Don Quixote, Esquire

I have a statuette of Don Quixote on my desk- it reminds me that the job of an attorney is often like the quest of good ol Don Quixote. Sometimes you try to slay dragons, but find that you are just fighting with windmills.
I believe the California dependency system makes a lot of parents feel like Don Quixote. It is a frustrating and insular system that tends to give short shrift to both parents and children in the name of efficiency. The system has a tendency to follow whatever the social workers recommend. It tends to reward compromise and is populated by lawyers that primarily only do dependency cases. I like compromise as much as the next lawyer, but I'm also willing to fight the system to get what is right for my clients. Sometimes this entails fighting with as many as three other lawyers in a proceeding.
I have two clients trapped in this system- one is a grandmother trying to get custody of her grandchildren and the other is a father trying to look for his son. Both clients are very deserving, but only one is getting the attention that he deserves. I'm winning father's case, but Grandmother is fighting an uphill battle. Before I came on the case, she was fighting with windmills- trying frantically to be approved by a system that didn't want to approve her. Now that I'm on the case, the windmills are mine to fight with.
I often feel like Don Quixote, even in victory. Sometimes you win a case for a client and find that the client goes out and commits another action that puts him in worse trouble. Someone once told me to only worry about what I can do and to not carry more weight than that. Yet, I think it's only human to wish that these windmills in all of our lives would stop spinning for long enough to let us pass and get on with the lives that we deserve. Don Quixote will forever be fighting windmills, but the rest of us deserve a break from time to time.