I have realised that I do give alot of myself in my blog…. brief moment of fear that I am shattering illusions and having people know much more about me than they really want to know. I wonder whether people a) enjoy it, b) are freaked out by it c) find it helpful to understand me more, or d) find it completely self absorbed and are sick of it?

Now in complete self centredness I am going to post a message on facebook saying I have posted stuff on my blog so people read this message! Aghhh!

h.

So, I really should be doing something on a Sunday rather than writing my blog, but i figured I could write a short post which was inspired by the phone call I had with my dad last night.

I had told people that I met my dad for the first time in 16 odd years recently and that the whole thing had seemed so ordinary, which struck me as both very strange and very reassuring. It is surprising how years of fear can dissolve in a hug, and how normal the interaction was. The other thing that stuck me was how much I was actually longing for that father daughter interaction which was lacking in my life. Even though I had a “father substitute” it just wasn’t the same. A dad is something which i have only just realised is a very precious thing — there are few men in a girl’s life that can love them in a platonic way, and protect them in the same way that a dad protects his daughter. There’s that fierce almost animalistic need to protect and nurture unconditionally and to love unconditionally as well. My dad would love me the same if I were a pauper on the street than if I were a princess, and I know that - it is very good for the self esteem!

I think that maybe people take relationships a bit for granted. I hear stories about people who have these sort of lack lustre relationships with their parents and i feel a bit sad about the fact that both the parents and the children don’t really appreciate what they have. I have spent my whole life trying to fill the void that was left by my dad being absent in my life with teachers, family friends, grandpas and finally to some extent with my partner, and I know what it is like to have that ache of feeling like your parent doesn’t want you. I still have that feeling every day with my mum, and I have to say that having my father back in my life only reinforces quite how bizarre my mother’s behaviour is, and has in part made me decide to become officially estranged from her.

So, it might seem strange that here I am espousing about how great it is to have parents and how people should appreciate their parents and in the next line I am saying that I have thrown away my relationship with my mum, but I guess you would have to understand my “philosophy” on how relationships work to understand why i have chosen to do what I have done.

I believe that noone has a right to be respected simply because they are a parent. Parents are humans and they are falliable. If my parent tells me the sky is red, I am not going to say “yes” just because they want that. As with any relationship there has to be a give and take and people have to work on it. Of course there is the biology aspect, I love my parents because they are my parents, but they need to do more than just that. Conception is not enough, because, lets be honest, conception is pretty easy, and also is not something which I could have decided anyway. What creates respect is how they raise you, what values they have, attributes of them that you admire, whether they protect you, etc etc.

I can say I love my mother, but I don’t like her. This is very hard. I don’t respect her choices and I definitely don’t respect her view on life generally. She believes that the world is a hard place where you are going to get jipped and that you should be “toughened up” to face it. I believe that the world is a balance of good and bad things, but allover is generally a good place. I also believe that what you believe creates your reality, and for my mother, this has proven to be the case, she has no friends and is generally disliked. When I say I don’t agree with her views on life though it is actually deeper than that - I am frightened and concerned about them. She has views on men and sexuality that would curl your toes, and her views on relationships are almost pathological. In my view she is unhealthy to be around - you spend 5 minutes with her, and it’s like an infection, she drains the positivity away.

Perhaps you are wondering why I don’t try to help her, and I have to say that over the years I have tried on numerous occasions to do so. She will not accept any help, assistance or guidance. As far as she is concerned I am a child and am incapable of offering her help. I have to hear the crap, but I can’t assist. I have on a number of occasions said that she might benefit from seeing a counsellor, but she is phobic of mental illness and refuses to acknowledge that she has any problem. She is so phoblic of mental illness that when I was diagnosed with depression at 11 she refused to take me to my appointments and I had to go by bike. I had to hide my bike around the back of the surgery so that noone in the town knew that I was going and I wasn’t able to tell anyone. She actually told me that I should never tell my partner that I suffer from depression, and one day, part way through my sessions decided to pull me out of the appointments all together and take me off my medication cold turkey because she objected to the cost. Depression is related to a chemical imbalance in the brain and the medication needs to be taken for some 6 months after your symptoms disappear to ensure that your brain is receiving enough serotinin. If you stuff this up, then you risk relapsing, which I did in year 12. Anyhow, going off topic! Mum refuses help and I think she has a disorder. I would of course help if she would let me, but she refuses and I have to acknowledge that she is her own person and that has been the hardest part.

I think though, there comes a point, as I said with my blog about mental illness where you have to throw up your hands and say, “It’s your life, you have the choice, I have tried to help you, now I am walking away” This is very, very hard. I was brought up with a huge victim image of my mum. In my mind my mum was always the person being hurt and being abused, she was weak and I tried to protect her. Now I am realising that she was in fact the person who often instigated the abuse, and that she is prideful and stubborn enough to risk a black eye to make a point, but even more concerning she will goad someone into hurting her!

