This story is unpublished. It was written for a class while Molly was attending Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.

Taylor Corbitt answers the door wearing a white cowlneck sweater. She is 23, beautiful, in many ways a modern Southern belle, and her son, born out of wedlock, is sleeping in the next room.

Benjamin Corbitt is a calm baby, with many fine strands of golden hair. He is nine months old.

“This little guy was not precisely planned, although once he understands us, we are not going to talk about that,” his mother said.

She graduated from the University of Virginia in three years with a double major in molecular biology and performance violin. She is from Atlanta, Ga. and spent 13 years at Westminster, a Christian school and one of the top prep academies in the Southeast. She started violin lessons at 3 and played with the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra for three years. She will complete her J.D. at DePaul University in May and has already been hired at Foley & Lardner LLP, a renowned Chicago firm.

She’s divorced. She had a baby. This is not what she expected.

Part of the Bubble

“In high school, there was a two-mile radius that was everything. I was happy with that,” Corbitt said.

She was born and raised in Buckhead, a wealthy neighborhood in Atlanta. Her mother stayed at home; her father was a successful financial planner. They still live in the old white house with the wrap-around porch.

“She was normally the first one up,” said her father Ashley, who is named after the character in Gone with the Wind. “Seems like it was around 5:30 in the morning and she’d get up to watch the Weather Channel to see what to prepare for that day.”

Corbitt lived one mile from Westminster. She and her friends called it “the bubble.” Her junior year, she volunteered to teach inner-city children how to play string instruments.

“It became part of the bubble,” she said. “That’s what affluent, upper middle-class people from my neighborhood do. They do service work… I kind of have a preppy background.”

I see the clean lace towel hanging in her bathroom, the green toile bedspread, the white and gold Holy Bible. The fact that she has a nine-month-old child and her apartment is spotless.

Corbitt is making an understatement.

An Education

“When I went to college, I had never had an experience in my entire life where I didn’t know anybody around me,” Corbitt said.

Corbitt, a member of the Zeta Tau Alpha sorority, finished two majors in three years. She devoted much of her time to violin. The rest went to biology. She planned to be a researcher.

“I spent two years looking for one receptor on one type of protein on one type of cell in one part of the brain. We weren’t even sure it existed, because it was so incredibly small,” she said. “I didn’t think I could take 20 years of that.”

Now, her specialty is chemical and pharmaceutical patent law. Foley & Lardner, which is ranked 27 out of America’s top 100 highest revenue-grossing firms, hired her two years in advance. Corbitt has been working 30 hours a week there and attending school full-time ever since.

She married Christopher Martin, a native of Marietta, Ga., and the principal trumpet for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, after her third year at U.Va. She wore a Vera Wang gown with a cathedral-length train, which by definition trailed at least seven-and-a-half feet.

She was 21. He was 32. And after her first year at DePaul, they divorced.

A Checklist for What Makes Babies Cry

Corbitt went into labor during a trial. She filed her memo from the hospital, wearing a green gown that was open on one side.

Ben’s delivery took 22 hours. He was supposed to be a meager seven pounds, but entered the world at 10, a bigger burden than expected. The only people in the room were doctors and nurses. Corbitt had two weeks to rest – during which she lost the 30 pounds of baby weight – and then returned to work.

“I don’t care how far we’ve come in recognizing the contributions of women in the workplace – if you’re a 22-year-old pregnant girl at a large, international law firm with mostly male partners, they will assume you’re on the family track, not the partner track,” she said. “I was killing myself all that winter. I was there all the time, working nonstop. I kept thinking, ‘I will show everyone. All of you, I will show.’”

Michael Steele is her assistant at Foley & Lardner. He’s worked with her a year and never seen Ben in the office.

“A lot of people assume that she would be kind of harried and overwhelmed, but I don’t get that sense at all,” he said. “She’s pretty unflappable.”

Corbitt both bucks and is constrained by her conservative Southern background. Her mother and older sister stay at home, but from an early age Corbitt wanted to work. Now instead of conflicting with her mother about having a career, she has conflicts with herself about how long she can stay at the office.

“I really love my work. I would be at my office Monday through Friday 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. if I could, and that’s not how I would want to raise a kid so that’s why I thought I’d never have any,” she said. “I never planned to have kids. Ever, ever, ever.

“I felt like I wasn’t doing anything well for a few months. My schoolwork was suffering, I wasn’t at work as much as I wanted to be, and then when I was home I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said. “I was unhappy for awhile.”

Corbitt keeps a checklist by the crib so she can identify what Ben’s cry might mean. She worries the nanny might be more maternal than she is. She thinks she should probably give Ben more time than she does.
He doesn’t like when she plays the violin.

Corbitt describes herself as creative, determined and extremely organized.

“I thrive under lots of pressure,” she said. “I don’t get stressed out unless something goes wrong because then everything has to be shifted around. Then I get a little self-pitying and we can’t have that.”

She lifts Ben from his crib onto her small hip and takes him to the clean kitchen for his supper. “Oh no, we must stop that,” she said as she walked through the door, Ben’s fist twisting in her hair.