It is a Friday, 5 am, and Maris comes home after having pulled yet another all-nighter. She goes up to her room and sees her two children, Gabby, six, and Patrick, three, sleeping and oblivious to the creaking door as it opens. Maris enters and sits at one side of the bed watching her children. Her eyes linger on them for a moment, then fall on two travel bags that remind her of her flight to Tacloban City later that day. She glances at her watch, she realizes that she still has to go to work in three hours.
Coming home in the wee morning hours is normal for Maris — at least now it is. She works for two law firms, one in the Office of the Government Corporate Counsel and another with a consultancy for a business process outsourcing company. As the law firms don’t require her to be present daily, she also handles cases in her private practice. It is not the hours that measure the work that she does, it is the load of corporate cases she handles within those hours and after hours. Draining, but Maris does not let this get to her.
But this is not how it all used to be.