Reflections :: Mommy Me-Time

Here comes an important self-admission:

I have no kids.  I am not a Dandelion Mom.

I am a single woman in the second half of my thirties who has devoted the better part of two decades to the work of women.  Specifically, how we relate to ourselves, our identity, our experiences of self and the roles we play, and our experiences of our spirits, our spiritualities, our personal growths and beliefs.  I am not a mom, no, not at all.  You’re right, I don’t get it.

Yes, the difference between us is that for me, taking time for me, honoring something as decadent as me-time and personal growth is a luxury, something I actually get to focus on with committed effort and time.    For my mom friends, especially the gals with multiple little ones or little ones under age 2, I seem to understand from the outside looking in that there are no luxuries.  Mommyhood is an extra full-time job.  What me, what self?  I am used to getting laughed at when I bring up words like this.

Which serves, in fact, to increase my insistence on the axiom:  what we don’t work out, we act out.  It is my opinion that the major part of the transition into parenthood lasts at least the first two years, and so what I am about to write is in accordance with an adjustment period of that long, adding two years on for each new child as well.  Meaning, after a child is age 2 or older, personal growth and me-time is no longer in the luxury category.  It is now necessity.  And there is one singular, bottom-line reason for this.  You are responsible for the healthy emotional development of your child.  Which means your needs, emotional, spiritual, physical, and mental, must be tended to, because what we don’t work out, we act out.  It is the most simple put, and true, psychological element that exists.

This is a good and beautiful thing.  The woman who relates to herself as worthy, worthy of her own attentive spirit, worthy of her own awareness, worthy of returning to her self as a renewable source again and again, worthy of seeking out and redefining the changing wonders of her own internal value and guidance–this is the woman who is naturally filled with the substance that feeds the hearts and souls of those who rely on her, of those she loves.

Now if I, a single woman who has devoted her life and work to the experience of cultivating and returning the heart and soul of women, if someone like me still has my dry times, my deadened times, my times of acting out!!  then for my dear mom-friends I can only begin to imagine the struggle.  Which is why I always return to the word practice.

This is a practice, that’s all.  A practice of greeting, of learning, of knowing, of honoring, and, when we leave, which we will (we will, we will) of returning to our own within.

If, no–when–we forget, when life has gotten away with us, when we are harried and frazzled and so far beyond stressed, we simply practice.  We begin again.  We do so with gentleness, with a softness towards our own precious self.  We greet ourselves wherever we are at, and we do so with tender loving care.  Your self-care won’t look like mine.  It can’t.  So it needs to look like yours, specific to what can work for you.

Just as we will act out on friends and loved ones the inner stuff we don’t work out, so too will we practice giving away what we practice on our self.   Me-time, self-care, these aren’t indulgences.  They are the most valuable gifts one can give, the kind that keep on giving.  Begin again.  Begin within.

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