Briefcase on the Kitchen Table

Hello Friends. I feel like I have been having to say this a lot lately but I apologize for the long break in posts. In yet a second example of ask-and-you-shall-receive, in one of my last posts around the turn of the new year I talked about learning to live with uncertainty. At that point I had been out of law school for seven months and had been a bar-passing lawyer for three. I had two part-time lawyer jobs that were paying the bills but weren’t a good plan long term- but I was hanging on for the dream job.

I am fortunate that I have a very supportive husband. Avery knew my long-term goal was to work for the government in the criminal law field. He never, not once, asked why I didn’t just give it up and go find a job at a law firm. It would have been easier, quicker, and offered far more stability. But instead he waited  along with me. And then all of the sudden I got three interviews at three different offices (one at a prosecutor’s office and two a public defender offices). And then I went from feeling like I was running out of options to having too many.

I am happy to report that I made a choice and I am sure as anything that it was the right one. I am the newest Missouri State Public Defender for the City of St. Louis and I am working almost exclusively with juveniles. It has only been a month but what I have learned so far is that the job is challenging and rewarding every day and I work with some truly brilliant people. Knowing the number of applications the office receives I feel like the luckiest girl in the world to have been granted this opportunity and I am learning so much.

In the last month of starting a VERY demanding new job I also had to prepare for the Indiana Bar exam which I signed up for last fall (for the record we don’t currently have any plans to move back to Indiana- it just seemed like something good to have in my back pocket). Had I known in October that the month leading up to the exam I would be in training for a brand new job I likely would have never signed up but I did and I tackled it the way that life often has to be tackled; the best I could. I worked and trained during the day and then I would come home at 6 o’clock and try to get two to three hours of studying in. Luckily for Avery he was in Arizona for a good chunk of the last horrendous month and was able to miss out on crazy-work-psycho-studying Christine.

The last nine months have been quite a ride. They have involved one graduation, studying and sitting for two full bar examinations, two work trips for my cheerleader/husband (with two more coming up), four total job interviews, three total jobs, and not nearly enough time for the more important things of friends and family- something I am hoping to rectify this spring and summer. More exciting to me is I am actually going to have a summer. Summertime is my absolutely favorite season and spending the entire summer in 2014 shut in a library was an endless source of bitterness for me.

After nine months of anxiety and uncertainty I say bring on the sun.