Did you know the Secretary of Transportation, Pete B-something, took family leave after he and his husband adopted twins? Tucker Carlson made a breastfeeding joke, because he’s an ass putting on a show for dopes, but then it’s not as if being a cabinet secretary, especially when container ships are stacked on one side while tractor trailers are parked on the other, might be a national supply chain issue.
And Buttigieg says he learned to appreciate the value of parental leave.
“The big thing is having a newly personal appreciation for the fact that this is work,” Mr. Buttigieg said. “It may be time away from a professional role, but it’s very much time on.”
It’s wonderful that each new parent learns what every parent before him knew and could have told him, and probably did, that parenting is hard, time consuming and exhausting, especially if you do it right. Sure, it can be a bit like “parentsplaining” as earnest n00bs tell those of us who did it a few times already what it’s like, because how could we ever know, only having done it ourselves back in the old days when everything was easier than today.
But we’re not secretaries. We’re lawyers. For the most part, we work solo or in very small firms and our clients’ needs don’t fit well within the paradigm of “just sit tight for a month or three, because I’m taking parental leave. It’s really important, you know.” It’s not that empathetic clients wouldn’t appreciate our needs as parents. It’s just that sitting in jail sucks and that cops, prosecutors and courts want to proceed with things whether it’s convenient for the lawyer or not. They can be so unhip.
For female criminal defense lawyers, the problem is simultaneously real and unavoidable. Being a “birthing person,” if a woman lawyer is pregnant, her (I went there because science demands it) practice is screwed. If she can’t take the call and show up at arraignment, her potential client turns to someone else. She loses the business, and that often means she loses all the ancillary business that comes with it. And she can’t turn to her spouse and say, “Hey, I’ve got work to do, you have the kid for me.” The uterus is not transferable.
For the non-birthing parent, the same issue exists if he decides that he’s going to be like Buttigieg because his clients too will have no choice but to go elsewhere. Damn impatient clients. Except he doesn’t have a physical imperative to produce a child, so he has a choice to make. He can take a month or three off because there is likely no one to tell him he can’t, but if he does, it will wreak havoc with his practice and cost him both his future income and, perhaps, his savings as he will be constrained to refund monies already paid so defendants can retain new counsel.
No matter how much work it is to have newborn children, they’re still going to want to eat and will eventually come to appreciate their parents earning a living to pay for everything from the roof over their head to their adorable onesies. Plus, the lawyer likely has an office, phone, computer, and staff that will require some amount of money during his absence from the office. Hers too, of course, but as already noted, biology doesn’t care about how you’re doing.
The point here isn’t that family leave isn’t great. It is, and it was always was something that would be wonderful for the new parent. Now that someone like Buttigieg has discovered its wonder, it doesn’t become double great. There is a debate as to whether someone who takes a position with the level of responsibility of a cabinet secretary might think that his personal baby needs should take a back seat to his duties to a nation, but then, it’s not as if anybody asked, “What happened to that B guy?” anyway. Until this became an issue, he was totally forgotten.
But for those of us who don’t have a large corporate or government structure behind us to cover both the cost of our indulgences and the workload that has to get done regardless of what we would prefer to do, parental leave is just a sweet idea off in the mist. Like pensions. Like getting a paycheck. Like getting a raise. Like making minimum wage, because if the phone doesn’t ring or the client doesn’t show with payment, we don’t make a dime. And if no one answers the phone for weeks, months because we’re off being mommy or daddy, the caller from lockup is likely gone forever, as are the people he would refer after we beat his case.
It is true, of course, that we didn’t have to choose to be private criminal defense lawyers. We could work for the public defender’s office or a corporate law firm or, god forbid, the prosecution. Then we would get paychecks, raises and, potentially, parental leave. But not everybody is cut out to be somebody else’s employee. And there’s the question of whether it’s a good idea that every criminal defense lawyer works on the government’s dime and the private criminal defense bar shouldn’t exist. Forget conflict; we do a very different job than the public defender carrying 500 cases.
It’s not that you should cry sad tears for our very difficult life. First, it’s the life we chose. Second, some of us do very well, thank you. But there are many who struggle to keep the lights on as well, as not every defendant has the ability or inclination to pay sufficiently large fees to cover the nut plus turn a profit, which is our version of a paycheck.
The same is true of most small business owners, whose revenues might not be sufficient or reliable enough to cover the cost of parental leave while needing to staff the business and keep it alive. The issue was never whether parenting was hard and it would be great to take time off to spend with your newborn. Of course it is, and of course you would.
These “human rights,” as valuable as they may be, just don’t translate well for a lot of us. If only we were cabinet secretaries, or a nation of perpetual employees of big business, so we could enjoy some time with our new little bundle of joy. After all, who doesn’t want to stay home with our newborn and still have a paycheck direct deposited?
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