I recently--and completely by accident--spotted a position for a part-time attorney at a local organization: 10ish hours a week. Hmm, I thought. I wondered if I could look into it. I have no wish to work full-time, but a few hours a week could be an interesting fit, especially given this season of life--I am finally "freer" than I have been in the past, and I wouldn't mind dipping my toe back into the legal world. I do love research and writing!
I unearthed my resume, blew off the dust. I looked at the grades, at the awards. I looked at the descriptions of my master's program, which I attended on a full tuition scholarship, and I looked at the interesting things I did in law school. I looked at my descriptions of the work I did when I was practicing law. It made me smile to remember everything.
Then there's a blank period of fourteen years. Nothing really "resume-worthy" took place in those fourteen years, except a modest smattering of published articles. It's a huge, gaping hole.
I looked at the page and realized that all the best work I've ever done has been done during the time of that gaping hole.
The past decade and a half look unimpressive in terms of my resume, my legal skill-building, my networking. And yet this has been the happiest, most productive, most fruitful period of my life. In those years I have worked hard at raising my children. I've cooked and cleaned, re-learned how to sew, taught myself to knit. I've taught my children to read and do math, read thousands of pages of books to them, introduced them to the world and, most importantly, to God. I've cried over my own weaknesses and been stunned at my own strengths. I supported my husband through a difficult year of cancer treatments, and I walked with my dad through his final months of life, right into his brutal last moments. I shepherded my children's hearts through those challenging times. I nursed children through illness and baked birthday cakes and volunteered at ballet performances and read Shakespeare and managed our household...and, by the grace of God, I've stayed in good spirits through it all. I have grown exponentially in my faith and character, although I'm well aware that I'll never be perfect. (Alas!) I am changed--and all for the better.
Many, many years ago I turned down a couple of opportunities in law school in order to be more present for my family, because my sister and I had just lost our mother. I should have known then that I was setting a precedent that I'd never be able to break.
I don't know what to think about my resume now. It seems so incomplete. So inaccurate.
(Perhaps for fun I'll write a *real* resume that accurately reflects my adult life!)
As I pulled into the grocery store this evening, thinking about Annie back at the house with a sore throat*, and what she might need or want, and how unglamorous my life is, and how much money I most certainly do not make, and about an acquaintance who just won a big victory in a trial, the words of Luke 10 came to me--"Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her."
May it always be so, whether I practice law, raise children, pull weeds, write poems. God will always provide what I need, and my job is to trust, and to try to choose the good part.
*Please pray for Annie! She spent a day doing cartwheels on the beach yesterday and today she's in bed with a fever. My poor girl.
