Making Time for “Me Time”
As a contributor is Rachel Hamman’s upcoming book, Mom’s Night Out: Even Inmates Get Time Off For Good Behavior, I have learned what might possibly be the most important skill for good parenting. Taking time for myself and feeling good about it has made me a far better parent than I could have imagined. I thought this would be the perfect way to start off my column, because “me time” is the basis of effective parenting and lifelong happiness.
As parents, we become so consumed with our new little bundles of joy that the rest of the world disappears before our eyes. You walk, sleep and breathe your new baby, and your every thought is of that precious bundle of perfection. You dwell on how amazing they are and count their fingers and toes twenty times. This adoration and affection is very healthy and promotes solid bonding, but at what point does it take a decline and become less beneficial to you?
The first nerve-wracking days and sleepless nights turn into months of baby talk and feeding frenzies that will have you in tears, both from crying and laughing. Your free time is spent doing endless loads of laundry and picking up toys so you can vacuum. Your Sunday drives turn into carpooling and soccer games, and later your teenager borrowing your keys with a charming smile that you simply cannot refuse. After years of practice, you’ve mastered the art of mind reading and knowing what your children want or need, or what they are up to without even asking. You are totally confident that you are a pro at any situation your children can throw at you, so what’s left?
Someone asks you what you like to do, what you’re passionate about, and what you do in your free time. After moments of silence, you realize you haven’t got an answer. For the last chunk of time in your life, you have been “Mom” and you have forgotten who the “me” is that used to be. It happens to many parents, but fortunately there is a way to get yourself out of the rut. There is a perfect balance between dedicating your life to being a wonderful parent, and taking a few minutes of time out to recapture the great person you were before you became a parent. Keeping in touch with who you really are can be a life saver and will give you the tools to appreciate your children even more.
Taking a time out and making time for yourself should come naturally, but if you are a planner, pencil it in and make sure you take it. Tell your family when your time is going to be, and ask that they respect whatever limits you set forth. Never feel guilty for taking some time for yourself. It is absolutely necessary to keep you sane, and will make you a happier person in the long run. If you have spent the last several years dedicating every waking moment to your family, they may need to adjust to you taking some time for yourself. Explain to them what is happening and how they can help. Tell them what you are looking for, and be proud of yourself for expressing your needs. Your family may not even realize you need a break until you ask for one, and in most cases they will happily oblige given the right approach.
Taking time out for yourself doesn’t have to be a lengthy process, but it can be if that’s what you need. Here are some ideas for getting the time that you need and deserve:
- Get a manicure
- Take a bath
- Read a book
- Scrapbook
- Write in a journal or diary
- Take a walk
- Go shopping
- Take in a movie
- Eat at your favorite restaurant
- Call up an old friend
- Catch up on correspondence
There are a variety of things you can do without the company of your children and significant other. It may feel strange at first, but you will learn to love the time you take for yourself. If you have lost yourself, you will again find what it is that makes you tick. If you are lucky enough to have kept a sense of who you are outside of your family duties, embrace what it is that makes you different, and learn something about yourself that you never knew. Remember the saying that in order to love someone else, you must first love yourself. The same goes for parenting, in that in order to truly be able to meet your family’s needs, you must first be able to meet your own.
Beauty Lessons
Up until the early 1900’s, foot binding was not only a common practice for Chinese women, but also a necessary one. Mothers would begin binding their daughter’s feet around the age of five. Read more
Standing Together
I was getting ready one morning to attend a playgroup I’d never been to before. As I tried on my third outfit I realized that I was stressing more about how I looked for these other moms then I do around men. It is hard to find that perfect medium between too casual (i.e. lazy and unappealing) and too prissy (i.e. “who does she think she is?”). Read more
What I believe
I believe in women. I believe women are worth more than they believe; are stronger and more powerful than they admit. As a writing teacher I am privileged to hear bits and pieces of women’s lives that are often kept secret. Read more
Embracing Pleasure
When you die God and the angels will holdyou accountable for all the pleasures you were allowed in this life that you denied yourself. –Anonymous
This quote is taped to my refrigerator to remind me of my new goal: Embracing Pleasure. Like a lot of moms in today’s society I let pleasure escape my life. I developed guilt over taking opportunities for myself to feel fulfilled, especially if it cost money or time that could be devoted to family. Over the last year I began to realize that I could not and should not allow this deprivation to happen. Not only is it detrimental to my state of self, but it is not what God intended for me when He gave me this wonderful family.
