Mary T. Wagner

Running With Stilettos

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The Last “Intake Monday”

August 2, 2018 By Mary T. Wagner Leave a Comment

After eighteen years of spending all of my “working” Mondays in the intake branch of Wisconsin’s criminal court system, I had my last pedal-to-the-metal “intake Monday” yesterday. Retirement, complete with punch and cake and goodbye hugs, is just hours away. I would be lying if I didn’t say I felt quite…unmoored. It has been quite the amazing journey. Rather than having an “empty nest” at my own home, I suddenly feel like I am leaving a sheltering nest of my own. What a cosmic turnaround!

Last day in court for these shoes!

To mark the occasion, I wore one of my stalwart pairs of stiletto heels, pumps with a grey and white faux snakeskin pattern and an equally fake illusion of having more expensive “stacked” heels. After ten years, the shoes had become a little wobbly, and one of them occasionally squeaked as I walked. But they were like old friends, and a familiar sight in court.

Aunt Mary’s bracelet

The other thing I made sure to wear was the ornate carved silver bracelet that my godmother had given me at my law school graduation. She envisioned it as my “signature” piece of jewelry, something that would catch the light as I made theatrical hand gestures in court. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that my wrists and hands were so tiny that if I made such a flourish, the bracelet would likely fly off my arm and clock someone on the side of the head. But for the last day, I wore it to honor her. She had been a trailblazing, world-traveling high school teacher, and had served as the inspiration for many, including myself.

My Aunt Mary

This becoming-a-lawyer thing was my second career…or my third, if you count the “soccer mom” years where I multi-tasked by writing magazine and newspaper articles while my youngest children were napping.

Who knew I’d go back to school!!

I was forty when I started law school as a part-time student, with four kids ranging from kindergarten to high school under the familial roof, and a life-long, bone-deep fear of public speaking. Only a year before I had spent several months in a body cast, the result of a horseback riding accident that left me with a broken back and a wake-up call to start heeding my “inner voice.”

Law School diploma day!!

Three and a half years later, I was getting sworn in as a newly minted attorney and soon found my dream job as a state prosecutor, working part-time handling everything from speeding tickets to appeals before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. I worked in an incredibly beautiful Art Deco courthouse on the shore of Lake Michigan, and always felt like I was working on the side of the angels, blessed to be charged with a job whose professional ethics literally required us to seek justice rather than just to win at any cost. Talk about being part of a real-life “Justice League”!

The Sheboygan County Courthouse

What an amazing Art Deco interior.

As the part-time prosecutor, I had few cases of my own that I followed from start to finish. Rather, I provided backup for the other full-time prosecutors, who were called to be in two places at once on a regular basis. Mondays in particular were top-heavy with cases as the attorney “on intake” spent the morning reviewing police reports and dictating criminal complaints for people who had committed felonies over the preceding weekend, and I furiously worked to get up to speed on a combination of pending cases and new “initial appearances” for folks who had been given misdemeanor citations and told to come back to face the music and their formal charges several weeks later. I describe it as “catch and release.”

My “Running with Stilettos” shoes.

And over time, I overcame the challenges of public speaking…and picked up the challenge of mastering life in high heels. I was a late bloomer when it came to this, way past the age of 40 when in a moment of weakness and curiosity and urged on by my younger daughter, I bought a pair of sling-back faux alligator brown stilettos. And then bright pink stilettos. And then plaid stilettos with little bows.  And then…you get the picture. I figure that after tomorrow, unless I’m giving a speech somewhere, I’ll be in flats for the rest of my life. No more the echoing snap of spike heels on a polished stone floor, announcing that trouble is just around the corner…and closing fast.

But that was just a bonus. More than the challenging and personally rewarding work, and the steadfast and wonderful people I worked with and the friendships that bloomed, and the closeness to the Lake Michigan shoreline that drew me to the water on so many lunch hours…the past eighteen years have also provided a solid anchor during tremendous personal storms.

