Lipstick Lawyerisms of a Work-at-Home Mom

By Tori Stetson

Law school, two cats, and a very successful husband behind her, Tori realized that her promising career trajectory of becoming a successful she-lawyer was on a seemingly endless downward spiral.  She needed to take her career into her own hands while simultaneously raising a family if she wanted to have any semblance of a career at all.

 

Lipstick Lawyerisms of a Work-at-Home Mom dives deeply into women's history and examines the agonizing question so many mothers face today: Do I stay at home with my children and risk abandoning my career, or do I work outside the home and risk losing quality time with my kids?

 

History, pop-culture, humor, and personal anecdotes take you on a journey—the journey of a twenty (er) thirty-something young professional mom.  From deciding on a career path, getting married, interviewing as a woman—then a pregnant woman, birthing children, and negotiating with toddlers, to navigating male corporate culture, discovering the new female advantage, and the power of being a woman.

 

Luckily, Tori Stetson, a lady lawyer who has mastered the art of stumbling and getting back up again, is here to show you that you're not in this alone. Lipstick Lawyerisms of a Work-at-Home Mom urges women to pull from their resources and redistribute their skills to gain a life fueled by passion rather than crippled by fear.  It is thought-provoking, enlightening, and empowering. 

 

It is a book not only for moms, but for future moms and women, not only for lawyers, but for professionals and prospective professionals. It is meant to speak to independents, innovators, entrepreneurs, and alchemists who transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

 

Truly a must-read for all young professional and aspiring professional moms!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tori Ludwig
• Release date: Nov 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781735876719

Book preview

Telling stories of self-debauchery

and making a spectacle of oneself

is never narcissistic.

Prologue

Writing is not about creating tidy paragraphs that sound lovely or choosing the right words. It’s just about noticing who you are and noticing life and sharing what you notice.

—Glennon Doyle, Carry On, Warrior ¹

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It’s 9:00 p.m. My eighteen-month-old son is nestled in his crib, knees tucked under him and particularly adorable little tushy in the air as he drifts off into a deep slumber. There is absolutely nothing in the world more breathtaking than peering in at your own child sleeping. There is something so pure and so innocent about it that is simply unexplainable. It is in these moments that you, as a mom, feel wholly overcome with love. As he lies there so peacefully, I turn the corner to gaze in at my equally captivating four-month-old daughter, who just finally finished nursing and is stirring ever so slightly—just enough where I think I might be able to squeeze in a quick bubble bath before she wakes.

Some of this book was written in that bubble bath, complete with foam letters, a seaplane, and a couple of floating cars, because—let’s be honest—no one has the energy to take the toys out after a long day home with the kids. Some of this book was written in the middle of the night on my smartphone while trying to nurse my daughter back to sleep. Some of this book was written during the rare occasions when both kids were napping—at the same time. And even still more of it was written at the gym, on a treadmill, or between weight sets. Life carried on and required frequent breaks from writing, weaning from breastfeeding, selling our home—and then moving, dealing with family illness, changing jobs, changing babysitters. But in the end, this book, my third baby—well, fourth, if you include my neediest baby of all, my husband—persevered. This is the life of an attorney turned work-at-home mom, who is trying to make having it all a reality, realizing somewhere along the way that while having it all simultaneously was the goal, having a little bit of everything is just as good.

It began as a diary of sorts, a means of expelling mounting day-to-day frustrations and a way to rid myself of all the banter building up in my head. It evolved into a story for my children—for my daughter. It ended as a book: a book, perhaps, for women who are similar to me now—or even similar to how I was ten years ago—filled with women’s history, psychology, sociology, and leadership resources. Writing this book was liberating, a sort of coming out of my shell, to put everything out there; it was a proclamation stating, I will make daily efforts to be who I am rather than who I’m expected to be. It is part story of myself: a woman, an attorney, a young mom; part history of how we as women got here; part history of women in the legal profession and the workforce at large; and part statistical analysis of present-day women working tirelessly to achieve the impossible.

What are you writing? my sister asked inquisitively.

A blog post, I replied keeping my eyes fixed on the computer screen. I’m just having trouble narrowing down the subject. I can talk about this forever.

Why don’t you write a book?

I looked up and squinted my eyes in deep thought. OK, OK—maybe it wasn’t exactly deep thought, but I was thinking. It never—ever—occurred to me that I might be able to write a real book—one with thoughts and words. And it was that simple: a book was born.

As it was written, the title quickly evolved. It began as Legally Mom, a book about a young lawyer’s struggle to make the worlds of lawyering and mothering align in symphony. It then quickly took on a veritable array of potential titles: So You Think You’re an Equal?, My Apologies: Reflections of a Real-Life Mom Lawyer, The Thirty-Year-Old She-Lawyer, and finally The Unapologetic Liberation of a Lawyer Mom Gone Wild. Even still, there was a brief moment in time that The Book of Crazy seemed to be most fitting.

