I remember sitting with my friends for our first girls’ weekend about eight months after my oldest son was born with all of his challenges. It was the first time since his stay in the neonatal intensive care nursery that I had been away from him overnight, and I was relieved and grateful for the getaway.
Over the previous months, I’d heard the platitudes over and over… I don’t know how you do it… You’re so strong… You’re an inspiration. I didn’t believe any of them, but I politely said, thank you.
But that weekend I heard those things from my three best friends, and the words stung. I replied back, “What other choice do I have? It’s not like I can walk away!”
“Yes, you could,” one friend replied, “but you don’t.”
Was that true? Did I really have a choice?
About a year after my son was born, I made another choice, or rather presented that choice to my husband for him to decide. We would stop, and our son would be an only child, or we would have two more children. Because of my life as an only child with a mother who had her own medical needs, it became very important to me that our second child have an ally when things got tough as I knew they inevitably would.
Fast forward, and now I’m the mom of three. A choice I made with them in mind, without taking my own wants and needs into account. Not realizing that at the end of the day, I was choosing a life I wasn’t sure I actually wanted.
Motherhood is hard for me. I don’t love it. I absolutely love these three humans I helped create, but each day it’s a choice I make to step into the role of being a mother, to take on that title, and to do that job.
Each day I choose not to walk away.
Self-care is a hot topic in the mom community and especially the special needs mom community, many talking about not having the time or ability for self-care, or lamenting that a pedicure isn’t going to make their life better.
And I agree, to a degree. Self-care is more than a pedicure. Truly caring for yourself is an individual act of kindness and gratitude to yourself, and it may require you to do things you’ve never done before, or that others might look down on.
For me, self-care looks like this:
Self-care is admitting that motherhood is hard for me, and accepting that it is okay for me to not like being a mom despite society telling me otherwise.
Self-care is working and paying for childcare because being the default parent 24/7 is detrimental to my mental health.
Self-care is flying in my mother-in-law up to help with my kids so I can travel to a conference in California and learn and laugh with women who get me and my struggle.
Self-care is making time to fill my cup and realizing it was emptier than I thought and that I might need to fill it more often.
Self-care is recognizing that it’s not too late to do the things that I dreamed of doing, and that my children seeing me take steps towards those dreams is not selfish, but a life-lesson.
Somewhere over the years the definition of motherhood became synonymous with martyrdom and selfless became the opposite of selfish. I’m not buying into either. Yes, there’s a level of sacrifice that comes with being a mother, but we don’t have to lose ourselves completely. I tell my daughter that she can do anything if she takes action and does the work, why can’t the same be true for me? And why does society think it’s wrong if I give myself the same encouragement that I give her? It’s not.
I’m doubling down on and.
I can be a good mother and not love motherhood.
I can be a good mother and work towards my dreams.
I can be a good mother and live a fulfilled life outside of motherhood.
I can be a mother without being a martyr.
I can be both selfless and selfish.
I can be my own version of motherhood.
