Learning About Momming by QUITTING LAW SCHOOL - My Messy Beautiful

I know what you're thinking. But no. Not, as the kids say, #firstworldproblems.

Well maybe the law school part. But not the quitting part. The quitting part was about a problem that any human anywhere could understand. It was about freedom.

Now I'm sure I only learned a fraction of what I was supposed to learn in exchange for my BA in Politics, but I got one thing down: ALL HUMANS WANT FREEDOM.

Needless to say, the world would probably be a sh*tshow if we all had complete freedom. Not all humans are strong in empathy and some are downright power hungry b*tches. Limited resources and all that.

But the world would also be a sh*tshow if we had no freedom. We need to feel we have a critical amount of control over our life decisions. We're happier that way. More peaceful. Less likely to rebel. That kind of thing.

And that's why the world is the way is the way the world is. A decent balance of being free and being controlled in some places, and a sh*tshow in places that lack balance.

There you go. Now you can have a BA in Politics too, if you don't already have one.

Not only does this freedomquest explain the world in sixty seconds or less, it also explains my life circa 2009. The year I quit law school. A messy year.

First things first. Me. I don't like doing things I don't want to do. And when I'm TOLD to do something I don't want to do? No. Like, I will put seven thousand times the amount of effort that the thing I was told to do would take into NOT doing that thing.

Sounds a lot like a stubborn toddler? I know.

But the big difference between stubborn toddlers and me is that I'm old enough to know that doing things for other people feels good. So even though I don't do well with orders, I don't really need them. I do things for people voluntarily. My robot builder people in high school, my debater people in college, my coworker people here in downtown Boston. I like to think that this means I'm not a total jack wagon of an adult. And that matters to me. Because I like people.

In fact, this was true of me even as a kid. I liked my parent people, so things were easy. They weren't schedule packers or demanding in any other form. So I liked making them happy. There was some brief friction in high school when I got my license and my dad turned into a car mileage nazi. But soon enough it was my best friend's turn with her family's decade-old Plymouth Acclaim. Sure, ownership had passed through her older sister's abusive hands and its recalled baby blue paint had rusted off of at least half the roof. But it got us to nowhere in particular and back more times than necessary, and its speakers were perfectly capable of keeping early career Britney Spears jams pumping.

That old car of course had no idea how significant a role it had in keeping the Willcox home at peace. And there peace stayed straight through graduation; I got good grades, picked a good major at a good college, and planned to go to law school. Voluntarily. College was no different. I got more good grades, I captained the debate team like all the coolest kids do, and I did well on the LSAT. I even did well in law school for two years.

But of course that doesn't mean sh*t. Because it turns out I had a problem with law school. And the short version of that problem is that it didn't feel right.

I could tell you the long version, but it would take awhile. It would involve things like how I came home from Orientation Day Number One to my best friend (you know, the one who used to drive the Acclaim) and told her, "I don't like any of these people." And as I told you, I LIKE PEOPLE. For real. I'll make friends with anyone. From the checker-inner at the tanning salon to my thesis advisor. I like all the people. You can't even stop me. But law school people. Different story. I warmed up to some of them eventually. But after months and months of feeling just lukewarm, it got depressing. Oh. And then the lawyers in the interviews. And at the summer job. Barf. Lawyer people. There was actually a lot more to it, but people was the biggest part. (And no offense, lawyers. There are a (very) few awesome humans who somehow handle their sh*t as lawyers. If you're a lawyer reading this, you're probably one of those lawyers.)

In any event, I endured, auto-pilot style, into my third and final year. That fall, I had been taking a class called the Nuremburg Trials with a professor who was generally as stoned as he was tenured. There was no homework (that he expected anyone to do anyway), and in class we watched movies and talked very generally about morality. Not so bad. Then one day he showed us actual footage of human bodies being dumped into a mass grave. And although I really feel my feelings when I feel them, a lot of times they don't come quickly or at all. I can't explain it. So anyway, I didn't expect feelings to come from the scene. But they did. I had a forty minute drive between campus and my parents' house, which was where I had been stupid enough to live during my third year in an effort to save money, which I ended up binge shopping away at some point to medicate my upcoming empty state of existence. Anyway. In those forty minutes, my feelings transformed from an ambiguous unsettled feeling into my entire head completely consumed by WHAT IS THE POINT OF LIFE, with correlating tears exploding out of my eyeballs, to the undoubted bewilderment of somewhere around fifty other drivers on I-84 on that rainy Friday morning. I was done.

And the way I dealt with not wanting to go to law school was I stopped going to law school.