It hurts to walk away but she appears to gain some perverse pleasure from the Bold and the Beautiful-esk life she leads. She is very much the martyr and will talk endlessly about the fact that she is the only one who cares for my grandmother, when I think her presence is what drives other family members away. She derives pleasure from her status as a sufferer, and will vehermentlybitch to anyone in proximity about how I have left her all alone, and will blame everybody but herself - at the moment her scapegoat of choice is my partner, which is a total no go zone as far as I am concerned because he was the person who spent years fixing me up from all the years with her! That I am a functional human being is to a great extent due to his patience, counsel and wisdom and she should worship him for that!

Nonetheless, I feel scared to leave her — will her partner hurt her and I won’t be there to help? what if she commits suicide? what if something else bad happens? But i have realised something - these sorts of people, they don’t suicide - they just find other people to use. If she gets hurt by her partner, then I cannot control that in her life anymore than I can control it out of her life. She is the only person who controls her state of being. Her finger is on the button and all I can do is hope that underneath it all she actually is smart enough to not push the boundaries too far — that self preservation prevails.

What hurts me most though is that my sister is still very much in the world of mum as it were. She still feels like she has to help mum and protect her - she is our friggin mother! We are not her keepers! My sister exhausts herself thinking about mum and worrying about her without any appreciation from mum whatsoever - mum actually kicked her out of home at 14 because her new husband didn’t like my sister, and my sister then had years of vagrant-like existance, where she had no fixed home. She has dealt with being rejected by mum and yet still tries to help. I have to say she is a better person than me, who is much more cynical about the whole thing.

So, I guess I am currently having a stand off with mum. She needs to earn my respect by making some sensible actions - ie getting help, before she is going to be back in my life. She needs to respect my life choices, especially my partner, and she needs to take responsiblity for her own unhappiness and work towards changing it. She needs to respect me generally and realise that I am not going to necessarily agree with her, that I am my own person and that because of this, my views vary from hers. Until she does this, I can’t see her in my life for the forseeable future, which is very very sad, but I have to say that my life has never been more settled and peaceful since I stopped interacting with her.

Mmm, depressing post! Promise happier post soon!

H x

So, I have told everyone that I had a new job, but I didn’t elaborate… partially this is because the whole working situation is pretty depressing. When I emerged bright eyed and bushy tailed into the legal world, I pretty much thought that I would have it made, respect, money and interesting work. The reality is a bit of a divergence from that!

I have had the opportunity to talk with a fair number of “baby lawyers” since starting in the profession and the situation for starting lawyers seems to be pretty standard. After you have spent 5 years or so studying you then have to do college of law for an additional 16 weeks and then you have to do a work experience componant, which is another 16 weeks full time. There is alot of competition for work experience placements and as you can imagine, the firms like Minter Ellison and Gadens are the creme de la creme. what this means is that firms can pretty much dictate the conditions under which the almost-lawyers work. The work placement is normally unpaid and you end up doing the most mundane tasks. It really is a way of getting free labour and is exploited freely. the problem is that the almost-lawyers often operate under the impression that their hard work will pay off with a position in the firm once they are admitted, however this is not guaranteed and almost all advertisements for these positions state that nothing is guaranteed - why keep the newly admitted solicitor on when you can get another freeby?

so, after slaving away in your work placement you then pay about $700 to get yourself set up as a solicitor, that being for your admission fee and practicing certificate. You then start applying for positions, however most firms will only employ solicitors with 1+ post admission experience. I personally think this is really wrong as it means that these firms essentually capitalise on the training put in by another firm. So you keep applying and applying and getting more and more disheartened. Alot of solicitors actually settle for paralegal positions as a way of at least getting a foot in.

this brings us to the issue of salary. Once you are admitted, you expect a decent salary. Unfortunately there is no way of a newly admitted solicitor to determine what a decent salary is. There is no award wage for solicitors, no award at all in fact, and the wages are determined by individual firms. We work with no employment conditions, no protections and no reassurances. I guess everyone thinks that lawyers can fight these issues themselves and operate under an AWA-esk system, however, the large amount of solicitors being admitted and the relatively low amount of wor avaliable means that many solicitors will lower their standards in order to secure their positions and what this in turn means is that things like excessively long hours, no breaks and unrealistic work expectations become the norm. I actually found it near impossible to find out what I could expect as a decent starting salary, the Law Society of NSW gave me a mean starting salary of $51k, but said that solicitors were getting as little as $43k and as high as $65K in their starting year. Salaries also vary depending on whether you are in a small, medium or large firm, whether you are in private practice or work in house and whether the firm is urban or rural. very complicated!

