By Jill Haymaker
Goals are dreams with deadlines.
~Diana Scharf Hunt
It was one of those smoldering July afternoons, with the temperature pushing 100 degrees. At five o'clock I was in the kitchen, as usual, preparing dinner for my family. Then eight and a half months pregnant with our third child, I was hot and miserable.
As I stirred the vegetables, I heard the happy squeal of my three-year-old daughter greeting my husband as he walked in the house from work.
"Hi there!" he greeted me a few seconds later, placing a kiss on my forehead as he opened the fridge and popped the top of a beer. "How are you feeling today?"
"Hot and pregnant," I replied with as much of a smile as I could muster.
After listening to his daughter chatter on about her day for a few minutes, I heard him say, "Why don't you go play in the back yard with your brother; I need to talk to your mom."
"Okay," she replied, happily skipping out the door.
I turned to face him, wiping my hands on a dishtowel. "What's up?" I asked.
"Come sit down," he invited and I joined him at the kitchen table. "I've met someone."
"What do you mean you've met someone?"
"Last weekend, when I was at the lake with my friends, I met this girl. I realized I am not really into this whole own a home and have a family thing. She has an apartment and says I can move in, so I am going to pack a bag of my clothes now. She's waiting for me. I'll come back for other stuff once we decide how to divide our property."
I just sat there and stared at him in disbelief as tears started to flow down my face. This had to be a joke. I had been very content with having two children, a boy and a girl, but Mark had begged me to have just one more. I had acquiesced, if we could have another child before I turned thirty-five. So here I was two weeks from the delivery of that child, three months from turning thirty-five, and he wanted out.
"But you were the one who wanted this baby," I stammered.
"Well, I've changed my mind," he said matter-of-factly as he rose and went upstairs to pack his clothes.
The next minutes are still a blur. I remember Mark walking down the stairs with his bag, getting in his truck and heading down our small, quiet residential street. I remember the humiliation of me running out the door and chasing his truck down the block in my bare feet screaming for him to come back, with all of our neighbors looking on in disbelief. But he never came back.
I survived those next days, but I'm not sure how. Two weeks later, I delivered a healthy, wonderful baby girl; a month after that, Mark and his new girlfriend left town in the middle of the night to parts unknown.
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I had grown up as a child of the 1950s and 60s, my mother and all of her friends were highly educated, stay-at-home moms. It was all I ever wanted to be. Despite the fact that I graduated at the top of my high school class and had always gotten straight A's, I was happy to quit college after two years to get married and become a mom. Since my marriage, I had helped my husband with the bookkeeping for his business and waitressed part-time to bring in some extra cash. Now, all of a sudden, I was left with three kids, no hope of child support, and no way of supporting us. I needed a plan, fast!
I did much soul searching about what I wanted to be, besides a wife and mother. After much thought and prayer, I realized that I had always been fascinated with the law; surely I could support my kids and myself as a lawyer. I did some research and calculated that I could go back to college part-time, finish my degree in three years and then go to three years of law school. We could survive on student loans, and in just six years I would be an attorney.
I enthusiastically broached the subject with family members, friends and co-workers, and got less than enthusiastic responses. "What?" they all said. "You can't do that; you would be forty-one years old before you became a lawyer. You should go back and get a teaching degree or something similar that will only take a couple of years." The trouble was, I didn't want to be a teacher. I wanted to be a lawyer, but after hearing the same thing over and over, I started to doubt myself. Then one day, I repeated my desire and the responses I'd gotten to a wonderful friend, who also happened to be a therapist. I'll never forget what she told me.
"It's true that if you do this, you won't be a lawyer until you are forty-one, but in six years you will be a forty-one-year-old lawyer! If you don't do it, in six years you will be a forty-one-year-old waitress."
My mind was made up and I plowed ahead. Three years later, I graduated summa cum laudefrom our hometown college with a degree in political science. That fall I packed up and moved out of state with my now thirteen-, seven- and four-year-old children to attend the University of Nebraska College of Law. Those three years of law school flew by as I juggled parenting and studying. You could frequently find me on the sidelines of a soccer game, cross country or track meet, playing law tapes through headphones, while cheering on my kids. I discovered the true meaning of "it takes a village" as many amazing friends and neighbors stepped up to help me parent.
One of the proudest moments of my life was walking across that stage on a May afternoon almost exactly six years after that fateful afternoon, and receiving my law degree as the song "One Moment in Time" by Whitney Houston silently played in my head.
That fall, after moving back home to Colorado and passing the bar exam, I began my career in a law firm as an associate attorney. Now, almost twenty years later, I have my own law firm and the satisfaction of having helped countless women, men and children get through the difficult divorce process as painlessly as possible. I have also watched my children grow into happy, well-adjusted adults. What had seemed like the end of my world at the time has turned into a blessing for myself, my children and all of those I have been able to help along the way.
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