Who says you can’t do it all?
A Chicago woman has passed the bar exam she took while in labour with her first child, in a whirlwind bit of multitasking that ended with her becoming both a new mom and a lawyer.
“I PASSED!” Brianna Hill wrote on her Facebook page Tuesday, after receiving the results of the bar exam she took in October.
“I am SO happy I get to be a lawyer officially and am so thankful that I got here. Now, I am going to go celebrate with my cute little family.”
It was a crowning achievement for the Loyola University grad, who first made headlines in October with the incredible story of her son’s birth.
Hill knew long ago that she’d be taking her bar exam while pregnant, but she’d originally been slated to do it in July, well before her due date. The coronavirus pandemic threw a wrench in her plans and the test was bumped to early October, 38 weeks into her pregnancy.
“I joked about taking the test from my hospital bed,” Hill told CNN shortly after giving birth. “Lesson learned!”
Hill ended up taking the test at home, where monitoring technology was used to ensure that she couldn’t cheat. She was effectively locked in for the first 90-minute stretch of the test.
The exam started. Then her water broke.
“I didn’t think about it because I was in the test,” Hill told NBC Chicago.
She says she pressed on with the exam until her first break, then made a flurry of calls.
“I cleaned myself up, called my husband and the test kept going,” she said.
Hill wrapped up the first 90-minute portion of the exam, then went to the hospital where she gave birth to her son, Cassius Phillip, several hours later.
She took the rest of the test at the hospital the following day, a short distance from her hospital bed.
“I took part of the exam sitting on towels because my water had broken and the other part sitting on an ice pack because I had given birth the night before,” Hill wrote on Facebook Tuesday. She added that she had hardly slept before Day 2 of the test, and was still anemic when she sat down to take it at the hospital.
“I breastfed my baby in between sessions,” she wrote. “I did all of this because I did not see any other option to accomplish both my goals: become a lawyer and a mom.”
Hill thanked her friends, family, doula and hospital staff for being the “best freaking support system ever.” She also acknowledged that many others face hardship through pregnancy and while pursuing an education.
“I am not the only one who went through difficult circumstances to complete this stupid test and I strongly feel it is not an accurate reflection of competence, mostly privilege,” she wrote.
She also held up her story as proof of one thing: “FEMALES ARE STRONG AS HELL.”