As my book evolved, the words, paragraphs, thoughts, and stories assembled into so much more than I had originally envisioned. It was a book not only for moms, but for future moms and women, and a book not only for lawyers, but for professionals and prospective professionals. The reader of this book is an aspiring professional, an independent, an innovator, an entrepreneur, and an alchemist who transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. She is a woman, a mom, or a woman who hopes to be a mom one day. She walks with other women and dances with men, forever trying to find where she fits into the game while finding her true happiness along the way. It is meant to be enlightening, empowering, inspirational, and hopefully a little bit entertaining. And while I appreciate that the audience will likely not largely include the other halves of these women, I hope they, too, would consider reading it because the ability to step into the mind of your partner is a rare and wonderful opportunity.

While written from the perspective of a middle class, Caucasian, twentysomething (er, thirtysomething) female with a Juris Doctorate and two babies under two, the ideas presented in this book, when juxtaposed with these sweeping classifications, transcend each and every one of them. I am a relatively new mom, with a relatively new education, and I am just getting my feet wet in the professional world. I am not an unrelatable ideal: I am still working my way up the ladder with the rest of them. The underlying discussions related to the legal profession are there because that is my background, but the ideas are centered on being a woman and a mom, and on finding a way to make these roles harmonize with my desire to also have a successful career fueled by passion and cultivating a tremendous sense of pride and achievement. In the end, being an incredible role model for my children, and not necessarily my chosen education and professional path, is what defines me.

I am not a psychology or sociology expert, nor am I an expert in women’s history. I am an attorney through education, a wife and mom through experience, and I am ever intrigued by women’s history, women’s rights—or lack thereof—the progression of women’s roles culturally and all things empowering women. It is a passion that has followed me from a young age. I always felt in my heart equal to my male colleagues, and in many ways, I have often felt that I excelled beyond them. Yet as I grew both professionally and personally, I have found my opportunities as a woman simply were not equal to men’s. And though I’ve searched plenty for plausible explanations, somehow I cannot articulate a truly equitable justification for this gender incongruity.

In sharing this book with the world, I feel obligated to make clear that I am not naive or vain enough to believe that any of the stories herein would have definitively turned out dissimilar if I were not a young female, pregnant, a mom, or any other of my series of the most fortunate of circumstances. Nor is this book intended to be a memoir or a guide to how to be successful in juggling all aspects of your life. It is intended to be a book that speaks to many women, moms, and professionals across the business and professional world—a book that says, You’re not in this alone. You’re doing a great job! and most importantly, Keep at it! and Don’t give up. Two plus two equals four, and so does three plus one. There may be different means to an end, but in the end we all get there. And as Glennon Doyle puts it in her book Carry On, Warrior, When you write your truth, it is a love offering to the world because it helps us feel braver and less alone.

Introduction

There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress, except those we ourselves erect.

—Ronald Reagan

---

I was ushered delicately to the back of the lab after arriving. You could feel the reservation in his steps and see it in his slightly awkward scientist stare. I had been working with this particular lab tech very closely, but the closest we had come to what I was about to see was a tiny pair of overalls spattered with blood and riddled with several holes one would assume were from the murder weapon. As we walked down the hall, I was filled with anticipation because at some point, I actually had considered a career as a forensic pathologist. It was the most appealing medically related profession to me because it was as if you were immune from what I believed to be the most terrifying part of working in the medical profession: the fear of irreparably, and perhaps unintentionally, harming someone in a way that could affect, or end, their life forever. A patient’s well-being—a patient’s life—was not at stake here. What was at stake was in the name of science, the law, and human compassion.

I don’t recall spending much time with her. The initial sight of the stiffened, blood-laden, swollen, and barely recognizable human form of Jane Doe pretty much cleared my mental slate entirely. The only other times I recall this happening were the rare occasions I found myself deep in the grieving process after the death of a loved one. She was laid out on a cold, hard metal table and was nude. How humiliated she probably would have been to see herself like this, so vulnerable—so raw—her long blond hair covered with blood and brain matter. How did this happen? What I do remember through my clouded, distant memory of this experience was the psychological impact it made on me as a young person. I returned home that evening and began writing in my journal. I could feel a heaviness form in the back of my throat as my eyes welled up in thick pools of water and my vision blurred without my permission.

I sobbed.

I recall in one of only a couple of brief encounters with the head honcho at the forensics lab something extraordinarily interesting he shared with me. He believed wholeheartedly that persons capable of committing intentional acts with the purpose of ending the life of another human being all shared a commonality with regard to their biology. He believed their brains were wired differently than the rest of ours. They were not like us. They were different. Through no fault of her own, Jane Doe’s life sadly was taken from her as a result of one of these sloppily wired individuals.

Any occupation involving violent crimes to any degree was entirely outside the scope of what I wanted to spend the better part of my waking hours doing as a career woman. But the theory of a biological explanation for an individual’s psychology—and resulting behaviors—remained with me all these years and continues to be something I am intrigued by.

You can imagine my delight when I came across a TED Talk by Neurobiologist Jim Fallon entitled Exploring the Mind of a Killer. ¹ In his talk, Fallon discussed his blind behavior studies of various individuals through the interaction of genes, epigenetic effects, brain damage, and environment. How do you end up with a psychopath? he questioned. In his pursuit of answers to one of the most inconceivable acts that mankind can engage in, he discovered that every murderous individual had a few commonalities. Each had specific gene he called the MAOA gene, had some sort of damage to the brain’s orbital cortex, and had experienced or was engaged in an extremely violent and traumatic event very early on in their life. These people, these murderers, were in fact wired differently than the rest of us.

