Integrity is not a platitude

And soon: the amazing science behind how parenthood rewires our brains

It was late on a Sunday night and I was falling asleep on the couch to my eighteen billionth episode of Sex and the City. I’d moved to New York a few months earlier, just after I graduated from Duke Law School, took the bar and pushed through Manhattan in the August heat to find a decent apartment.

Like most new lawyers, the magic of starting a career in the big city felt overshadowed by the pace of working in “big law”. Every night I took an Uber home, maybe ate cereal and passed out in front of the TV. The restaurants, museums, shows — all of it seemed to be passing me by. I’d gone to law school with big dreams of becoming an entertainment lawyer and somehow gotten stuck in the churn of city court litigation.

And then a phone call changed my life and career all at once.

It was the partner I’d been working with day and night on a pro bono case. He had taken on a new client, the last person in a long list of 33 indicted defendants. Her name was Molly Bloom. There were a few articles about poker games, but other than that, neither of us were ready for the complete force of nature we met the next morning, directly after her arraignment in federal court on charges of running an illegal gambling operation. I told the partner that I didn’t even know how to play poker. He said it didn’t matter — what he needed was a junior associate with a low billable rate who was mature enough to “deadpan” a meeting filled with celebrity gossip.

That’s how I became known as the deadpan girl, and the rest is history.

But why am I telling you this? Because of all the excitement and fear, living with imposter syndrome day after day, having to figure out ways to dupe reporters when she left the courthouse, making sure she had granola bars during long, grueling meetings with prosecutors, accidentally handing her sparkling water that exploded everywhere during a very important government meeting, a million late night and early morning nervous calls (from both of us), and getting to see her story told in an Oscar-nominated movie called Molly’s Game, I ended up with a soul sister who became a constitutional thread in the fabric of my own coming-of-adulthood story.

MANY years later, Molly and I became mothers less than four months apart, and for those who knew us when, going through pregnancy and parenting at the same time was never something we saw coming.

I remember a lot about representing Molly and the early years of our friendship, but one of the things that I remember most was how focused she was on rebuilding her life with integrity and authenticity, not only for herself but in the people she surrounded herself with. Back then, integrity was something I always assumed I had, but I’ve learned it’s actually a daily choice and like many things, parenthood has brought the intentionality of integrity into focus.

This past weekend, our own little forces of nature met and the magnitude of it knocked me over.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m leaning into the EQ part of this Substack with a 3-part series on integrity, parenthood and the science behind how becoming a parent can make our brains more receptive to positive change (it is fascinating). Molly’s going to weigh in about the daily choice parents can make to model integrity over perfectionism, and we’re going to tie it together with two amazing women doing incredible work at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Child Development.

See you Friday for the next civics microdose.

Sarah