Amy Coney Barrett stood outside at the house party she and her husband were hosting for family and friends before they left Indiana for Washington, DC. She looked around at the rented bouncy house on the front lawn and the teenagers playing music in the back.

"I'll never have this again," she thought to herself.

With her 2020 appointment by President Donald Trump to the Supreme Court − the vaunted panel now enmeshed in fierce and fundamental debates over presidential powers − her life and those of her seven children were transformed. Security is now a constant; so is public scrutiny.

"I knew that I would never be able to feel as free with my friends and the people who I was interacting with," she told USA TODAY in an interview about her new book, "Listening to the Law," published by Sentinel on Sept. 9. "The hardest thing for us to give up was just that freedom, the ease that you feel with friends you've had for a long time, and the freedom that you feel about having a life that's outside of the public eye."

Later, she said matter-of-factly, "It makes it kind of lonely."

She's not complaining; she understood from the start that the need for security and the drumbeat of criticism on social media came with the job.

Still, when asked if she liked her job, she didn't exactly say yes. "I think it's a privilege to serve," she replied.

One of these is not like the others

There have been 116 justices on the Supreme Court since the nation's founding.

She's the first and only mother with school-age children. Seven children, to be precise, including a son with Down syndrome and two adopted children from Haiti. She's also the youngest current justice, at 53.

"There's a pretty sharp contrast between what my days look like and what my after-hours look like," she said, especially compared with her colleagues on the bench. "I spend my days talking to law clerks about cases and writing and analyzing and reading, and then I leave and I'm on the sidelines of a soccer game or making a grocery run or serving lunch, volunteering at my children's school.

"So I think that keeps me very grounded," she said. "Feeling like I was removed in some sort of marble palace − that just can't happen to me by virtue of my lifestyle."

She stays away from social media; she deals with stress with a CrossFit routine in her home gym. She and her husband, lawyer Jesse Barrett, occasionally find themselves facing the sort of child-care crisis familiar to working parents everywhere. And while they discuss current events with their kids, "I will say that there is some mild pushback from my children when Jesse or I talk about the law at dinner."

None of her three oldest daughters has shown any interest in pursuing legal careers, she said, though she "kind of hopes" at least one of her children eventually does.

The demands of having a security detail can feel intrusive, affecting not only her but also others in her family. "My daughter doesn't really enjoy being picked up from soccer practice in an armored vehicle," she said. The justice's sister was targeted by a bomb threat, which turned out to be a hoax. "It's really hard to get used to when you're a normal person and you're used to being able to move about freely without it."

A bulletproof vest

Supreme Court justices are no longer the anonymous figures they once were, when then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist could take a regular afternoon stroll around Capitol Hill and go unnoticed.

"Sometimes people will come up in the grocery store and say, 'Thank you for your service,'" Barrett said. Occasionally, their messages are more hostile. At times, threats have been serious enough that she has worn a bulletproof vest.

Two hecklers briefly interrupted Barrett’s appearance Saturday at the National Book Festival in Washington before they were escorted out by security.

The hard-fought nomination process proved to be helpful training for what would follow, she said. The Senate confirmed her, but by a narrow 52-48, with every Democrat and one Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, voting against her. Her appointment solidified the high court's 6-3 conservative majority, although she has been a swing vote on some cases.

"People can say whatever they want, they can caricature you, they can say things that aren't true," she said, calling the confirmation hearings a "searing" experience. "But I will say, as unpleasant as that was, it was also good preparation for the job, because I had to learn to just steel myself and be on a news blackout and not mind if people said things that weren't true."

What keeps her up at night?

Security concerns don't keep Justice Barrett awake at night, she said − but the weight of her job sometimes does.

That didn't happen when she was a professor at Notre Dame Law School.

"When you're a law professor, sure, you're giving people grades, you're writing law review articles," she said. "But when you are a judge, your decisions affect real people. If it's a criminal case, it's the liberty of someone. If it's a capital case, it's the life of someone." In the future, federal courts will follow the precedents set.

"Sometimes I'm up at night because I'm trying to figure out the right answer, and they're really hard, and it's important to get it right," she said. "Sometimes I'm up in the night because I'm working on an opinion, and it can be difficult to think about how to write the opinion and how to write it in the right way to keep a majority" of justices on your side.

"You are making decisions of great consequence," she said. "And so there is certainly more pressure in this job" than she had ever felt before.

On the wall, portrait of a heroine

For the hour-long interview − the first with a print news outlet about her book − Barrett sat at a small round table in the Lawyer's Lounge, a room down the hall from the Supreme Court chamber where lawyers waiting to argue cases can gather. There are nine portraits of her predecessors lining the walls: All male, white and of a certain age.

In her chambers, though, she has hung a portrait of Abigail Adams.

Barrett has long been an admirer of Adams, the wife of the second president and the mother of the sixth. "The closest thing to a woman Founder," the justice says, and one whose letters to her husband showed her sharp eye and keen advice.

"She had many children and ran the farm, and she made money for the family because she was a shrewd investor," Barrett said. "But she couldn't do this" − that is, serve on the Supreme Court − "because she didn't have the rights and just because of the way the world was. But now our Constitution has changed and our society has changed in ways that the mother of school-aged children can serve on the Supreme Court."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett tells us what keeps her up at night

Reporting by Susan Page and Maureen Groppe, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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