Sunday, December 4, 2011

Interruptus Gesticaticus

The sloppy title hopefully gives it away - I have been absent from my inept attempt at blogging due to a sudden onset of gestation!

Which is pretty weird since a) I am not married (no biggie there), b) I was on birth control when I got knocked up, and c) I haven't done this in more than a decade - the youngest around here is eleven.  But, the more the merrier, etc, and onward we go, if a bit green around the gills and way too old and tired to enjoy the joke yet.

On the job front I am keeping this schtum, mainly since, haha here's more irony, I am something of a role model in my GAL role and perhaps an unwed, unplanned, late in life pregnancy won't be well met in my court or with my other coworkers.  This isn't too easy with my often twelve hours straight through court days where I now MUST take pee breaks (and no one else including the judge ever does).

The job is already a bit tense, since I may be having my pay cut significantly as my job splits in the new year.  My current job is both GAL and delinquency defense, and frankly, I have too many clients to be ethical at either job; new state laws regarding GAL standards have put the onus on me to inform the court of this overage of clients.  I have done so and the solution is apparently to split the job (which is needed very badly, not only due to head count but also due to raging conflicts of interest that are coming up in at least one-fourth of the cases - call it small town, everyone knows/screws/deals/perps together or on one another - a very sick version of Cheers).  The bad news is, the county can't pay me my salary and still actually pay a delinquency defender...so instead, my pay gets cut.  Gotta figure out some way to make the numbers crunch in a way that doesn't leave us homeless with a newborn. 

I might add here, with every understanding that I begin to sound pitiful, I also have no health insurance outside COBRA from my divorce ($$$$) and no time off unless I pay a replacement.  I'm a contract employee, which I now understand to mean "screwed."  There is a job on the horizon which I could take, one which would give me insurance and time off and the whole normal spiel, but it would be far less flexible than my current setting, where I have some ability to work from home at least. 

In spite of all the shocking and/or nearly Dickensian sounding news here, I am pretty happy and the kids are thrilled that we will have a baby next year.  Who knew this was the direction we would take, with one graduating and leaving for college in 2012?  What fun, to have a small one again! 

Typed while munching broccoli and carrots and swigging back not rum and diets but Crystal Light ;-)

6 comments:

  1. Congratulations! Ha, I think you'll still be a great role model. You can show all those girls that just because you're a mom, doesn't mean your life choices end there. They can still go to college, they can still have rewarding careers.

    Depending on when you're due, you might be able to find a newly-minted baby lawyer to fill in for you super cheap. Y'all's juvenile stuff is different from ours; there are many of us who take appointments for GALs and parents' attorneys (although most judges keep a closed list and only use a handful of attorneys), so when I popped, I asked a friend who also takes appointments in the same courts to fill in for me and I didn't have to pay her (we got to be friends because I paid her the first time I asked her to fill in for me). Of course, I also fill in for her on occasion too, you just have to find a buddy willing to do that when you're a solo. I also only took a month "off" (the month off was not going to court... I still ended up in the clinic, and the law library, and constantly dealing with my clients and other lawyers... ugh... there is no maternity leave for the solo practitioner).

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    1. You are so right - there was no leave for me and I was in court four days after my baby boy was eventually born healthy!

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  2. Wow! Congrats!!! I'm sure I'm not the first to say it, but how nice to have built-in sibling babysitters!

    Having had my daughter while I was practicing solo/doing contract work, I definitely feel your pain on the employment front.

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    1. It was so hard - and he is four now, but I am still on a mommy track more so than a full time practice. That is starting to change, but it really is hard to make those choices.

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