My tenure at the job has seen me through the end of my marriage; the divorce; several serious health crises involving my kids; my own health setbacks; endless 240 miles loops of crisis management and medical response involving relatives in my home town of Chicago; the decline and deaths of my father and godmother; the wrenching move from my “empty nest” home of 32 years in the country to a place in the city close to my job; the whole “empty nest” thing at all; the passing of several beloved pets including the two horses I had loved and cared for since I was a teenager; and just this year the typhoon of chaos revolving around my 94 year old mother suffering a broken hip. Whether up or down, feeling depressed, exhausted, elated, triumphant, happy or some combination of all, I could count on the fact that every single Monday I had a seat in a courtroom and a job to do, frequently starting with the words “The State appears by…” It provided me with a routine, and a structure, and a set of familiar duties, and a specific place in the universe. And now, in less than a day, I will be casting off from this solid, secure dock and setting sail on unknown seas to a new stage of life and adventure.

It feels more than a little scary!

Perhaps I shouldn’t be quite as dramatic as all that. I still have the same children, the same friends, the same hobbies, the same inquisitive nature. Perhaps instead of looking back at the past eighteen years as a prosecutor with such a sense of wistfulness, I ought to look back at a few years before that, when I threw myself off the familiar path of journalism and with a “carpe diem” sense of destiny, took the plunge into law school.

Perhaps. All I know is, when I was starting to take things down from my office bulletin board this week, I not only uncovered photos of some treasured moments, I also found a pin that a friend had given me when I graduated from law school nearly twenty years earlier. I laughed when I studied it closely before packing it to bring home.  Right now, I can’t think of a better message to begin this new journey with!

My “Carpe Diem” bear!!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: careers, carpe diem, courage, courts, criminal law, early retirement, high heels, inspiration, Lake Michigan, law, power shoes, prosecutor, reinvention, retirement, second acts, second career, second chances, sheboygan, spike heels, wisconsin

Ripple Effect

August 8, 2017 By Mary T. Wagner 1 Comment

I first published this essay ten years ago on my very first website, and have included it in a couple of my books. A decade seemed to be about right for bringing it out again, because the basic notion–that kindness is never wasted and encouragement can change a life–never go out of style.

Black River Marsh at sunset

She looked familiar, but somehow shorter. For an embarrassing instant, I couldn’t remember her name. But she was grabbing me by both elbows and smiling and anybody could tell she was REALLY happy to see me!

I was standing in the middle of Miss Katie’s Diner, a retro-fifties restaurant near Marquette University with a whole lot of steel and chrome, waitresses in bobby sox, and cheeseburgers to die for. I’d just finished lunch during a break from an annual criminal law conference that a few of the guys from work and I go to every December to find out just how much we don’t know about our jobs. Our little foursome stood up and shrugged into our coats, heading for the door, looking a lot like a casual, weekend version of the intro to “Law & Order.” I turned and then a gal I just knew that I knew from somewhere was right in front of me, brimming with good news.

“It’s me, Cheryl,” she said, and it suddenly all came back. She looked shorter because this time I was in boots with three inch stacked heels instead of sneakers. “I just had to tell you, I’m graduating from Marquette this weekend with a double major, and it’s all because of you!”

Huh what?!! We swapped essentials in a hurry, because I had to get back to the conference and my boss was driving and while he’s a terrific guy, he’s never been known for his patience. But…she wasn’t kidding.

We’d been soccer moms many years before, with kids in preschool and grade school together, and then had run into each other by chance a few years earlier while I was running an errand at law school. She was working at the university. We hadn’t seen each other in years, and as we walked and talked one day on campus and caught up on what our kids were doing, she told me she was tied up in knots about whether she should start taking classes toward a college degree as long as she could get free tuition through her job at the university. She could think of a million reasons that it would be too hard, too inconvenient for everybody else in the family, too complicated. And, of course, she was “too old.” I—keeping in mind that one of the ways that I juggled law school with four kids at home was to remember that I could always buy clean socks and underwear at Wal-Mart—urged her to go for it. But the argument that clinched the deal, apparently, was something my long-departed grandmother had told my Aunt Patsy years ago when Aunt Patsy was agonizing over whether to study accounting and go for a C.P.A.