What the hell does this have to do with this book? Let me ask you this: If these biological factors could affect the psyches of those we classify as psychopaths so profoundly, isn’t it true that other biological factors—including chromosomes, genes, hormones, and an assortment of other elements that I won’t pretend to know a whole lot about—are likely to affect the psyches of a variety of other classes of individuals? Everything that makes up our somatic existence when working in conjunction creates a complex physical environment that determines how our bodies and minds function. And while each of us possesses a unique set of these physical properties, larger classes of us share groupings of and outward manifestations of characteristics resulting from these properties in concurrence with environmental factors: classes, perhaps defined by different demographics, various stages of brain development and deterioration, and, more relevant to this book, gender.

And while I believe our physical ecosystems create certain homogeneity within us, external environmental factors are formative, interacting with our minds and resulting in a multitude of human perceptions and expressions—norms, traditions, stereotypes, folklore, and fables among such stimuli.

Whatever the cause (biology, psychology, culture), whether it’s a certain compilation of all these things and others, we know that women are different from men. ² Recognizing what distinguishes us from men, and learning not to overcome—because this assumes that what differentiates us is undesirable—but to embrace these distinguishing elements, and to use them to our advantage, is what will help us to assimilate more seamlessly into a world largely created by and for man, and to evolve as women—as a society.

Everything I as a woman think, say, and do can be looked at through the lens of my gender. And this, I think, is a wonderful thing. I was born with the physical strength to endure the birth of a child, the mental strength to endure all that comes along with raising a child, and the emotion and empathy required to make up the incredible maternal instinct, as we so casually call it. It adds an entirely different dimension to us as human beings that many men cannot compete with, a dimension that should be harnessed and used to our advantage. Man up they say? I most certainly don’t want to be a man. Woman up? Now there is something I can be on board with.

But really. You need to tell me what you want for Valentine’s Day. You don’t want that necklace? my husband asked with a concerned gaze on his face.

No. I don’t really need another necklace.

He paused, then replied in a way that could only be described as utter confusion. "Is this some sort of backward way you are telling me you do want it? If I don’t get it, am I going to get in trouble? Because Valentine’s Day is in a few days, and I’m not sure what you’re saying."

Not sure what I’m saying? I mean, how do men even begin to sort something like this out? Poor guy; he doesn’t stand a chance.

1

Unicorns, Dragons, and Having It All

M ommy. Mommy. Mommy!

I rolled over and pulled the covers firmly over my head. Maybe if I hide under here for a while, it will go away, I thought to myself. I peeked out from under the blanket, peering at the baby in the monitor with one focused eye as the other struggled to remain comfortably in its former sleep state. She was still sleeping soundly, thank God.

Mommy! Come get me!

I glanced over at my husband and was assured by the brash snoring that continued to oscillate throughout the room that he miraculously was still sleeping through the piercing screams emitting from the next room. Why was that? Why was he able to still rest so peacefully with his son screaming so vibrantly for help immediately next door? And why is it that my son must have me fetch him from his room in the morning when he is perfectly capable of popping out of his toddler bed on his own? It is as if he is permanently affixed to his mattress, and only Mommy’s touch can release him.

He is not permanently affixed to his mattress.

Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!

I’m coming, sweetheart, I managed to mutter as I finally concluded that it was time to get up. My daughter would surely be awoken by the feral howling sounds within moments, and my motionless husband clearly was not going to be a part of this situation.

I rolled over and placed my feet on the floor; my hair stuck to my cheek and lips, and both my nursing bra and nursing tank were unclipped and hanging half off—in the sexiest way.

I succeeded in arriving at his room, placed my hands on his tiny, eager body, and magically lifted him from bed.

Good morning, honey, I quietly muttered.

Milk, he demanded, rubbing his eyes.

I could hear the baby starting to cry next door. I sighed aloud.

With both babies firmly situated in my arms, I finagled the baby gate open and hobbled noiselessly downstairs so my husband could continue his beauty sleep. Diapers changed, milk poured, cartoons on, and my daughter nuzzled calmly into my right breast, I finally plopped my exhausted postpartum rear end onto the sofa, flipped open my laptop, and began scrolling through emails.

Is that poop? I just changed diapers. Can’t be.

I kept scrolling—coupons, forwarded chain letters from my grandma, bar association networking events and requests for volunteers, and an endless array of retail store promotions.

I have to unsubscribe to all this stuff. Yeah, that’s definitely poop. Who pooped?

I continued. More coupons, social networking notifications, committee meetings—delete, delete, delete.

Oh, what’s this? My eyes affixed to an email entitled Help! It had to be a potential client. I swiftly clicked to open it.

Hi Tori, it began. Any chance you’re accepting new clients? I could really use your help.

Now? Really? Now? I lifted my daughter to an upright position and pulled