The Three Identities Mayim Bialik Relies On To Balance Her Personal & Professional Lives

Mayim Bialik may forever be known as the face of Amy Farrah Fowler on "The Big Bang Theory," but the actor has shown remarkable range in the little corner of the industry she's quietly made her own. A sitcom kid, a neuroscientist matching wits with Sheldon Cooper, a "Jeopardy!" host, and a successful podcast host, is a resume anyone would envy. Through it all, Bialik says one role has always stayed at the top: being a mom.

While starring on "The Big Bang Theory," Bialik wrote an essay for Today, wherein she broke her life into three distinct selves. One was the mother at home. The other was the on-set professional. Last came the camera-ready glamour girl. In her telling, the first one was the truest of the bunch, and it came naturally. In fact, such was her dedication to that particular role of a lifetime that she clocked in to play Amy, pumped breast milk in her dressing room, and checked in at home between scenes. She even kept a wallet photo of her two boys, along with a treasured note in which her then-5-year-old apologized that her job was boring and told her he missed her.

Bialik got her big break in a classic '80s tearjerker, and maintains that dealing with the glamour version was a challenge. The version in full makeup who materialized for industry parties was hopeless at parenting. "Glamour Mayim is high maintenance," she wrote. Even the boys found that persona a little off-putting, with one bursting into tears at an unfamiliar hairstyle and the other observing that she didn't smell like herself.

Mayim Bialik has kept busy in life since "The Big Bang Theory" came to an end, but that 2011 essay and the life philosophy outlined in it has stayed with her. After all, she called her motherhood "the reminder of who I really am: the baseline Mayim that is the only person I ever have to be." Interviews from the "Big Bang" years reveal how literally she enforced that idea. "We don't use a nanny, and I clean my own toilets, " she once told E! News ahead of the 2014 SAG Awards. Bialik lives a lavish life, but she described her household in that interview as deliberately un-Hollywood.

The commitment ran really deep. She wrote a book in 2012 titled "Beyond the Sling: A Real-Life Guide to Raising Confident, Loving Children the Attachment Parenting Way," and discussed how it affected her life in a chat with NPR. "We wanted me to be with our kids more than that kind of science career might have allowed for," she said as an explanation for why she left academia for acting.

Bialik had to deal with near-constant guilt when working on "The Big Bang Theory" set. No amount of ambitious planning allowed Bialik to be on set and at home simultaneously, so she leaned on swapping stories with fellow working mothers and locking her phone away so the boys got her undivided attention. Through it all, what never changed was the ranking she outlined in the 2011 essay. Years later, with both sons in their teens, she told The Mother Chapter that motherhood remains "the most important job I will ever have." A gig, she added, that never comes with an instruction manual.