Black Sheep Girl In A White Sheep World

I have always jokingly referred to myself as the “black sheep” of my family. Not because of any horrible traumas or dramatic personal failures, but just because I’ve always felt so different than everyone else around me.

This “different-ness” shows up a lot in my various personality traits, the most dominant of which is that I am very much an ALL or NOTHING person. The middle ground is not a place I visit very often.

Looking back I can see that this was true of me even at an early age. I know this because of the stories my mother tells about me when I was a little girl. Either they describe how I insisted on wearing multiple dresses at the same time, or they talk about how I would rip off every stitch of clothing I had on at the time and then run through the house completely naked. So, either I was excessively clothed, or I was totally naked; nothing in-between.

Along with my all-or-nothing tendencies, I am also very much a person who likes to push the edge of the envelope. This I attribute to being a Libra.

If you’ve ever seen the visual representation of the Libra’s Zodiac sign, you know that it is a set of scales. And the scales are always perfectly balanced. But in my opinion that picture should always have a giant asterisk underneath it and a note that says, “Warning: the state of balance shown here represents the Libran ideal, not their day-to-day experience.”

Because, while I may occasionally reach the state of perfectly balanced scales in my life, as soon as I do I think, “OK, well this is cool. Now, I wonder what happens if I do this?” and then I purposely unbalance my scales in as dramatic and chaotic a way as I can imagine, and then see if I can get back to my previous state of balance.

And, once again, this is not a new thing for me. I remember one day in high school when we had some relatives visiting us and my dad took us all downtown to see his new office. We were all enjoying ourselves and everyone was getting along really well, so all the metaphorical scales of that day were perfectly balanced. And then my mom started to tell us all about this new system she’d discovered to help you deal with all your paper clutter and help you keep your desk cleared off. I don’t remember all the details of this system, but I do remember that it had 4 parts which were represented by the letters T, R, A, and F.

So my mom finished her story by saying, “And the best part of this system is that the first letter of all the steps spells a word, so you can always remember what you’re supposed to do.” And I, being the edge-of-the-envelope pusher that I am looked at the perfectly balanced scales of that day, looked at my mom, furrowed my brow in pretend innocence and said, “A word? Oh...(pretending to think)...you mean ‘fart’.” And the scales went WHOOSH!

As you can probably imagine, these particular personality characteristics did cause some problems for me when I entered the work force, as all-or-nothingness and pushing the boundaries are not always what employers are looking for.

I discovered this in a particularly memorable way one day when I was teaching at a private, religious school. A number of us women were in the office one day discussing the dress code, which required that all female employees wear pantyhose and heels when they were at school.

There were a couple of pregnant women there at the time, and so I turned to them and said, “Well, what about if you’re pregnant? Do you still have to do this then?”

And they looked at me and said, “Well, yeah, of course,” stunned that it would even occur to me to ask that question.

And then, before I could stop myself, I felt these words leaping out of my throat and I said, “Well clearly a MAN made that rule.” And there was silence. And not just any silence, but the kind of silence that would have been appropriate had I just announced, “You know, in my spare time, I kill kittens.”

So now, not surprisingly, I work for myself, and that is where the black sheep aspect comes into play. Because I come from a family that is full of mathematicians, accountants, engineers, chemists, and financial planners. And I...write a humor blog on the Internet. So while my family members are all of working through serious issues like, “Gee, I wonder how we can get these molecules to bond together and form this new cancer drug,” I am wrestling with complex problems like, “Hm, would it be funnier to use the word ‘underwear’ or ‘underpants’ in this story? And is there any possible way to work in the word, ‘weasel’”?

And that is how I am proud to be a black sheep girl in a white sheep world.