thoughtful musings (with some big words thrown in...)

It's peaceful in my house right now. After work, I picked up the kids and brought them home. Then, The Husband grabbed them and brought them back to his work because we both had to work this evening and I could not bring the kids with me. My meeting was far quicker than I'd anticipated and I am back home now. As I am sitting here enjoying my solitude, a multitude of thoughts are swirling through my mind. Mostly, I'm thinking of the fact that I seem to live two separate lives: life at work and life at home. I don't mix the two well. My job requires my bringing work home often and yet, I don't seem to get much of it done (perhaps why I enjoy going in on weekends...). It's just that when I'm home, I'm HOME. I'm mom, wife, and all that comes with. At work, I'm a person with different responsibilities. I don't think about home stuff at work and, despite my thinking of work while at home, I rarely act upon it. Overall, it's not a bad thing. I always get everything caught up and all is well with the world. It's just that it seems so overwhelmingly evident at this precise moment.

It is interesting that throughout our lives, we play different roles. Many of the times, for many of us, those roles overlap. All the same, there are times when they have nothing to do with each other. I had a conversation with one of my closest friends this evening and I believe that is what set my pensive mood into action. I was explaining how, at one particular point in my life, I found myself having to act very differently than what I considered my normal 'everyday' life. At the same time, part of me realizes that I really wasn't acting much differently than I do now - that is in my 'public life.' That, of course, led me to the whole 'separate lives' thought. Who I am with my family is not necessarily who I am to the public. Of course, that realization made me think of the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, in which one of the characters says about Atticus that he is the same man inside his house as he is on the public streets. I suppose that is the type of person one aspires to emulate, provided one knows that Atticus is a man of great integrity.

Reading back over this post, it seems maybe all that money spent on college didn't go to waste!