So here's the deal. When you combine a desire to abandon your path to a prestigious career because "it doesn't feel right" and because you "don't like the people" with parents who have anxieties in the form of finance and stability and work ethic, what you get is a good old fashioned sh*tshow.

My parents passed on the opportunity to disown me when I finally told them I wanted to quit law school. They just made it clear that I should graduate "just in case" and start figuring out what I wanted to do with my life instead. Their support for this new mystery lifestyle of my choosing was conditioned upon securing my backup plan. My backup plan being the one plan I knew with complete certainty that I did not ever want to do.

So I tried for some amount of depressing days and decided eff that. And that decision began the sh*tshowiest part of the Great Sh*tshow of 2009. My dad was just a little more than furious that I was now "backing out of a deal" to graduate. Through his fury, he got hold of some puppet strings I didn't even realize were attached to me and wouldn't let go. In more enraged terms, he said that he wanted to kick me out, but he owned my car, so I would have no way to get anywhere else to stay. It's been eight years since I took Formal Logic, but I'm pretty sure the amount of sense this made was exactly zero sense.

Faced with this imaginary dilemma, he gave me one more chance to agree to graduate. Okay. I could have put my foot down, called my best friend to pick me up, and then cobbled together the rest of my life from her couch in the in-law apartment above her boyfriend's parents' garage, from whence comes the most delicious Italian cooking this side of the Connecticut River. It wouldn't have been bad in a whole bunch of ways. So if I could have done that without decapitating my relationship with my dad, I probably would have. Feelings of imprisonment aside, I have been given one million reasons to love my dad (and mom, who basically just sat and cried throughout the entirety of the sh*tshow, such is her way). So I didn't want to do that.

But remember the part where I said I don't like doing things I don't want to do? ESPECIALLY when I'm TOLD to? About that. I may or may not have continued dodging campus and then forged a completed transcript and got their seal of approval on a semi-permanent move from Massachusetts down to Texas.

I don't relive the sh*tshow often. Because when I do, I feel like slamming a mojito or eight likerightnow. Either because I need to get it out of my head FAST or in celebration of the fact that it's all over. But I think the truth is that I'd suffer through it all again seven thousand times. Because it taught me a heck of a lot about the most important place my life would ever bring me to. Motherhood.

So there I was living with my pregnant Army officer sister in Texas. My parents even subsidized my entire time there, which was really generous, but also felt a lot like more puppet strings. So I started looking for a job anywhere in the country that I knew people. Six or seven months later, I found a job back in Boston. A beautiful job. A job at a non-profit in the legal industry that I'd actually enjoy because PEOPLE. Not too much contact with the client people (who are lawyers) and totally cool coworkers. Coworkers who were among the few lawyers who had fled the practice of law. Turns out, I'd even end up liking a handful of our clients too. (A handful. That's out of about 600.)

This job. The proverbial icing on the proverbial cake is that I COULD NOT HAVE gotten this job if I HAD gotten a law degree. Just-in-case THAT.

And the proverbial whipped cream on the proverbial icing is that I found my husband living right above the first apartment I moved into for this job. And what goes on top of proverbial whipped cream? Proverbial chocolate syrup? Proverbial chocolate shavings? Both? Because he had a Tiki dog for my Monty dog, and now, a bunch of years later, we have the most amazing son you ever did see. So. Much. Beautiful.

So listen. I know God doesn't like lies. But damn. Sh*t really worked out for me. I don't know why. Maybe it was because I really didn't want to lie but was literally scared sh*tless and backed into a corner. You might not believe me, and justifiably so. But I'm me and I know that I really don't like lying. And I know I made it sound easy but I felt nothing but panic and fear for months and months before and after I did it. Because the lie was the messiest part of the sh*tshow. And as you probably realize, a sh*tshow is really messy. So yes. Part of me wishes I'd been braver. It wouldn't have been quite as messy for me for awhile there.

But being in that lying place taught me something I couldn't have learned anywhere else. Messy is a good teacher and learning is beautiful. And I learned the sh*t out of my messy lesson. I learned some seriously deep sh*t about parenting. About freedom and happiness and about lies and fear. Ideas that I ramble about all up in this blog. It was an enlightening sh*tshow. 

Of course I didn't realize that until I started reading about parenting and thinking about the sh*tshow in the context of parenting. So for years it just sat in my memory as a sh*tshow. 

Until learning. When beautiful grew out of messy. Because learning.

What I'm saying is that messes are for learning and big messes are for big learning. And learning is beautiful. So it turns out that messes are just as beautiful as they are messy. You just have to learn.

This essay and I are part of the Messy, Beautiful Warrior Project — To learn more and join us, CLICK HERE! And to learn about the New York Times Bestselling Memoir Carry On Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life, just released in paperback, CLICK HERE.