Battle Dress or Dressing Up?

I mentioned I have another trial starting up this week.

This one is important to me. Not just because of the time, effort and expense in getting it to trial, but because I've become emotionally attached. I feel this case.

I suppose becoming emotionally attached to a particular case or cause shows my relative inexperience. My idealistic tendencies and still-soft heart. I suppose the glare off my not-yet-three-year-old law license still colors my optimism and makes me a bit well, shinier than the average tried and true trial lawyer going into battle.

Fair enough.

I have spent weeks, months really, preparing for next week. I gave my Thanksgiving holiday break to this trial. I am sitting at my desk on a Sunday instead of hanging out at home with my daughter and husband for this trial. I have agonized over exhibits, written and rewritten witness questions, drafted motions, poured over photographs, talked to witnesses and pictured a million different scenarios for how next week might go.

I'm ready. I think.

There's still a part of me that worries the jury will take one look at me and smell a fraud. That when I walk in with my muted toned, professional suits (all in tasteful shades of black, brown and gray), with my sensible, yet stylish heels, my subdued make-up and Chi-straight hair that they won't see a polished professional ready to stand up for her client's rights.

I'm afraid they'll see a child playing dress up.

I am secretly (well, less secretly now, I suppose) afraid that this panel of twelve citizens will see a frizzy haired nine year old with a mouthful of braces, wearing her mom's strand of (we discovered later-fake) pearls, swallowed up by a comically large suit jacket and too big heels. Maybe with a floppy hat for effect.

Maybe it's my age. Thirty seems so far like a weird crossroads in that respect. I mean, I hate to reference that wise prophet Britney Spears for anything (and especially after saying the word "Crossroads"), but this year really has seemed to be a "not a girl/not yet a woman" moment in my life. For every day I feel confident, accomplished, halfway intelligent and together, I have at least two or three days where I feel completely overwhelmed, inadequate and well -- not grown up enough to be tackling my every day responsibilities.

I'm old enough to practice law? I have a mortgage? I'm a MOTHER???

Whoa.

I guess I wonder when that feeling goes away. I thought when I was twenty that I'd certainly have "it" all figured out by twenty-five. At twenty-five, I thought about how silly I was at twenty to think I'd know it all then, and that obviously I would for sure have "it" all figured out by thirty. I mean, it's a whole new decade after all, right?

Wrong. Still not sure what "it" is and I certainly don't have "it" figured out.

In either case, tomorrow, I go into battle. Whether I go in as a warrior or as a child is in large part up to me I suppose. I hope, I really, truly hope, that I go in a warrior and that I'm leaving that child here on the page...at least for this week. My clients deserve at least that.

Oh-and about "it." Thirty year old me is absolutely certain thirty-five year old me will have "it" all figured out. No question.