Sybil

Being a work-outside-the-home mom is a bit like having dissociative identity disorder (i.e., split personalities).  You have these two lives that don’t mesh together very well, and each life requires its own persona.  Hence, having returned to the workplace fulltime, I have become Sybil. 

I’ve decided to use this blog to document my hysterical  state of being.  I’m not sure if that’s hysterical as in “funny” or as in “marked by madness, or hysteria”.  Whatever the case, I’ll try to capture it appropriately. 

I’ve settled (quite uncreatively) on names, or “voices”, for the two personas – ”Sybil” the Super Mom and “Sybil” the Career Woman.  Why the same name?  Well, because neither is my dominant or defining persona. 

I borrowed this bifurcated blog concept from my dear friend Peggy, an educator and fellow blogger.  After a six month hiatus, Peggy sent an email announcing that she was back to blogging with this approach:

I am planning on posting twice a week, once about personal matters and thoughts, and once about teaching, working with parents, and, as always, the intersection between my personal and professional lives – which are more intertwined than most I suspect. 

A few rules of engagement: 

I am neither as organized nor as confident as Peggy.  I can’t promise to blog with any frequency, on any schedule or in any order.  That is to say, I do not plan to blog twice a week, and, if I did, I would fail…miserably! 

As Peggy alludes, like most work-outside-the-home moms, there’s little intersection between my personal and professional lives, unless, of course, leaving the office and running to Payless at Metro Center on your lunch break to get your kid a pair of shoes to wrap for an orphan at Christmas embodies that intersection.  And I don’t think that’s what Peggy means.  Besides, that intersection was covered hilariously and irreverently in Allison Pearson’s novel I Don’t Know How She Does It.  And to try to replicate that work would be like trying to replicate Luther Vandross’ classic ballad, A House is Not a Home.  It can’t be done, and it would be foolish to try.  (Although, I must say David Procter — was that his name??– ROCKED that song a time or two at a talent show “back in the day”.  But I digress….)

I Love what I do for a living, and I love the people with whom I work.  That said, at times I feel as though both — some of the work and some of the people — are rather “Special”.  (Noooooo, you’re not “Special”.  It’s Those Other People we work with that are “Special”!  –wink wink–) I will, therefore, avoid sharing workplace mania with you (which can often maliciously be taken out of context), unless it illustrates that rare intersection between my personal and professional lives.

I will try to keep both voices going with some regularity.  And I will try to clearly delineate when I am Sybil and when I have become the other Sybil.

Lastly, and most importantly, I’m not sure I can pull this off.  But I am eager to try, not to dazzle you with my Balancing Brilliance nor to Baffle you with my BullNanny but, as always, to enlighten, to inform and, more so, to amuse.

Stay tuned as I blog on!!!