Enfianced

The day before the Super Bowl, my main squeeze and I decided to get married. If you’re reading this blog and didn’t already know that… well I have a much wider audience than I guessed. Anyway, it’s fun and exciting and also the same as before except I am working on driving myself crazy already thinking about this awesome party happening probably 15-18 months from now. It’s been fun to share the news. It’s also been funny. Both of my parents suspected we’d already gotten married. Not true. Most people ask for the “story.” The story is something I never really thought I would have. You know how there’s some things you picture in your future and some things you don’t? Falsely accused of a crime goes in yes, “story” of engagement goes in no. It has long seemed strange to me that this huge life decision would be anything other than a conversation. It confuses me, women who claim to be surprised. Why would you agree to be married to someone if you hadn’t considered it before? The cultural expectation is so confusing, the man is supposed to ask, the woman is supposed to be surprised. A lot of those themes are addressed in this post about women proposing to men.

But there have been other interesting things. A week later I was out with some female friends from work and some friends of friends, most of them married, all of those wearing diamond rings. One of my friends mentioned the engagement and the friends of friends immediately looked at my naked left hand. I laughed, but also felt compelled to explain, “it’s at the jeweler.” It’s such a funny time we live in, where women keep their names, walk themselves down the aisle but are proposed to and wear diamonds. Or not.

There’s a lot of pressure. I resisted for a long time and I don’t think the decision to get married was caving, I do think it can from a place of wanting to be married to Charlie and go through a public dedication of our relationship. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I am tired of calling him my boyfriend, of trying to explain his significance in my life without a more serious title. Of husbands and wives who have known each other for half as much time as we’ve owned Gus or our house being taking more seriously. And it’s apparently impossible to get the storyline that everyone expects out of your head, since Charlie didn’t propose does he really want to get married to me? That Sunday, driving home from dinner, I asked him whether that was true… again. Do you want to get married to me? “Yes, are you going to ask me that every time you have a few glassess of wine?” No, I suppose not.

Then about 10 days ago I got the ring back from the jeweler. It was my grandma’s, she took it off her finger and gave it to me the last time I saw her in the summer of 2009. She was fading and I’ve kept it in a safe deposit box, in case any family member didn’t think I should have it, because I didn’t know what to do with this diamond(s) ring that was a titch too small. But becoming engaged, it seemed appropriate to take it out. To get it checked and sized and appraised and insured. And I did and I got it back and now I’ve been wearing it. It makes me feel uncomfortable because diamonds aren’t really “me” and it’s large and in charge and I spend all day working for poor people and my politics don’t really jive with diamonds or looking owned by a man who puts a rock on my finger. Just as I felt the need to explain there WAS a ring, I also need to explain-- this is an heirloom!

I guess this is all just dipping my toe into this wedding world that is frought with cultural weirndness and excess and, at least for me, guilt and discomfort. I still feel embarassed to look at white dresses. It feels goofy and fake. Like a little kid putting on too much eyeshadow from the Tinkerbell makeup kit. That’s cute, she thinks she’s a grown up. How do you stay genuine and “you” while doing something you’ve never done before and hopefully will never again? Stay tuned. I’m working on it.

Balance

So last week one of my clients went missing. I actually first read about it on Twitter (where apparently I get all of my news, like road closures and my dad’s release from Rwandan jail.) And I was instantly so startled and surprised myself how disturbed I was. He’s a really nice guy, so is his wife and I felt so sad for how scared she much be and worried about his safety. Long story short, he has returned home and it was something of a false alarm. But I thought of him a lot over that week, it had a much bigger effect on me than I would have expected.


This morning I learned a former client died. In this line of work, I guess, it’s not that unusual. I mean, many of my clients have drug and alcohol abuse issues, all of them are poor and have the difficulties taking care of themselves and their families that go along with poverty. But this woman was young, 23 and had an involved family. She had been in college at one point. From what I saw, there were some serious substance abuse issues and seemed to be a lot I didn’t know about her family, her past, why she numbed herself so often. So, sadly, it’s not surprising. Upsetting, sad, but not shocking.

In November my coworker and friend was hospitalized for a few days. I was covering some hearings for her and to each client I’d introduce myself and explain their attorney was in the hospital. Maybe one out of five asked a single thing about that—is she ok? What happened? I hope she gets better. And after that I was basically feeling like, “you jerks! We spend all our time and energy trying to take care of you, to help you, worrying about you and you don’t even care!” Shortly after I got pneumonia and was home for a week and only dragged myself to one hearing where actually the client was very grateful and concerned I was sick.

There was an article about public defenders and trauma that I posted on facebook a couple of months back. Some people took it to mean I was struggling with the issues in it at the time, I wasn’t, I just related to the story and thought it was interesting and important to share. It talks about secondary trauma, hearing the stories of client who have had horrible traumatic things happen to them. But there’s this other trauma, which is what they are experiencing in the system while I’m representing them. And I’m the one who hears that their pregnant wife and kicks are getting evicted because dad is jail. Or that they hitchhiked 85 miles in January to get to court so they didn’t get a warrant. Or that they didn’t have gas money to get to court, so they got a warrant and then got arrested and lost their job while they were in jail. Or things directly related to the case, that are horrible and traumatic and I am sometime inadvertently complicit in making happen, just by being a player in the system.

I guess my point is about the balance, the elusive balance between being able to be a compassionate and zealous advocate and being able to leave your work at work and not let the sadness and trauma of it leak into your home time. And that’s the thing, you can’t stop caring. I have immeasurable respect for a coworker who has been doing this 35 years and will get as righteously indignant as anyone about how someone is treated, the hijinx he sees the police pulling. I hope I can keep that feeling alive, without becoming burnt out.

So then there is also a balance between caring about clients and… everything else. Caring about myself, my homelife, my friends, my family, my DOGS. Lots of balance, lots of balls in the air.