My Mommy Wants to be a Lawyer

By Mary Nienaber-Foster, a 1L at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio

Everyone thought I finally lost it. The kids or my husband's job had driven me to the brink of insanity and I had officially gone bonkers. I stood up in the spring of 2006 and announced to the world that I was going back to school. Law School. Fulltime.

Granted, thousands of people around the country were announcing the same thing, but somehow, my little cluster of friends and family thought this was an earth-shattering announcement. After all, I wasn't a fresh-faced 22-year old. I was a mother. Of two. Toddlers. Not to mention, my husband was in the home-stretch of completing four years of medical school. The roller coaster of endless exams, tests, and long rotations was coming to an end, but we still faced three more years of residency and mounting student loans. It takes a village to raise a doctor and I had carried the heaviest load as his spouse.