Blog #31: Advancing in the Law

Many legal professions require a large amount of hours to be put in over the course of a work week, even more when you are working on a hard case that needs to be finished by a deadline. It doesn’t leave as much time to spend with your children/spouse as a regular working mother would have. This topic is really interesting because I received the same response from the working mother’s in law interview assignment that we just completed. My aunt is an attorney that puts in over 80 hours a week and has been doing this for almost 30 years. She talked the most about how it severely effected her home life. Her children were raised by a nanny, and she hardly ever saw her husband outside of work. By the time she got home, they were way too tired to do anything but go to sleep to wake up and do it all over again. You can never break away from the stresses of work if you follow a routine like this. Stress from work that is carried home with you in turn creates stress in your household. The professional side of life becomes more important than your family because you are competing against many single attorneys that will be glad to take your position.

The difficulties in fixing these problems cause your job to be at risk and that is the biggest problem for most people. Money and financial worries are some of the toughest issues to combat in a marriage, so worrying about that would not improve your home life more than losing your job. Most people feel like they cannot make both work without sacrificing something. This is normally true, it’s extremely hard to “have your cake and eat it too”. Some people can make it work, but not without an extreme amount of effort.