Grandma was a poorly educated but quick witted and tart-tongued Irish immigrant with a very practical bent. “You’re going to be fifty years old whether you have that accounting degree or not. So why don’t you turn fifty with it?” My aunt took that encouraging ass-kicking advice, got her C.P.A., and rapidly made life hell for tax cheats, working for the I.R.S. I will always remember the story. And so, apparently, will Cheryl.

We laughed and hugged each other at the diner, and then I left. My head was spinning for a long time, and it had nothing to do with trying to fold my five-foot-ten-in-heels frame into the back of the Jeep. It had everything to do with the power of a kind word and a little encouragement, and what had brought me this far.

I sometimes think that we’re all just in the middle of a giant three-dimensional pinball machine, thrown from one trajectory to another by things entirely unpredictable. But one thing that remains constant is the remarkable power of believing in someone, and telling them about it. You just never know where that’s going to end up.

For me, serendipity threw me off the full-time mommy track and on the path to law school at a tourist bar in Florida. I was on vacation with my two year old son and some relatives on Sanibel Island, and had arranged to have lunch with a guy I hadn’t seen in seventeen years but knew from when I was a college sophomore. We reconnected because of a reunion newsletter. He was working in Florida, and so one day he drove across the state via “Alligator Alley” and we caught up. Umpteen years earlier, he’d been a really bright, challenging, dissatisfied and angry young man, and dropped out (or been kicked out, I was never quite sure) of college. I had thought his potential was limitless, and before he left I bought him a poster to take with him. It said “If you set your sights among the heavens, even if you fail, you will fall among the stars.”

Seventeen years later, he had long since pulled his act together, gone back to school, become a highly accomplished federal attorney. We covered a lot of ground over chicken sandwiches and fries and diet Cokes. I jerked his chain and told him I thought he’d be a terrific writer. He jerked mine and told me he thought I’d be a really good lawyer. I was happily writing a novel, and didn’t think I had the brain power to possibly consider such a leap. He wasn’t buying it. He never had. “What, you think you’re too old to change?” he shot back.

I went back home, mulled the challenge, took the LSAT to see if my brain still worked, got accepted to law school and started making the place my own. In the early days, if I hit a questionable patch, I reminded myself that John believed I could do this, shut my eyes, and forged ahead and did it. Eventually I came to believe more in myself, and didn’t need his faith to fall back on. But I was glad to have had it when I started.

So I often tell my kids that kindness is never wasted. That if you have something good to say about someone, say it sooner rather than later because you just never know what shores that encouragement will carry them to.

Just ask John. Or Cheryl. Or Aunt Patsy. Or me.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: encouragement, friendship, inspiration, kindness. second chances, personal growth, reinvention, second acts

Why the hell not??

January 15, 2016 By Mary T. Wagner 8 Comments

Yosemite Shoes

The last time I stood up in front of a group to talk about how “it’s never too late to make mid-course corrections,” I got a bit of a surprise. I’d talked about how my own career and passions had caromed serendipitously from journalism to motherhood to law and then back to writing. I’d read from a couple of my essays about the power of encouragement and the far shores a few kind words can push you toward. I’d talked about the importance of both friendship and following your instincts. I talked about shoes…and chocolate…and power tools…and reinvention…

And the end of the evening, the words that resonated the loudest with the women who hung around to chat later were simply these. “Why the hell not?”

Why the hell not, indeed.

I’d included them in a short list of advice I like to wrap these talks up with, an exhortation to say—or at least think—reflexively in response to the naysayers who can shoot down your dreams and your hopes with just a put-down or two. Say the words out loud, I said. Then say them louder!!! Repeat after me…when someone tells you can’t do something…“why the hell not?”

