Aspire Magazine: Inspiration for a Woman's Soul.(TM) Aug/Sept 2017 Aspire Mag Full Issue | Page 53
For the first few weeks, everything felt
overwhelming. I wondered how I could ever
be the parent I wanted to be when I was
struggling just to meet everyone’s basic
needs. With spit-up in my hair and breast
milk staining my shirt, my Little Star in one
arm and my Moonbeam tugging on the other,
I closed my eyes, ran through my to-do list―
which had not, despite my fond daydreaming,
miraculously shrunk after Little Star’s birth―
and promptly burst into tears.
Don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t trade my
family for the world. My daughters are the
biggest joys in my life. But they are also
my greatest teachers―and, like all great
teachers, they push me to my limits and
beyond. They have shed their moonlight,
starlight, and heart lights on the patterns
in my life that are no longer helpful―most
prominently, my complete and total inability
to prioritize my own self-care.
You see, I’m a natural workaholic. I thrive
in a state of busyness―which my brain,
conditioned in my early life by the middle-
class bootstrap narrative, translates as
“usefulness.” Give me three minutes and
I can fill a leisurely day with any number
of moderately necessary tasks, none
of which include making time for me to
nourish myself. After all, in my habitual
No one, not
even a dedicated
workaholic like
me, loves work
for work’s sake.
It’s what that work
produces that
keeps us going.
Crash! Reality hit on my first day home from
the hospital, when I discovered that, no
matter how much help one has, parenting a
newborn when one already has a precocious
toddler is a far different experience. There is
no slow unfolding or leisurely exploration. It’s
all about putting out fires―and, in the case
of my headstrong toddler, repeatedly saving
both her and our furniture from permanent
damage of one kind or another.
narrative, self-care is a luxury, not a
necessity: it’s not useful.
Before kids, this tendency was balanced
by seemingly vast stretches of time when
there was simply nothing to do. Days when
my husband was working, but I didn’t have
deadlines. Mornings when I could put off the
laundry because, what the heck, I still had
plenty of clean panties. Random hours when
taking a brisk walk and smiling at the sun
actually seemed like the most productive
thing to do. Before kids, I was effectively
forced into self-care by virtue of having
only a limited number of tasks with which
to occupy myself. And the more I paused
to take care of myself, the better and more
connected I felt.
These days, though, the to-do list is miles
long, punctuated by cluster feeding and
diaper changes, underscored by not a small
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