True confession.
It’s 10:18 a.m. on Thursday, 03 November 2016, and I’m sitting in the baby-changing / nursing-mother room in the women’s restroom on the 3rd floor of the Jackson County Courthouse in downtown Kansas City. I’m eating carrots, feeling fat, and worried about an afternoon trial that could go to hell or fizzle in the dust, depending on the mood of a judge and the whims of an unemployed father who wants more parenting time to escape his child support obligation. Or at least, so say I, the mother’s attorney.
I have a 3-minute egg and an apple which I might not be able to eat due to my lousy teeth and the fact that you can’t take a paring knife into the courthouse. It’s a sad state of affairs when the country is so afraid of terrorists that we aren’t allowed to tote kitchen utensils around with us when we pack our lunches.
If you’re wondering how I know that it’s a three-minute egg, I’ll tell you. I timed it with my mother’s egg-timer, which I got in an up or down round, after my father died, when my siblings and I moved through our parents house room by room divvying up the stuff. Oldest to youngest, youngest to oldest. Ann to Steve, Steve to Ann. When we did the kitchen, we grouped the contents by lots. I got the stove lot, including the egg timer. It had sat on a shelf above the stove for years. I wiped the grease away with the gentlest of motions, the softest of cloths. My tears cleansed away the lingering touch of my mother’s hand.
My morning docket curdled the coffee in my stomach and made the judge raise his voice. A warring family, playing tug-of-war with a ten-year old, flanked me. As the only attorney, I represent what ought to be the sanity factor. My clients, the child’s grandparents, have had actual physical custody for six or seven of her ten years. Their son resents them and argues for her placement with him. Their former daughter-in-law considers the grandfather to be her own father. She calls him “Daddy”. They formed a faction on my right. The angry movant seethed on my left.
By the time we finished the status conference, I felt like going home. But duty calls.
Now I’m using a precious respite to collect my thoughts. Somebody asked me last night why I work so hard, so many long hours. I concede that my work distracts me. It drives away the loneliness. It keeps me on the marginal side of despair. Work spreads like lava to fill the hours and stave off my natural tendency to complain. It deflects my focus from everything about which I might complain, the events which derailed the life that I wanted to make for myself and those which call me to whatever this life might be.
As I came downstairs at 5:15 this morning, the glint of the abiding angel hanging in the stairwell caught my eye. I lowered my body and leaned against the rail. I let her gaze warm me, this serene hammered-copper celestial being which my son gave me, two Christmases ago. When I had the attic finished and hung lights on the wall where coat hooks had been, I knew that I wanted her there too. Someone to watch over me. I touched one of her wings as I continued down the stairs. I took some comfort there.
It’s the third day of the thirty-fifth month of My Year Without Complaining. Life continues.
