Now that Coy is a 3L at BYU with his last semester around the corner, I’ve learned many things that I wish someone had told me and shown me before we started law school.
by Rebekah Christensen
Fall 2022
I thought I was prepared for my husband’s first semester of law school. Coy and I had developed the habit of preemptive planning early in our relationship, even while we were dating, for the difficulties we saw creeping over the horizon of our time together. By the time law school was far from the horizon and only a few metaphorical streets away, Coy had worked full-time for a couple of years, I had found joy in teaching as adjunct faculty at BYU, and we had welcomed our first son, Marcus, into our arms and hearts. And it was for Marcus that we planned to rely on our savings during the three long years of law school. I would be with our happy, messy, hilarious boy, except for the couple times a week I would teach my classes. Coy planned to treat law school like a 50-hr work week. While we mourned the loss of those ten hours, we felt confident in our plans to make the most of the time we would have as a family. But we only understood a shadow of the struggle to come, especially me.
Coy’s first semester felt like hell, and I do not use that word superlatively. If you know Coy, he’s one of the most easy-going and calm people on the planet. The first year of law school was the first time I saw Coy suffer a mental breakdown. And then another. And another. The pain of being powerless to relieve his stress was heart-breaking.
Because he had a computer science background, any writing Coy had to do seemed to take him longer with poorer results than the friends we were making at the law school. The comparison was painful. But it was a drop in the bucket compared to the stress of his first impending round of finals. Coy did not know how well he was doing in the classes that relied on reading and discussion instead of writing, and he wouldn’t know until he got his grades back after finals. The most help I could offer him was helping him revise and edit his papers because I teach advanced writing to BYU’s Honors students. And still, there was a frustrating lack of assistance I could do! Coy was the one in the classroom learning law, not me. I felt helpless to help Coy or know how to support him.
More than that, as full as Coy’s days and nights were with studying, writing, and reading, mine were full of caring for our son, working, and doing the majority of household tasks. The pressure of our lives became an unending beat right behind our eyes. Suddenly, the little time we did have together became characterized by icy misunderstandings followed by the exhaustive effort to parse through the misunderstanding when all our mental and emotional energy was spent in surviving each day. We felt utterly alone.
It’s odd. Everyone at the law school had warned us about the first semester’s difficulties and promised their finite nature. We thought we had planned for these types of stresses by scheduling time each night for us as a couple to emotionally connect and time each week to do a family outing, where no mention of law school was allowed. We even practiced this routine over the summer before law school. But apparently, it was insufficient. By October that first semester, I quickly found I couldn’t let myself consider the long stretch of law school ahead of us without spiraling to a dark, hopeless mindscape. It felt like I was drowning right next to Coy and we were taking turns pushing the other above the surface for a breath of air – a sensation that has continued through our long days and short semesters here at BYU Law. Now that Coy is a 3L with his last semester around the corner, I’ve learned many things that I wish someone had told me and shown me before we started law school, starting with how we discuss 1L year.
I’ve spent this much time painting a picture of our 1L experience because I don’t want anyone else to feel alone or unseen, and in talking with our law friends, I feel like it’s safe to assume our experience is common. Yet it is still an inaccurate representation of the emotions and conversations and tears we have both experienced. I think, unfortunately, words fail here – which explains why it is only in hindsight that I’m able to recognize the things that may have lessened our stress earlier. There are ways to maintain mental health as a student, a spouse, and ways to deepen the health of your marriage as you adjust to law school in these often frigid waters.
The rest of my thoughts here are based on my experiences, Coy’s, our friends at the law school, as well as a conversation I had with Abi Scoma. Abi Scoma and CSW is the in-house therapist at BYU law school, and I am so glad that Coy has been able to meet with her regularly for over a year now. We highly recommend making an appointment with her if you’re a student! Since I’m married to a law student, most of my thoughts here are for others who are also married to a law student, not necessarily a law student themselves. However, Abi and I also discussed ways to strengthen marital and parental relationships while in law school. This will be the first of three posts based on our conversation.
Common Mental Health Challenges in Law Students
I wish I had known what mental health warning signs to look for in Coy at the beginning of all this. I wish we had had discussions about the stress behaviors we saw in each other before law school. But most of all, I wish someone had handed me a little handout detailing the common mental health challenges that arise in law students and how to help support someone in the midst of those struggles. This is my attempt to give something similar to you, but because my education doesn’t lie in psychology, I won’t be prescriptive in this section. Instead, I’ll set this section up as a conversation starter for you and your hardworking law student spouse.
According to Abi, the main mental health struggles that law students develop or encounter are intense stress that manifests through anxiety, depression and obsessive/compulsive symptoms as well as a louder than ever inner critic that holds onto a narrative of failure, scarcity and disconnection. There is the pressure of infinite to-do lists for each class because there is no end to the amount of work a law student could do to improve their learning. And that “could” can be a dangerous companion, eroding mental and emotional fortitude.
This begs the question: how does a law student decided when they have studied “enough?” And in your marriage, how will you both decide to allocate the time leftover after law school? Please note that with this question I am specifically referring to the schedule of classes and meetings; time for homework and study is tricky to plan out and plan for. After the structured parts of law school, there is still work, dealing with household tasks, maintaining friendships, quality time with family, individual self-care needs, and sleep.
Another large reason for the unique stresses of law school is the environment of law school itself. Congrats, you succeeded enough on the LSAT to be admitted to law school! But law school needs a different skill set than the one needed to succeed on the LSAT. And the more interaction you have with firms or judges in internships and clerkships, the more evident it becomes that law school can’t fully prepare its students for that environment either. Coy and I may have shared a mental breakdown about that after his first internship.