The weight of discouragement can be absolutely crippling if you let it. One woman at the library where I spoke that night talked later about her experience during a divorce many years earlier. Contemplating going back to school, she confided to her divorce attorney that she thought about applying to law school.

“Oh, you can’t do that,” he scoffed. Now, she wasn’t naïve. She already had a college degree. But nonetheless, as quick as that, her hope and her promise was snuffed out. She unfortunately believed him. She went on to train as a paralegal and worked for years in that field, but she eventually was downsized out of that job, and once again she was pounding the pavement looking for work. Her confidence was palpably low. How different might her path have turned out had not her divorce lawyer, her advocate, her champion during a difficult time, responded differently. Or if she had thought…or known..to push back, to say “just wait a minute here. Why the hell not?”

Sometimes the voices we need to push back against come from the outside. Friends, relatives, spouses, rivals. Sometimes the discouragement is deliberate, a sabotaging of any change to the familiar status quo. My ex-husband (we were still married at the time) had  two essential opinions about the idea of my applying to law school as a soccer mom with four kids. First and foremost, was the admonition that the law school would never admit me as a part-time student. Tradition could not be overcome. Ergo, “you can’t do that.” And second, even if I was admitted to the school, I wouldn’t perform very well there. Fortunately, he was wrong on both counts.

Sometimes the discouragement is unintentional, a failure of imagination by someone who knows you—and perhaps even  loves you—in one role to be able to imagine you in another.

And sometimes the voices we need to push back are the ones from  inside our head, the voices of fear and doubt that were drilled into us by…who even knows how many familial and cultural influences that poured over us and into us from the time we were born. Those can be the most stifling voices of all, the hardest ones to push back against, the most important ones to stop and question. I admit that when I was admitted to law school two decades ago, I had no expectation of achieving good grades. I could have used the “why the hell not?” pep talk myself back then.

I repeat those words far more often to myself these days, sort of my first fallback position to familiar, instinctive, even primordial feelings of self-doubt. Write a children’s book about a cat on spec and and  then try to find a traditional publisher? Why the hell not. Hang my nature photos in frames in an art studio? Why the hell not. Start exploring the idea of a trip to Cuba although I don’t speak Spanish? Why the hell not.

And in new frontiers, I am about to start shopping for a pair of proper ballroom dancing shoes to wear during the lessons I’ve been taking recently since the move. After a particularly frustrating lesson in the foxtrot that involved a couple of spins in quick succession, the instructor looked at the casual (though incredibly comfortable) flats I was wearing and informed me that “your shoes are holding you back.”

I have a general sense that the dancing shoes I seek will have sueded soles so that I can manage a spin on the wood floor with far less effort and drag. I am also quite aware from experience twirling around at those Viennese Balls a few years ago that for my particular brain, one spin is fine…but two leaves me dizzy. Without fail. As sure as gravity.

And yet…I know I’m going to get the shoes. My question is no longer whether I’ll buy them at all and possibly spin myself into disaster, but rather, what heel height I should pick. Because darn it, I just have the feeling that if I practice enough, I’ll eventually get that fancy turn mastered.

Really…why the hell not?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: encouragement, inspiration, reinvention, second acts, taking chances, why the hell not

Gratitude anniversary

June 23, 2015 By Mary T. Wagner 1 Comment

Water Lily

There are times when you think you have a major complaint…and then reality, and a sense of a “near miss,” can completely undo your pity party.

I came face to face with a reminder of my profound good fortune today while I sat in an impersonal examining room talking with a specialist about severe pain in my hip that had set in a week ago. While we sorted through the twists and turns of my medical history and medications and exercise and stretching routines, we looked at a diagnostic X-ray of my lower back that had been taken just days before. Viewed from behind, things looked pretty good. Aside from a slight, longstanding torque to my spine, the vertebrae all looked appropriately sized and spaced, perky even. Squarish, like marshmallows. What innocent imagery.

