bring the truth to those who need to hear it. First, like I said, I need to shut up and learn how to be a lawyer. And therein will lie my challenge over the next three years.

I am a law mom on a mission. And I aim to perfect it. I want top grades. I need to do my best. My absolute best. Because children all over this country are counting on me to insure the law represents them. Only a person who has “been there, done that” could possibly understand the life I have lived over the past several years.  If there is such a thing as a calling, then law school is that for me.