This seeming disconnection can cause a cognitive dissonance amidst the ways that law school stretches the mental capacities of its students. The law is often purposefully murky. The benefit to that is that it requires professionals trained in understanding the law. The downside is that it’s a difficult language to learn, depending on your background. A common question law students have is, “Am I even thinking about this right?” Too often, there’s never a clear answer to that wondering.
What other mental and emotional difficulties have you and your spouse discussed that they’re enduring? Do they have access to mental health help to discuss their hardships? Did they have anxiety, some OCD, or depression before law school? If so, are the things that were helpful then helpful now? Consider what things are within your and your spouse’s control. Also note what things are not in your control, as frustrating as that will feel. How can you both let go of those things better? And for you, are you able to discuss your own daily stresses with your law student spouse? Ask them what behavioral changes they’ve noticed in you since law school started. Are the causes of these behavior changes clear? What resources do you have for increased mental and emotional support? A possible resource is BYU CAPS offers couples counseling. And again, for law students, I cannot recommend Abi’s assistance enough!
Automate More Decisions as a Couple
I hope my attempts at describing the stresses of law school on a married couple resonate, and you’re both able to identify specific issues in your relationship. Allow me to make some recommendations that have helped us.
Whether or not you have kids, running a household with your spouse takes so much planning, time, and work. Add law school into the mix, and it’s a recipe for some frustrating moments. Abi Scoma’s main advice to smooth this out is to determine what decisions can you automate. In taking her advice, we have a standard grocery list that makes the same ten-odd meals. When we have time for self-care, we each have a hierarchal list of the things we know that help us most. Since we have two boys now, my self-care time is during my baby’s naptime while my toddler does independent play. In order of priority, I use self-care time to pray, exercise, read for pleasure, and write. I try to ensure Coy gets a half hour in the morning (his preferred personal productivity time) to read scriptures, exercise, and journal.
Something else to automate is planning the moments you both view as sacred. This prioritizes healthy emotional connection in your marriage. As I mentioned, Coy and I try to have this connection time each evening. Sometimes, it even happens! But we set our intention for those minutes together in daily planning the night before. Do we want to read to each other? Watch our show? Make dessert? Play a favorite boardgame? Because we plan it out for a set time each day, we’re able to do whatever we need to do during the day so we do have some time. (Kids permitting, of course.)
Besides daily sacred time, I loved Abi’s suggestions to plan ahead time each week for an hour or two, each month for at least a half a day, and each semester for a weekend. Coy and I have maintained a weekly date night as our norm through law school, and if there’s one thing I would like to receive a recognition medal for, it’s this! But we hadn’t considered doing something set on a monthly or semester basis. We plan to sit down over the break and plan what this sacred time will look like in Coy’s last semester and hope to find ways to adapt it to lawyer life after graduating.
Also, Abi recommended a method called Fair Play developed by Eve Rodsky, a graduate from Harvard Law School. I first heard about Fair Play at the Women in Law symposium last year. Essentially, Eve Rodsky and her husband built a deck of 100 possible cards that account for each task that needs to happen for a household to run smoothly, including self-care, maintaining friendships, and having space to pursue individual passions for each spouse.
After Coy and I built our unique deck of tasks, we each took ownership of a card until we accounted for each card in our deck. But taking ownership of a card also means taking ownership of the understanding needed to plan to do what that card requires. A quick example: if you hold the Weekday Dinner card, it’s your task to make those dinners. But to make them, you also need to conceive and plan. That means knowing what ingredients are already in your home, what meals you want to make, getting a specific grocery list (if you need half and half for a creamy soup, don’t just say milk – speaking from personal experience) to whoever holds the Groceries card, then prep the food and finally make it. Eve Rodsky calls this awareness before doing a task the CPE: conceive, plan, and execute.
Learning about this organizational method blew my mind. I felt like I could finally explain to Coy what I meant when I said, “I’ve got a lot on my mind, it’s hard to parse through” or “I don’t know, just do something!” whenever he asked what he could do to help my stressed little self. The issue was that I couldn’t simply say, “can you pack the diaper bag?” because Coy didn’t have an understanding of what was needed to execute that task. I knew which places we were going, which toys the boys’ had been fixated on all day, and where I had organized our stock of diapers, wipes, and boys’ clothes. Coy likely knew only a couple of those things. The result was always either my unmet expectations or Coy needing micromanaging, which only left him feeling dumb and frustrated and me feeling like it would have been easier if I had just done it myself. Even though he wanted to help because I was already trying to do too many things all at once. After Fair Play, that scenario is completely different.
There are some parts of Fair Play that we’ve tweaked to better accommodate our circumstances and preferences, but implementing Fair Play has helped Coy and I gain a vocabulary we didn’t know we were missing. It’s raised questions we wouldn’t have reached on our own, allowing us to have the discussions we didn’t know we needed. We have less stress at home and less miscommunications with each other. If you’re interested, you can find the Fair Play deck here and more information about Eve Rodsky’s work at her website here.
The last thing I want to note here about automating as many decisions as you can is acknowledging how much time planning ahead takes. In no way am I trying to add yet another thing on your impossibly long to-do list, though I realize that is what’s happening. Much of the planning we’ve now automated happened while we were driving somewhere (our ten meals). Otherwise, it only happened when we decided to carve out the time now so we could save time later, like our date nights. I’m writing this now so the timing lines up with Christmas break. While you wait for grades with baited breath together, discuss the ideas here that fit. And please reach out with any questions you have!
The next post in this series will focus on personal stresses and tools you can use.
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