In which I do a lot of sort of angry bitching

I know I took an oath of Facebook silence a few days ago, but since I'm actually writing this on Blogger, it doesn't really count.

Actually, I shouldn't be dicking around online at all this close to the bar, but really, it's late on Saturday night, and I've been studying since 9am, and I think it's time to use the other part of my brain for ten minutes.

Sigh. I finally came to terms with the very real possibility that I'm going to be taking this thing again in February. For the first time, I allowed myself to contemplate what failure is going to be like. No, I don't like it. But it won't be the end of the world. Despite the fact that I will have one more child on top of the three already in my brood (one which will be much more needy and less forgiving than the three already around), now I know how to study for this thing. And the truth of the matter is, it takes a lot more time than I have, full-time study schedule notwithstanding.

When you have BarBri until 1pm, and kid duty starting at 5pm, you have exactly the hours between 1pm and 4pm to do everything that your law school contemporaries have from 1pm to midnight to do, except with three more kids and a house where the dishes and the laundry jump out at night and crap all over your floors. Weekends where leaving your poor bemused husband and kids for hours and hours at a time to go sit in a library is psychological torture. Misguided plans to refurbish your husband's antique barbecue for Father's Day because you have no money and he explicitly told you not to spend anything on him, so instead of going to Cost Plus and buying him some fancy deck furniture you spent an entire week of said afternoons sanding, painting, and driving all over creation looking for red high-heat paint (which they apparently don't sell anywhere in Sacramento or Yolo County, FYI).

That, and also because you have no money, you were on the phone with Victim Witness trying to get compensation for the thousands of dollars you spent on mental health counseling for your kids four years ago when crazy shit* happened to them, but you never had time to finalize all the issues with the insurance company, all so that you could scrounge up the $600 for the hotel room during the bar exam. Oh, and maybe a new pair of maternity shorts, since NOTHING FITS AND IT'S EIGHT HUNDRED DEGREES OUTSIDE. And in the meantime it seems like every member of your immediate and extended family is either pissed at you because you're, uh, studying, or is peeing her pants every ten minutes because, again, you're a bad mother who doesn't potty train her children.

Yeah. So, there's that. I think that coming to grips with my own very definite realization of possible failure has actually allowed me to maintain some sense of sanity in these final days. If I fail, I take it again next time and I pass, because instead of spending all my time distilling all this crazy California law into detailed yet condensed attack sheets, I'll be doing the practice exams like they've been exhorting me to all along. Hey, BarBri guy, I did what you said - I said "screw it" to worrying about memorizing the law early on and did those graded essays like you told me to, and your incomprehensible BarBri practice exam graders FAILED all of my essays. So don't tell me that I shouldn't have spent the time working on learning the law.

If I do fail, at the end of the day, it wasn't because I was lazy, or stupid. It was because I tried too hard to do everything. I tried to maintain my unreasonably high expectations of my abilities while I should have put everything more or less on hold for this exam, no second thoughts, no glances backwards.

It's just so hard. I guess that's really it.

Back to studying.

* Said crazy sh*t is probably worth a post of its own someday, maybe in like 200 years when I get the time and energy.