And then we looked at the side view. And twenty years of life-changing decisions and growth and new directions came swimming into view.

“Where’s my T-12 vertebra?” I had asked. He counted up from the bottom, and let his finger rest on the screen. “Right there,” he said. And there it sat, not square and perky like the rest of them, but crunched down on one side. As though someone had taken a fluffy marshmallow and pinched it between their fingers from top to bottom. “Oh,” I said. “I am SO damn lucky.”

In August, I will mark the 20th anniversary of the day I took a long, hard fall from a tall horse as we navigated a fence in a riding lesson. It started with a warm summer morning and the smell of saddle leather and green grass, and ended with a diagnosis of “you have a broken back.” A backboard and an ambulance ride from the riding arena where I lay on the sand until the EMTs showed up to cart me off filled out the day’s dance card. Three months of being locked into a fiberglas body cast–rigid, unremovable, horribly uncomfortable–followed, along with years of weakness and setbacks due to muscle spasms that would set in without warning.

That day provided the dividing line in my life. Before the fall, I was a full-time soccer mom with four children, a professional niche as a former journalist and freelance writer, and a stay-home housewife in a marriage that was already unraveling. After, cognizant of how close I had come to dying or living out my life in a wheelchair, I took the road less traveled and went to law school. I became a criminal prosecutor, bought my first pair of spike heels, and started writing again, this time from my heart instead of as a contractor paid to meet a deadline or fill a magazine column. And so I flourished in this second act. Became braver, bolder, less willing to stifle my voice or ignore my instincts.

Every once in a while, if I started to whine that I had too much on my plate–family emergencies, assorted medical problems, difficult pets, general all-purpose crabbiness due to TMS (“too much s–t”)–I would remember that day in the riding arena and try to suck it up.

Somehow, in this past week though, the temporary pain in my hip was so severe that I had forgotten all that. And so I contacted my primary doctor, and went in to see the specialist to try to solve the immediate problem and fix “poor me.” And then we looked at the X-ray together, and my immediate aches and pains took on less importance.

I’m back home again, with a renewed sense of gratitude. Yes, we’re still working on solving the immediate hip problem though some ibuprofen has brought me some relief for the moment. But the bigger “take away” from this morning is that I’m alive. And I’m still walking under my own steam. I can see the sky, and hug my children and my grandson, and smell the flowers in my garden, and listen to the birds from my patio in the evening. Things could have turned out much differently.

And you can be damn sure that the next time I walk into a courtroom, even if I’ve taken the elevator to get there, it will still be in spike heels.

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: fortune, gratitude, happiness, health, reinvention, second acts, second chances, wellness

New GB frontiers!

December 20, 2014 By Mary T. Wagner Leave a Comment

I first stumbled across Growing Bolder back in 2008 when…just wait for it…I was trying to find something else. Seriously, isn’t that the way most good things happen?

I have to really laugh now when I think that we were both literally “works in progress” at the time. I had recently published my first book, “Running with Stilettos,” and was browsing the web late one night, trying to figure out how to contact the producers of “Menopause the Musical!” for a possible shout-out for my essay collection based on my blog of the same name.

And as luck would have it, I saw a small banner ad for something new called “Growing Bolder,” and the name just pulled me right in! I sensed a natural fit, and immediately reached out. I started with the short synopsis—former journalist and soccer mom, now an attorney and author—but saved the best for last.

“I’m a 52 year old woman currently shopping for my first motorcycle jacket. ‘Growing Bolder’? Definitely!!” (I also admitted that when it came to mastering technology, I was “a few steps beyond a quill pen…but not by much.”)