Read more
Love
Love
Why do we over eat things when we know we’re not supposed to? People talk about learning to eat properly and I have trouble with that statement. I think we all know how to eat from a logical standpoint. We know our food groups, we know fruits and veggies are supposed to fill our days. We know we need protein and a little fat to keep us healthy. We know fast food is bad for us. We know everything should be in moderation. Even if we were brought up in a cave, our bodies know, they tell us through our weight, our blood, our energy levels and so on. Why do we do it then? Why do we put more and more inside ourselves? I have learned that it all comes down to one thing: Love. Our ability to feel love is what effects the way we treat our bodies. Whether we are overweight or have an eating disorder, it all comes down to our ability to feel love. I am talking about both the love of the outside world, and the love we have for ourselves (or in this case often don’t have). When we feel loved, I mean really feel it, we don’t want to abuse ourselves in any way. When we feel loved, we cherish ourselves, we protect ourselves, we hold ourselves in high esteem. The world can be a lonely place right now. It isn’t the way it was in the past with neighborhood get togethers and stay at home moms. (Though many people are beginning to try to regain this.) Families aren’t together in the same town anymore. People lose touch. People keep to themselves and are less likely today than ever before to really reach out and take in new friends. People are lonely. The world can be full of judgement right now. The media (including television and movies) portrays an image of women (and men too) that is physically impossible for most people to reach. Why do you think many celebrities, men and women, suffer from eating disorders? Even they cannot reach the standards that so many of us are holding ourselves and each other to at this time. We hear all the time that only 2% of the population can look the way we think we all should look. At the same time, obesity rates are gaining at a rapid pace, and more individuals are finding themselves faced with eating disorders in many forms. The two are definitely tied together. Most of us spend so much time in our heads thinking of the things we dislike about our bodies, more than we think good thoughts toward ourselves. We’re lonely, making us feel disconnected and therefor unloved. We’re ashamed because our bodies don’t look like the cookie-cutter mold that they’re supposed to, a mold that in most of our eyes would definitely bring more love into our lives. There is no miracle cure for this. It all comes down to the individual, as it always does. We can’t sit and wait for others to come to us and love us. We have to learn how to love ourselves and to feel loved even in our loneliest moments. More than relearning how to eat, we need to relearn how to think about ourselves. This is a time of individuals more than groups. People stand on their own these days more than ever before. If you can get to the point where you feel love within yourself, no matter what is going outside of you, you will find peace with yourself, your body, and no longer have the urge to hurt yourself. Whether we are overeating or purging, we are hurting ourselves. We are punishing ourselves for not being good enough, for not being strong enough, appealing enough, and lovable enough. But we are. Every one of us is beautiful, sexy, strong, appealing and lovable. We’re not supposed to look or be like each other. We are individual reflections of God, and we are what He wants us to be. Finding your way back to love can be easy or hard, depending on how much you doubt your worth, how long you’ve let yourself think badly about you. This is how I began my process. For everyone it will be a little different, but this can be a sort of guide on your way to rediscovering that self-love we are all born with. The realization that I didn’t feel love took awhile to come upon. I don’t have a lot of family, but what I have is very important to me. My mother, two younger brothers, my husband and my son are all important and close to me. And yet I often had trouble believing in their love as well. I had convinced myself so much that I was unlovable, that I didn’t always trust what they said, their motives for saying or doing things, or their stability in my future. Two things played big roles in discovering I was worthy of love. One was my son. As he grew into a toddler I was able to see more and more the love he held for me. He saw me as beautiful, wonderful, extremely loving and lovable. He didn’t know about anything in my past, he didn’t see my mistakes or pain. He just saw me, the real core of me. Most importantly, he felt my unconditional love for him and responded to it in kind.The second thing was my dad. After a bitter divorce between my parents when I was 27, my dad separated from all of us and started a new life with a new woman. He was often