Working Moms face Duel Roles - Especially on Monday | May 23rd 2006
By Jacqueline Dooley
I find it incredibly difficult to get back into the mindset of working on Monday morning. The recent departure of my free time is an almost-physical loss because all the trappings of the weekend are so close at hand — the kids downstairs, the piles of laundry I didn’t quite finish washing, the yard toys outside my window strewn all over the place and in need of cleanup.
This past Monday was worse then ever. I’d just spent a long three-day weekend with my girls preparing for, then enjoying, then recovering from, their collaborative birthday party Saturday. The hectic weekend which ended in a slow, lazy Mother’s Day Sunday with lots of rain, lots of toys and (I confess) a generous nap for me was pure bliss. Once the work week started it was extremely difficult for me to put my business persona back on.
I’ve begun to wonder if my newfound dread of Mondays has to do with working from home. I never used to have such a hard time getting started. But these days the weekend still clings to me on Monday morning no matter how fast I run up the stairs to my office at 9 a.m. to settle back into the work week.
The feeling of having one foot deeply rooted in homemaking, and the other firmly planted in the business world, is very stark and stressful on Monday morning. Weekend chores feel unfinished, but I’m close enough to remedy that. I have to suppress the urge to run downstairs and spend another 15 minutes playing and cleaning among the girls, even as I flip through my e-mail, update my to-do-list and prepare to dig deep into the week’s deadlines.
Personas collide
These mom/work mo-ments tend to jump out at me and cause my two personas to crash into each other on a fairly consistent basis. For example, inevitably the office phone will ring while I’m at lunch — a time often spent eating and playing with my kids. When this happens, I let it ring, but I can’t help wonder who in the business world needs me and what they would think if they knew that I’d spent the past 10 minutes lying flat on my back on the driveway while my 5-year-old traced me in four shades of pastel-colored chalk.
Working and living in the same place has made me realize the skills involved in running a household are awfully similar to the skills I use to run my business. So I guess it should come as no surprise to me that because I both work and live in my home, my two identities — mom and career woman — are constantly vying for dominance. When Monday rolls around, I’ll try to be ready for it.
The truth is, I don’t think I will ever be able to completely separate my personal self from my work self ever again.
Having kids changed that forever.
Running a business out of my home changed it even more. For me, business is personal and my personal life will always influence the choices I make during the work day.
The separation anxiety I feel toward my house, my kids and my domesticity is equal to the stress I feel when I’m forced to break for lunch and hold off on finishing an important project for the inconvenient necessity of eating. In the end, it’s all about focusing on the moment and striving to achieve balance — something tenuous and at times completely absent — but I am ever hopeful that I’m getting closer to it each day that I’m on my own.
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This article was published in the Poughkeepsie Journal under the the title, “Work at home makes it hard to avoid a case of the Mondays,” on Saturday, May 20th, 2006.