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Illustration by April Dela Noche Milne

I have never been an ambivalent mother, but I was an ambivalent lawyer.

When I was at my second law firm (of the three major law firms I eventually did stints in), I was shopping when I saw a gold-foiled leather pencil skirt. The catch: it was only available in a size 4. I had recently lost a bunch of weight due to excessive dieting, but I was not a size 4 – especially in a leather skirt that had no give.

It wasn’t so much that I loved the skirt itself. It was that I loved the idea of being the person who could wear it.

When I emerged from the changing room, panting, the zipper was stuck in a position that made my butt look like a sausage with its innards pouring out. But with my friend’s help, I got it fastened three-quarters of the way. Good enough for me!

I wore the skirt a couple of times, each time walking more tentatively than the last in fear of ripping another seam until I was sure the whole thing would fall apart. As I unpeeled the pencil skirt from my chafing thighs, I swore the next time I wore it, I’d be thinner. But it never happened.

This is the best metaphor I can think of for my legal career. I tried to mirror the female attorneys I watched on TV when I was a little girl. I wanted to be Ally McBeal, clicking her heels and humming to herself at stoplights. I, too, wanted an attractively quirky exterior, while underneath my life was completely copacetic.

And on the outside, it all seemed to fit. I worked at a prestigious Manhattan firm that leased 10 floors in one of the most expensive properties in midtown. I ate succulent branzino at Le Bernardin and airy soufflés at Le Cirque. I once attended a party where I saw Bette Midler exiting the bathroom.

But internally, it felt like my life was being squeezed out from my intestines. In spite of finding only four or five hours to sleep each night, I often had to take sleeping pills to suppress the urge to constantly check the BlackBerry that lay on the pillow next to me. I ruined all my fancy blouses with sweat stains that looked like ringworm, indigestion forced me to keep a jumbo bottle of Tums on my desk and I developed unrelenting hypochondria. Like the skirt, my job made me feel as if I couldn’t breathe.

In contrast, motherhood fit me like a nice A-line skirt. It was more flattering and generally just a whole lot easier to wear. But I wasn’t supposed to want to wear that skirt. I was supposed to go after the fancy skirt. Or was I supposed to wear both? Was that even possible? When would I wear one and where would I wear the other? Who made these rules up anyway?

As I approached my due date with my first baby, the doctors became concerned that he was growing too big and I would have trouble delivering.

But I knew my body could handle it. This was what my well-structured frame was built to do. I only had to push for about an hour. I had finally discovered the purpose of all those girthy curves and soft rolls of cellulite. It wasn’t that I had a subpar body, as I’d surmised. It was just that I’d been trying to be a jockey my whole life when I was meant to be the horse.

When Miles was an infant, he arose from naps with a vengeance, screaming at me to feed him until his face turned red like a whistling steam engine. My breasts, heavy and aching from the sustenance they were so adept at producing, leaked all over the place. Racing to my baby gave me an even better high than achieving tight deadlines at work (minus the leaky breasts). It was the satisfaction that I imagined some of my colleagues felt when a partner called them in the middle of the night with a problem only his “most brilliant” associate could solve.

And yet, six months after having Miles, I got a new job and went back to work. I thought of my mom. She left her law firm three decades earlier after giving birth to me. She told me she felt like she was betraying the entire feminist movement. As much as things change, they remain the same.

It didn’t matter that I felt as if I was leaving my heart behind every day when I left Miles. It didn’t matter that I was so anxious to get home to him that I got my arm stuck in a subway door because I refused to wait five minutes for the next train. My arm turned a purplish yellow. But it was worth it not to miss bedtime.

Before becoming a mother, I viewed my work as somewhat stimulating, if not entirely fulfilling. But now I found it was neither. When I was at my desk, I propped my phone up like a security guard monitoring a closed-circuit TV, watching hours of footage from our Nest app of Miles sleeping peacefully in his crib at home.

I had spent my childhood observing my mom perform the working-mother dance. She sat beside me in the waiting room of the doctor’s office, wiping my runny nose with a balled-up tissue from the pocket of her trench coat. A sly smirk appeared across her face.

“Mommy, why are you happy that I’m sick?” I asked.

“Because I get to be with you,” she replied.

By the time I went back to work after having Miles, the dance was so ingrained into my subconscious that I wasn’t even aware I was performing it. I was accustomed to ignoring the alarm bells that fired through my body every time I left Miles’ huge, drooly smile. I normalized the tears that filled my eyes at the thought of missing bedtime and pushed down the anger. I repressed my jealousy toward our nanny.

The gold skirt still hangs in my closet. After the 40 pounds in pregnancy weight I gained with Miles, I have no hope of ever squeezing into it again. Recently, I caught a glimpse of its rich, luminescent material peeking out from amidst the reams of stained, drab maternity clothes in my closet. I haven’t tossed it yet because it reminds me of the potency and insidious nature of illusions, especially those we tell ourselves about who we are.

Today, I grabbed an A-line skirt. I think it’ll sparkle just fine.

Jenny Leon lives in New Jersey.

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