My Sad Sad Day

I had such a bad day yesterday. Last week, one of my cases just completely exploded on me. This doesn’t happen often in appellate work, but when it does it can be a nightmare. Turns out that my perfectly good appeal with a brilliant (if I do say so myself) argument had to be settled in a matter of days for political reasons. So I had to spend several days scrambling to settle a case I hadn’t even wanted to settle in the first place. And not only am I bitter about the outcome, I’m disappointed; I was really looking forward to writing that brief.

And on top of that, the one thing I’ve been looking forward to the most, my friend N’s return from maternity leave, has just sucked. I missed her desperately while she was gone, and have been counting down the days until she gets back. So yesterday I spent the morning setting up a 10:00 meeting on my exploding case, then at 9:40 went over to see N, figuring that would give me 20 minutes before my meeting. She was just getting in (first day back is tricky) and her supervisor had just gotten to her office at the same time. So I spent 20 minutes standing there like an idiot while she and her boss talked about their new babies. She kept talking about how hard it is and how paranoid she’s become, and how grateful she is that her husband gets to stay home with the baby for another year, because she couldn’t imagine leaving him with strangers. (I thought bitterly about how, due to the leave I keep burning with IVF, my baby will be in the hands of day-care at 3 months old). Her boss kept talking about how much easier it will be when N has her second baby. (I took deep breaths and tried not to think about how I'm not going to get to even have a second baby.) We looked at baby pictures. They discussed the merits of the exersaucer. I had NOTHING to add to this. It was just awful. And then N starting telling her boss about how hard it is to be alone with the baby all day, and how if she didn’t have backup walking through the door at 6 pm every night there’s just no way she could have handled it. So now I’m standing there like an idiot trying not to cry, because even if I do manage to have ONE child, I know that J will often be gone in the evening (or be completely out of town) for weeks at a time and I will have no backup, and I'm completely freaked out about this.

Finally, I tell her I have to go to a meeting and I’ll come back later. Her boss is still there. I’ve said less than two sentences the whole time. Then I go to my meeting, which actually makes me feel a little bit better because at least it isn’t about BABIES, it's about being a lawyer, which I'm at least good at. So I go back to her office after the meeting to try again. And C is camped out in there. That's right, newly pregnant "I'm having my tubes tied" C of my previous post. They insist that I come in and I panic and can't think of an exit strategy so I go in an sit down. I bailed out a couple of minutes later, but not before C starting gossiping about what a bitch another friend of mine is for bringing her baby in to the office, because he has pinkeye, and how C is pregnant and has a 2-year-old so she has to be really careful. And all I can think of is that C works part-time and has a nanny, while the friend that’s she’s bitching about has two kids and works insane hours to stay afloat. And I really like this other friend, and I'm really anti-C at the moment, so obviously I’m on my other friend’s side.

I have yet to have a moment alone with N since she got back, and the two times I’ve been in her office I’ve just been this wooden dummy. You know the feeling, where your facial muscles freeze and you can't really manage an expression and you're sure you look like you've had a lobotomy? That was me. And mind you, none of this is N’s fault. She was the best pregnant friend an infertile girl could have, and we've had great phone conversations since she's been gone. But I felt so disappointed and deflated nonetheless.

So yet again, yesterday afternoon, I found myself sitting in my office trying not to cry. Part of it is that I'm so hormonal. And part of it is that we just learned that they're going to try a new hormone therapy on J, which is somewhat promising, but means we're not going to do another cycle until JANUARY at the earliest. (Sorry, that’s a story for another post.) So I’m nowhere near having an actual child to ease my pain. And then there's all that frustration that no one suggested we try this treatment for Jason a YEAR ago! (Again, something I’m trying not to get into right now.) But mostly it's knowing I have to wait while everyone else gets to be in this special club and have this amazing life experience and I'm stuck on the fringes with nothing to say and I feel totally left out.

And of course my rampant PMS isn’t helping. And J left yesterday morning for Alabama and he won’t be back until Sunday. And then I had to spend the entire afternoon getting patronized by smug opposing counsel in a case that we WON, because they knew we had no choice but to settle, and they were holding all the cards.
Blech blech blech! What an awful day.

I keep thinking at some point I’m going to run out of sadness, that there has to be a time where this stops hurting me so badly. But there is no rock bottom, and my pain seems infinitely renewable. How many times can I write that I’m so fucking tired of crying before my heart gets the message?