And the rest, as they say, is history…very fond history! While I continued to write for my own Running with Stilettos blog, there were plenty of things that I just naturally turned to Growing Bolder to share first. I’ve been with GB since before I bought that motorcycle jacket, before I ever spent a weekend at Chicago’s Printers Row Lit Fest selling and signing books, before I learned to enjoy standing up in front of a crowd to read an essay, before I “ran the Rocky stairs” in Philadelphia with my son, before I ever thought of myself as a photographer, before I sat at my father’s deathbed. And the power of words was never more real or clear to me than when I shared a piece I wrote for Growing Bolder during the last awful stretch of my elderly father’s decline. I wrote about bringing my dog, Bandit, to the nursing home to visit. I called it “Have Dog Will Travel,” and instead of a dirge it was a warm reflection on a wonderful old retriever, himself well along in years, and his attempts to play with my father.

I then I shared the post in an email to my writers’ group in Chicago, to let people know about the stormy seas I had recently been traveling, and I got a response from a person who I have never met but still remember. Her circumstances dealing with failing parents was even worse and more dire than mine, but she found both connection and hope in the essay, and I still feel humbled when I think of it.

And then just look at Growing Bolder over the past few years! Radio! Television! Magazine! Film production! And a quarter million “likes” on Facebook! 

And so I am absolutely thrilled to death to be included in the ranks of the newly redesigned Growing Bolder blogging team as we both embark on new frontiers. And if the past is any predictor of the future, it’s the ones we don’t expect that will be the most challenging and rewarding!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: accidental fortune, growing bolder, inspiration, new beginnings, reinvention, second acts, serendipity, the power of words, writing

May it Please the Court

December 3, 2014 By Mary T. Wagner Leave a Comment

I first wrote this essay in 2009 for MORE Magazine’s website. It then won honors in the Royal Palm Literary Awards…and I’ve included it as a chapter in my best-of essay collection, “When the Shoe Fits…Essays of Love, Life and Second Chances.”  I can’t think of a better introduction than this as Growing Bolder strides forward into new frontiers, because I still can’t think of a bigger leap of faith and change in my own life than the one that took me to law school when I turned forty!

“May it please the court.” The words are enough to strike terror into the hearts of most attorneys I know. They are the first words you speak when you address the Wisconsin Supreme Court in an oral argument. The words are ritual, as standardized and formulaic as Kabuki theater. And I was about to say them myself…if I just didn’t faint.

I have a framed photo on my desk at work   It dates from perhaps a year before I started law school at the age of forty, and only a few months before I would break my back in a riding accident, spend three painful months in a body cast, and have the world as I knew it divide into “before” and “after.”

In the photo, I’m standing in a winter woods, with my four children gathered around me. They range, in that picture, from about three years old to thirteen. We are surrounded by pristine snow and bare trees, and framed in a pretty fieldstone archway. I am beaming, and my entire universe revolves around keeping them safe and warm and out of harm’s way. If you had walked up to me then and told me that in just a few short years I would not only be a criminal prosecutor but find myself arguing cases before the state supreme court, I would have given you the same stare as if you’d told me a genealogical search had just revealed that I was really the Queen of England, and a Lear jet was standing by to whisk me back across the pond. Oh, and the roof at Buckingham Palace needs fixing.

I might have smiled pleasantly, rolled my eyes…and then called the police.

But fate—and a tall horse who steered like a barge—intervened, and barely a year after I was lifted off the sandy soil of a riding arena on a back board, my youngest son started part-time kindergarten and his mother started law school as one of the first part-time students enrolled at Marquette University Law School. I remember sitting in a large classroom during orientation week, surrounded by dozens of twentysomethings young enough to be my children. An affable professor at the front of the room was demonstrating the Socratic method of teaching with an exercise that kicked off with the question, “who owns the moon?” I didn’t really care about the moon right then, but as he spoke I felt an oppressive cloud of pessimism descend on me like a starless night.

