Book Review: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

You must read The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell. Must.

You know how some books are so good you can't put them down? This one was so good I had to put it down the first night. Drop it like it's hot, if you will. It was too much to take.

But still I managed to finish it in less than 24 hours. Yeah, me. The one with the baby, and the other job, too, who can't always figure out when to shower.

I gave it to my cousin with a request to get it back before Book Club (still 3 weeks away), as the book had been chosen by the lovely Adrienne for our next discussion. She gave it back to me last Saturday. She'd stayed up all night reading it.

So what is it about, you ask? It is a novel about the power of perception, the reliability (or unreliability) of memory, the way we sometimes forget that the people we love are more important than the opinions of people we really don't care all that much about. It's about the walls that we build to deal with loss in its many forms. It's about the subordination of women.

This book crosses generations and continents, and it's told in a remarkable way.

Read it.

My "Weeble" Is Wobbling

Here in my Kool-Aid drinkin' corporate culture, we have a different name for everything. No, we can't just be like regular folks who say "HR" or "employees." And we talk about WBL - well-balanced life - instead of work/life balance. Maybe we aren't the only ones; I've been insulated here for a while.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately as I try to be a star don't-call-me-an-employee as well as a star mama.

It seems when people think of work/life balance, they usually think of the life part of the equation. As in, is work giving me enough time to have one? But lately I find myself having a hard time with the work part of the equation. As in, can I still give and get something worthwhile in my work-life while I try to have a life-life?

Part of the problem is that my definition of life-life has changed. It requires me to be home at a reasonable hour, and even if I work from home after Bubs goes to bed, it's not the same as being there. Pre-baby, having a life-life involved some late-night activities, not to mention the ability to stay awake for them, which allowed for working all hours and still having fun. Ah, that work-hard, play-hard mentality that romanced me against my better judgment.

I think the big problem though, and the one I have yet to find a way around, is that most of the fulfilling work I used to do was extra-curricular. In order to get ahead here, and more importantly (to me), to make a difference, I had to take on extra projects - some to help the way we work internally, some to help us win new business, and so on. And of course, those gravy projects are the ones I've had to cut out. And I don't care what people think of that, and I don't care that it may cost me a promotion, I just plain miss it.

Now my task is to dig deep and figure out if there's a way to fit in that extra work, or to somehow make it the work I am tasked to do, during the regular day. I'm working hard to solve this one, because the last thing I want is to find out that our aforementioned corporate culture won't allow for that. As goofy as we can be, I like it here.

The scary question behind the question is whether any solution could even do the trick, or if I got the adrenaline rush from the fact that I was going above and beyond, from the buzz of the late-night office crowd, from the shots of espresso that were inevitably involved.

If there is a neat wrap-up for this post, I haven't found it yet. That's part of my quest, and I'm only going to find it inside myself. I ask you, who has the time?!