Billable Hours Don’t Pause for Birth
The conflict between careers and caregiving: Part 4 of Poverty and Privilege
Editor’s note: This is the story of Richard, a man with generational wealth, and Lauren, a single mom struggling to keep her household afloat. The twist is they both have Ivy League educations but life has turned out very different for each of them. The story is true but names and certain identifying details have been changed.
Look for it every Saturday at 10 a.m. Central here on Untrickled.
If you’re new to Poverty and Privilege, you’ll want to start with Part I here.
Two hours after a cesarean, Lauren was already fielding work calls and emails from her hospital bed.
When motherhood meets law
Lauren found the corporate legal world didn’t make much room for motherhood.
“The older men who led the law firms where I worked came from a generation where women stayed home and men were the breadwinners. When I gave birth to Peter via scheduled cesarean, I had to return to the office within five weeks.”
An eight-week leave is the medical standard after a cesarean delivery.
With no maternity leave, she scraped together two weeks of paid time off. The other three weeks were unpaid.
The partners pushed back when her children needed her. Once, after leaving work to take her sick son to the doctor, a partner insisted she return to the office that evening, regardless of the 45-minute drive or the child’s croup.
The highly flexible, remote job Richard provides for Lauren now is a much better fit for her, and at $120 per hour, offers dramatically higher pay than what she made delivering for DoorDash.
The business of injustice
“America Runs on Women.”
Sociologist Jessica Calarco said that. In Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net, she notes, “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.”
Without the government-supported safety nets common in many other countries, American women who combine motherhood with paid work outside the home nearly always find themselves facing difficult choices. If they can afford to, they can pay others (usually women) to handle some of the childcare and domestic duties. That essentially shifts part of their burden to less-advantaged women. Their other choice is to scale back their work hours, which usually results in lower earnings and a less successful career.
Most working women find themselves tired and overwhelmed, unless their partners take on their fair share of the domestic and caregiving work, which was not the case for Lauren.
The lack of work-life balance may be worse in the legal world
When an Ivy League-educated attorney was delivering for DoorDash and Instacart, the obvious question was why not return to legal work? But it wasn’t a workable option for a mother essentially on her own with young children.
“I didn’t retire from practice, I resigned. In my state, if you resigned, you were absolved from annual continuing legal education and registration requirements. I had to go that route because I didn’t have the money to pay for the ongoing education courses. So, if I wanted to practice law again, I would have to apply for admission, and with my debts, I am not sure I would be readmitted.”
Richard, who previously worked in a high-powered law firm, confirms the lack of flexibility.
“What our consulting company does is allow her to work at her own pace, and remotely.”
The job with Richard’s firm has given Lauren a lifeline that may lift her back into the middle class, while her skills also benefit the business.
Lauren chose a law career out of prudence
“Because I knew I didn’t have family money to pursue my real love (art history), law seemed like a ‘safe’ path and a good use of my love for writing. But my view of the law was overly romanticized. I didn’t know any real life lawyers.”
This represents another class issue; a lack of exposure to professional role models. (Her son Peter’s country club experience spurred him to consider becoming a lawyer vs. a police officer.)
Lauren’s perception was based on books and films like To Kill a Mockingbird or Twelve Angry Men.
“I was fixated on lofty ideals and a pursuit of justice without considering the actual reality of practicing law. Financially, I made a terrible litigator because I would usually counsel my clients to settle rather than go to trial, which would have resulted in higher fees to me and my firm.
“One such case I worked on, which dragged on for 10 years and ended without either side getting what they wanted, was still a success for the law firms involved because of the huge fees they collected.
“Both sides walked away as losers but not the law firms, since they each had billed over a million dollars. It’s kind of like how the odds are always stacked in the casino’s favor.”
What success costs
As a former lawyer himself, Richard understands. A prestige firm in New York City, he said, may start its associates at as much as $225,000 a year, but it requires incredibly long hours.
“There’s very little room for parenting if you’re required to bill 2,200 hours a year,” Richard said.