When you do finally get a place in a firm, chances are you will be overworked and thrown in the deep end. Liability is something which is drummed into almost-lawyers and the prospect of having to actually do legal work, when you don’t necessarily know what you are doing is highly daunting. You are running to deadlines and this pressure, combined with long hours and a diet consisting of adrenalin and caffeine means that you are more likely to make silly mistakes. This in itself, in a supportive workplace would not be so bad, after all, people can do anything if they feel appreciated for it, but unfortunately there is such a high expectation of the workloads that will be undertaken by lawyers, spurned on by the brown nosing types that do literally live and breathe law and have no other life outside their offices, that the work being done is not appreciated.

It would be hard to understand as someone not in the profession quite what it is like to go from being a student to a lawyer. analogies are often pretty poor, but i guess the best way I can describe it is imagine that you have had about 20 driving lessons in a car, and you have a vague understanding of how to drive, but you aren’t feeling evry confident at all, and you still think you might stuff up. Imagine now that someone plonks you in a car on your own in peak hour sydney traffic. I know this seems extreme, but I kid you not, this is what it is like. on my first day at my current job, I was told to go to court and do a matter where the file was 15cm thick of documents and I had no idea at all. There was no one to help me either. I didn’t know how to find the court, what the procedures were, whether i was before a judge or a registrar, where I was supposed to stand, who I was acting for or what I had to say. It really is sink or swim.

The other thing that I have found about the legal profession is that there is a large amount of workplace bullying and harrasment. I have had three jobs in 6 months - in the first I faced bullying and sexual harrasment, and in my current job I am regularly belittled by my boss and bullied by my boss/coworkers. I am subject to unrealistic expectations and if i stuff up, I’m accountable. I literally get stomach cramps and diarrhoea each morning at the expectation of what will happen in the day. My boss has had me in tears so many times now, and I have come to the conclusion that it is better to simply admit fault, even when there isn’t any and move on, save hours of badgering. Is this gutless? yes, probably, but the fact is that trying to sort it out doesn’t get you anywhere and you are wasting time from doing the urgent stuff.

So, you ask, what then is good about the legal profession? there must be something that makes you stay? The fact is that being a lawyer is a profession that encourages you to feel good about yourself. It is elitist and it is very easy to comfortably fall into the “I am a lawyer and I am so great” mentality. Lawyers separate themselves from other people in society and exist in a world of pomp and ceremony. We are the champagne sippers of society and feel that we reside in its lofty eschallons. lawyers are bandied to by a number of other organisation in society too, we get discounted mortgages, special offers on health insurance, credit cards, gym memberships, hire cars and travel resorts. If you are asked what you work as and you say “lawyer” most of the time you engender respect from whoever questioned you and their attitude towards you changes. This still whigs me out and I often don’t tell people what I work as to avoid this, as it makes me feel uncomfortable.

So, you feel like you are special and there is also a sense of comraderie that comes from being a lawyer. I was once told that lawyers are notoriously horrible to each other and highly competative. I am in contact with many, many lawyers and barristers each day and I can say that I have found the great majority of people in the legal profession to be ethical, helpful and genuinely nice. There are some real bitches and bastards, but most of the time there is the recognition that even if you are on either side of a matter, the dispute is between the clients and the lawyers are just doing their job, and you can have crazy situations where in between playing hardnose about dates for compliance, lawyers are having a great natter about what they did on the weekend. I do feel proud to be a part of a community of sorts that is populated by such people, and I would feel sad not to have that community.

I guess the last thing is that lawyers often choose to get into law because they want to make a difference, either because they believe in giving back to society or they want to make a name for themselves. People don’t actually realise that lawyers are creating the laws that we live under every day. each time a lawyer makes a case that changes how a judge interprets a law, each time a new precedent is set, there is a lawyer behind it. Some lawyer had to put together the argument that made the issue be explored and that is pretty powerful. The other thing that people don’t realise is how much lobbying lawyers do and how much pro bono work is done as well. Because lawyers are in contact with the law and see its faults and inadequacies they are some of the major movers for change.

So, there is the legal profession in a very wordy nutshell. Of course this is just my observations, but as I say, I see alot of lawyers and I talk to alot of people, so I have taken some of the things others have said to me… I would be interested in what people think….

little h

Hello bloglets,

I have decided to reenter the world of the online blog for a couple of reasons:

1. firstly, because much has happened in the life of little h, and I feel the need to vent, gush, exclaim etc etc; &

2. I was asked to do so, which to me is the most wonderful compliment!!! People actually want to read my ramblings.

So, how to summarise my life without getting RSI? Months have passed and if this was a movie, pages would flutter off a calendar, leaves on trees would brown, snow would fall, blossoms would burst and birds would sing… yes, I have been a slack arse, but the fact is that I have been too busy living life to record it, which I guess is a positive?

