PART 1
Only hours after a difficult C-section, I was in a recovery suite watching my newborn twins sleep beside me.
They were finally here.
Every small movement sent pain across my abdomen. I could not sit up on my own and I could not reach either bassinet without help, which is normal and which nobody warns you about properly.
And I could not stop looking at them.
Five hours, by that point, of just looking. One of them had a crease at the top of his ear that I had already decided was the most interesting thing in the building.
My name is Perdita. I am thirty-seven. Before I started maternity leave, I was a state appellate judge.
My husband has always known exactly what I do. He came to the swearing-in.
His family had no idea how far my career had gone, and that was not an accident of circumstance. There were at least four separate occasions on which it could have come up naturally and I steered each one.
Vespera decided years ago that I was an unsuccessful lawyer living comfortably off her son.
When I stopped appearing at public events during the pregnancy, she started telling people I was unemployed.
I never corrected her once.
Not once, in four years, at perhaps thirty tables, in front of perhaps a hundred different people.
There is a specific Christmas in 2022 where she said it to a neighbour while I was standing eleven feet away holding a plate, and I smiled and went and got more ice.
Part of that was privacy. I do not enjoy the way a room changes when somebody says the word judge, and I have had about eleven years of watching it happen.
But there was another reason and it is the reason this account exists.
I wanted to know whether she could respect me without knowing my title.
I have said that sentence to three people. All three nodded. One of them said it was wise.
It is the most flattering possible description of what I was actually doing and I kept it in service for four years because it worked on everybody including me.
By the time the twins were born, I had my answer.
I had had it for about three years, in fact. The answer arrived somewhere in the autumn of 2021 and it was unambiguous.
And I kept running the experiment anyway, for another three years, which is the part a reasonable person should stop and ask about.