“Assuming two weeks of vacation a year, it means billing 44 hours a week for the other 50 weeks. It’s incredibly stressful because to generate 44 hours of billables each week, that means you’re actually working 60-70 hours. That initial $225,000 starts to sound less attractive when you figure you’re really working the equivalent of 1.7 jobs.”
The partnership track — when a lawyer starts to share in the profits of the firm, after having to buy into the partnership with a large payment that can rival a home mortgage — is typically seven to 10 years.
“That kind of ongoing commitment usually becomes an issue for women who take maternity leave during that period, but is rarely one for men. The work-life balance is especially hard in litigation.”
Indeed, Richard’s wife found his hours less than family-friendly when he was working at a top law firm.
“With a young child at home, my professional, Ivy League-educated wife would ask me when I was coming home, and I would have to reply, ‘I don’t know. The senior partner is still here and he/she could still dump something on me before heading out.’”
With his family money, he could afford to turn to his first love, high school teaching. This allowed him to live a comfortable life while still being a very involved parent.
“But most corporate lawyers are ambitious enough to forgo such work-life balance. The economic payoff is huge, and if they are from modest backgrounds and saddled with student debt, many are forced to make that choice,” he said. It often costs them their marriage.
“If the spouse (often the wife) is on board, however, the next step is the bigger house, the nicer car, private schools and the country club.”
Richard has known a few women who managed to have it all, but all of them had something in common: “They had supportive partners, parents and siblings, and they paid a lot of money for childcare and housekeeping to maintain their lifestyles.”
Teaching may have been a better fit
“My mother — who also did not know any lawyers in real life — had suggested to me that I become a schoolteacher,” Lauren said.
“If she had finished her schooling (her mother left college before graduating because she had become a mother), she would have become a primary grade teacher. She regularly told me it was an ideal profession for mothers because of its predictable, manageable hours and vacations that overlapped with those of her children. My mother didn’t know anything about being a lawyer but she knew everything about being a hands-on mom.”
Next week: The Value of $50,000
Read the continuing series:
Part 1, Unlikely Allies in an Unequal America
Part 2, The Country Club Lunch
Part 3, One Family’s Fall From the Middle Class
About Michelle Teheux
I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here and on Medium. I also have a new Substack aimed at authors who want to self-publish books, called The Indie Author. My most recent book is Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class. My most recent novel is The Trailer Park Rules. If you prefer to give a one-time tip, I accept Ko-fi.
All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park
For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.
Jonesy is a failed journalist with one dream left. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society just shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t solve their predicament. Darren is a disabled man trying to enjoy his life despite a dark past. Kaitlin is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy runs the park like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.
When the new owners jack up the lot rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.
Welcome to the Loire Mobile Home Park! Please observe all rules.
“The US has Women.” I grew up in a privileged society where women did not work. I knew two mothers who did and found it fascinating. Mountain Brook, Alabama had married women who volunteered.
I began getting my imprinted societal status as a Candy Striper. I was opposed to this volunteer system for older women who had to ask their husbands for money, that is, unless they were also born to a bit of wealth. Inevitably, that ran out after becoming a mother of a gaggle of children. I swore to myself I would complete my education and never be put in a position of having to have money doled out to me with an accounting for each dollar.
My grandfather was a banker, his bank in a tiny South Georgia town of Camilla and also a State Senator. Looking at my grandmother’s check book, he kept seeing GOK for purchases. He finally asked, “Margaret, what is this GOK you keep purchasing multiple times?” She replied, “With 7 children, God Only Knows.”
I'm sure you know, Michelle, but didn't mention (cut for brevity?) women taking care of family in the upward direction — the kids (in their 40s and 50s) taking care of parents. My wife spent most of the last two years of her mother's life living in Mom's guest room. We have no kids, while her siblings do; plus Mom's place was a ten-minute drive from where Deb worked then (and where I worked then — sometimes I would get a call at work to come to help Mom, because "I hate to bother Debbie at work all the time").
Women (*always* the women) taking care of elders is yet another "free" benefit American society counts on, whether it realizes that or not. And it's only getting worse as the people who provide professional assistance get shipped out of the country.