What was I thinking? How could I possibly survive this, competing with kids literally old enough to be mine, who had no families and no pets and no responsibilities, who could close the law library and then go out for drinks and convivially debate legal theory over pitchers of beer, who could read textbooks with their breakfast cereal?   In contrast, I had four kids, a dog, two elderly horses, and a marriage that was teetering on the verge of collapse. My sense of doom right then was as deep and all-consuming as a black hole.

But on the ride home, I reminded myself that I’d already borrowed the money for the first year…and I might as well show up for class the following week. I soon found a comforting road rhythm in driving the thirty miles to school, studied like crazy for four hours every Friday morning, kept ferrying children as usual to tennis and soccer and gymnastics and volleyball, skipped class whenever there was a field trip or it was my turn to be the “hot dog mom” at the grade school.   And somehow, through it all, I managed to keep a decent grade point average.

There was one serious barrier for me to conquer, though. All my life I’d suffered from a tremendous, crippling fear of public speaking. Call it panic attacks, anxiety attacks, sheer nerves, I was unable to get up in front of a room full of people without my heart racing and my breathing going tight and shallow, and my voice starting to shake with dread. I will never forget the first time I was called on to “brief” a case in front of a law class. Standing near the back row of an amphitheater classroom, I could feel the cold wind of fear and desperation creeping up my back, and while I knew the subject well, I barely choked out the words. The professor sat, motionless, on the edge of his desk at the front of the room. I have often imagined what must have been going through his mind. Two questions, really. First, if I died of fright, what on earth would he tell the dean? And second, what would he do with the body?

After that first debacle, I forced myself to confront my demons. In every single class after that, I read ahead and raised my hand, determined to say something on point. Little by little, with every attempt, my heart quit pounding quite so hard, and my voice quit quavering so much. Still, it was a decidedly uphill climb. When the rest of my classmates showed up conservatively dressed in suits for our first mini “oral arguments” in a legal writing class, I showed up in jeans and a Mother’s Day t-shirt that read “Best Mom in the Whole World.” I wore it to remind me that if I fell flat on my face in school, I still had a life. If I had to do that day over, I’d still wear the same thing.

Three and a half years after I started, I finally graduated from law school with an honors degree and a commitment to finding a job in criminal prosecution. I was lucky enough to soon land a part-time position with the District Attorney’s office in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. The post was newly created, and both my boss and I were open to suggestions on how to make the best use of my time.

As a former journalist, I naturally gravitated to writing projects—briefs, motions, research, appeals.   And then one fine day one of the other attorneys in the office turned up at my desk with several pounds of paper for me to review. He had won a TPR (“Termination of Parental Rights”) case at trial before a jury, but the judge had subsequently refused to terminate the parent’s rights based on a technicality. What did I think?

I had been a prosecuting attorney for less than a year. I had never looked at the Children’s Code before this. But I rolled up my sleeves, read the statutes and the judge’s decision, and came to the conclusion that the judge had gotten it wrong. My boss gave me the green light to file an appeal.

A few months later, the written decision came down from the Court of Appeals. The appellate judge ruled in favor of the trial court judge. Once again, several pounds of paper landed with a thump on my desk. What did I think? We had now lost the case twice in a row…but when I looked at the law and the appellate court’s reasoning, I came to the conclusion that this one was wrong too. I got another green light, this time to go knocking on the door of the state supreme court. The petition was granted. And I was absolutely terrified.

All of my old fears of speaking before an audience came flooding back, in spades. As a survival mechanism, my obsessive compulsive streak kicked in then, and I zealously over-prepared. Terrified that I might not have an answer, or that my mind might just go blank, I researched…and rehearsed…and researched some more.

The stakes were high, as they always are at this level of argument. On a personal level, the case came down to whether a three year old boy who had been placed in foster care for very good reasons could be freed up for adoption by a family who wanted him. On a broader plane, the issue that would be decided for this case and all cases coming after it  was just when in the formal TPR process the courts should stop favoring a parent’s right to stay connected and start considering the “best interest of the child.”

