family wellness
Make Room for Self-Care By Catherine Gibel
A
h self-care. It’s on your to-do list. You’ll make time for it. You’re just too busy right now. If you don’t run your household and your business, who will? To our own detriment, we prioritize everyone and everything else. I haven’t met a mother who doesn’t struggle with this, myself included. For the longest time my motto was “I’ve got this.” You’ve got an autoimmune disease and you need surgery, your husband has to go to Germany for work and will be gone for two weeks, your son’s social anxiety is crippling and he’s miserable, you need to start marketing the new branch of the company you work for oh and you move in three weeks. Sound familiar? I’VE. GOT. THIS. I didn’t.
Photo credit: Simon Rae from Unsplash
Shift your mindset
Why is your yoga class not as important as a conference call or dance recital? You committed to both the call and recital so, why are the promises you made yourself any less important? They aren’t.
Decide and re-prioritize
What do you need? What do you want more of? Time alone? Time with friends? Exercise? Don’t focus on all the things you should be doing or what others around you are doing. Pick one or two needs and focus your efforts on those. I had to make time for a new diet and exercise regimen. That wasn’t an option.
However, I wanted to make friends in my new community and read more books so, I joined a local mom’s book club.
Make room
In the same way you have to schedule everything for everyone all the time yes, you have to schedule this too. If you can block the same day(s) and time(s) every week, even better. It’s much easier to schedule around a reoccurring event. This will likely require some reevaluating. Yes, you can say “no” to organizing the classroom party. Yes, your kids can do two instead of three extracurricular activities a quarter and be perfectly content.
In organizing a “perfectly balanced” schedule, I failed to block out any time for myself. As an organized person, that was hard to accept. The harder truth? I realized that if I don’t make room for me, no one else will. I need to make it happen, but how? I can barely handle what’s already on my plate. May/June 2022
suburban family | subfam.com
family wellness 39