So, dear bloglets when I last wrote I was working in a firm doing conveyancing and not much else, I had earnt the measly sum of $2000 for two months, and although I loved my boss and the work I was doing (not to mention all the lovely macedonian food! — Burek breaks!) It wasn’t filling the coppers, so to speak. One day, I just get this call, a firm in the city is hiring, did I want to come in? Feeling guilty as sin, I agreed to go to the firm for an interview after work, did the interview and snared the job, only problem was my new boss wanted an immediate start (such is the cutthroat world of law methinks). I told my old boss the next day, and promptly burst into tears. I LOVE my old boss. He is so lovely! He was hugging me even as I was saying I was leaving. Anyway, I haggled three days off the new employers since I felt I owed it to my old boss, and set off on a new adventure in a bright, shiny city firm…..

My new firm is right in the middle of the city, you can literally see major landmarks outside my window - I have a window because I am one of the most highly qualified people there - such is the corporate world when a windowseat is a prime location! I have been officially dubbed “agent h”. My job involves getting instructions from other firms at the last minute about court hearings that they can’t do and doing it for them at the last minute. I do every court and every kind of matter.

It is very difficult to describe the conditions I work in accurately. I literally get instructions scribbled on a sheet of paper handed to me as I am running to a different court, and I mean running! I do about 7 court appearences per day, and they can vary from in-and-out in 5 minutes ones to ones that can last 3 hours. I’m always running om adrenaline to the point where if I stop, I feel surreal! I work crazy hours with a group of equally crazy co-workers. I do some standard solicitor casework, but 90% of the work is agency.

So, you are probably thinking — that sounds horrible! Why would little h do this? Well, one reason is that it is a way to fast track legal experience. Most baby lawyers aren’t allowed near courtrooms, and if they see inside one in their first year they are grateful. Contrast this with the fact that I have done over 300 appearances already in 3 months. I get to do amazing networking - I’m always talking to other solicitors, barristers and court staff and my name is out there - I have been head hunted a few times too! The money is decent as well, which helps and I get to be centre of attention, which i have realised appeals to me quite alot!

I don’t know how long I will do it for, or how long I will be able to hack it, agency has a time limit because it really knocks you around. Somedays you feel crap and you just have to drag yourself to work and do it. Because you have no structure in your day, planning things like lunches with people is a nightmare and you can literally still be at work at 7.30 pm. I have to go into work by 8 at the latest to prepare for the 9.00am court matters too, so I am usually bedwards at 9.30pm at night so I can get enough sleep. I don’t exercise enough, eat well or regularly enough, or clean the house enough and it’s been only about 3 weeks since I have been able to face brekky in the morning because of butterflies and nasty morning bouts of upset tummies (and I mean really upset!).

So now with the new job and decent salary I have entered the adult world of high finance. We have updated our credit card and are arranging an appointment with a financial planner, we have got health insurance and are planning a UK holiday at the end of the year, and perhapes the most important thing is that little h, the author of “ovary blues” is officially off the pill in preparation for starting a little h family!

So, what made me change my mind? I guess people would be thinking that I would be even more in the corporate world  with the new job, but turning 26 was somewhat of a milestone for me, and made me reassess things a bit. I realised that I want to be a mummy and I would like to be one sooner rather than later. I am not looking forward to doing the whole “corporate mummy” thing, but I think it will be a necessity. With a career like mine, long times away can make your skills obsolete, and you really need to keep current. Also in all honesty the idea of staying home for years with a child terrifies me. I can’t even spend a day in the house without going nuts, and I am morbidly afraid of having less money for a long period of time… so now I am potentially faced with the “career woman/mother guilt conundrum” — on the plus side I have a great partner who is willing to take paternity leave and be a house hubby!

D day, or should I say B day (b for baby) is 27 October. That’s the day that we start officially trying. I know, how very guppy to plan it like that, but it’s actually practical — take note broody people, health insurance does not provide obstetrics (baby services) until you have been a member for 12 months. Personally, I wanted to have my baby in a private hospital with all the trimmings, and that is why we have to wait, so for the time being it is no pill for h (get my system in check) and not much fun for h’s hubby (or h who hates latex) until the 27th.

Mmmm… okay attention span is waning now, and I have a girly mag waiting for me. I am going to sign off bloglings but will write again soon, as I have only touched the tip of the little h adventures iceberg. Maybe I might do some more humourous stuff next time rather than factual???

little h x