Since the case involved a young child who clearly deserved a better life, the “mother tiger” in me kicked in as well and I spent weekends working on the case. I pulled over to the side of the road just to jot down ideas on Dairy Queen napkins that came to me as I was driving. I sat cross-legged on the floor of the courthouse basement, poring over dusty statute books from the 1800s, trying to trace the path in the law from when children were considered property to the realities of the present day.  I rehearsed my introduction over and over again as I drove, afraid that if I didn’t have the words absolutely committed to some subconscious part of my brain stem, I might freeze like a deer in the headlights.

And finally the day came to argue before the high court. I had brought my older son with me for company. I treated him to lunch beforehand at an Italian restaurant. I passed on his offer to share his breadsticks, and took another dose of Pepto Bismol. My friend and co-worker who had tried the case joined us at the court. As he sat beside me in the packed room, I told him “if I pass out, just pick up my notes and keep reading!” I wasn’t kidding.

It was my turn to go first, as the person who had asked the high court to hear the case. The justices filed into the courtroom in their black robes, and solemnly took their seats. One of the justices and I had been reporters at the same newspaper many years earlier, and she gave me a quick smile as our eyes met. I don’t recall that it made me feel any less nervous. As I began to speak, I could feel my chest start to tighten and my air supply go dangerously short. My voice shook for a bit, but it passed. I remembered that what was at stake was far more important than what I was afraid of, and my breathing finally returned to normal as the justices started to pepper me with questions about the case and the law.

Gratitude and relief beyond words flooded through me when I finally got to sit down and turn the hot seat over to the attorney on the other side. When the court was done with our case, my son and my friend and I left the courthouse and stepped out into the sunlight. As I cleared the doorway, I looked at the sky and declared, “Thank God I’ll never have to do that again!!” I was absolutely sure that I wouldn’t survive another go-round.

The three of us headed to a nearby restaurant for a little celebration. We settled in to our air-conditioned seats, and ordered drinks and nachos. As we waited, I repeated my heartfelt desire to avoid such an incredibly grueling experience again. My friend looked at me and smiled wickedly. “You know, I’ve got another case I want you to look at…”

Timelines for appeals in cases involving TPRs are mercilessly short. I wouldn’t have thought it possible at first, but only five weeks later—and months before the first case was even decided—I had finished another brief and had it sitting in the supreme court’s “in” box. And I got to prepare and argue two more cases to the court after that in the next couple of years.  Then I finally got to catch my breath. Even now, the thought of saying the words “May it please the court” can make my heart race.

As for that first case…the decision eventually came down months later in our favor, 7-0. I like to say that the good guys won.   But win or lose, every time I look at that picture from the snowy woods…I remember how far I’ve traveled.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: advocacy, careers, fear of public speaking, inspiration, law, motherhood, oral arguments, overcoming obstacles, personal growth, prosecution, reinvention, second acts, starting over

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About Mary

About Mary

Mary T. Wagner is a former newspaper and magazine journalist who changed careers at forty by going to law school and becoming a criminal prosecutor. However, she never could step away from the written word entirely, and inevitably the joy of writing drew her back to the keyboard.

A Chicago native, this mother of four and recent new grandmother now lives in rural Wisconsin, where she draws much inspiration for writing from daily walks in the countryside with her dog, Lucky, and the cat who thinks he's a dog...The Meatball. Wagner's ongoing legal experience has ranged from handling speeding tickets to arguing and winning several cases before the Wisconsin Supreme Court...sometimes in the same week!

Her first three essay collections--Running with Stilettos, Heck on Heels, and Fabulous in Flats--have garnered numerous national and regional awards, including a Gold E-Lit Book Award, an Indie Excellence Award, and "Published Book of the Year" by the Florida Writers Association. Now her latest book, "When the Shoe Fits...Essays of Love, Life and Second Chances" rounds up her favorites--and reader favorites--into a "best of" collection now available on Amazon in paperback and ebook formats.

Mary’s Books

Mary’s Books

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