very unkind in things he said of us to others, and even to us. The couple years after the divorce were really only a magnification of what had been going on subtly for years. I know he loved us all, but he was never good at love. He didn’t trust people’s love and I had learned this from him. He also didn’t really know what love is and seemed to think it was made up of pity and the ability to lean on others. Because of these things I had to do something I would have never thought I’d have to do with my dad – take him out of my life, step away from him and move on. It was painful and extremely disappointing. But through it I had the opportunity to learn that the idea of a father is not limited to one man in our lives. I learned that God is our one true parent. God is our Father and our Mother. God is not some distant spirit, but is right here with me every single day. He has plans for me, dreams for me, bigger than anything I could imagine. And most importantly, His love for me is beyond anything I could ever fathom. That love is there every moment for every one of us, filling us up. I hope that I never find myself in the position of having to spend every moment of every day for the rest of my life without any human companionship. But if that would happen, I now know that I would never really be alone. My Father and Mother, my Best Friend, my true Companion would be there every second of every day loving me. Knowing that someone as big and powerful as God loves me, knowing it to my core, has allowed me to begin to see how lovable, beautiful and wonderful I really am. There are still moments when I question these things, but these questions and moments of self-doubt and self-destruction are getting fewer and farther between. By exploring my worth and my innate love, I am beginning to find my passions and my purpose in life. All these things are pointing me on a path to self-fulfillment in which I am full of love more than I have been in a long time. Now that I am feeling more loved within myself, I am not looking as much to the people around me for that love. I am finding more peace around others, more ability to trust them and their love for me, more moments of happiness and joy and fulfillment than of self-loathing. All abusive eating habits are self-punishment. When we love ourselves, no matter our size, shape, look, we no longer feel the need to punish. Instead we feel the need to inspire, to lift up, to stand strong and proud. I want this for everyone out there who has ever felt a moment of self-loathing. You are loved beyond your wildest dreams. You are cared for, you are protected and you are beautiful and strong. Embrace it and learn to believe it.
Read more
Remembering You
Somewhere between pregnancy and motherhood I crossed a line about the value of myself. I was never a fashion guru or a makeup queen, but I always took care of myself and was proud of my attractiveness. And then I had this precious child who demanded everything of me; a house with endless responsibilities; and a husband who provided so well that I felt compelled to make his home life as comfortable and easy as possible. During this time my parents divorced and I had to come face to face with issues I’d been ignoring about my father. Soon I was forced to sever ties with him, and was left with anger, sadness and the pain of feeling unloved. Little by little, without even noticing it, I began to put myself down. Soon I was at the bottom of the line where everyone and everything else came first. My value for myself diminished and guilt and self-hatred took its place. I couldn’t lose the baby weight, I stopped caring for myself and I began mentally depreciating myself constantly. I could buy products for the care and necessity of everyone else, but the thought alone of getting what I needed brought me close to tears with guilt. Somehow the idea got embedded in my thought that I was worthless: worth
less than everyone around me. When we begin to hate ourselves for whatever reason, the result tends to be the same – we want to disappear. Some do this by trying to take up as little space as possible through disorders like anorexia or bulimia; others try to take up so much space that people will take one look and instantly dismiss them as someone who doesn’t matter.
One day it occurred to me that there was a difference between body image and self-image, though they were definitely connected. I began looking at my self-image and correcting my view about my body. I began trying to see what my body had to say about me, the story it told, it’s strengths instead of its weaknesses. Slowly my self-image became less critical. Then one day I was reading Oprah’s “What I Know For Sure” in her February, 2003 issue of O, and she said, “You are not built to shrink down to less but to blossom into more.” I wanted to be full – not with possessions or food, but with myself! Full of myself to the brim – and proud of it! After slight changes such as this in thought, I was ready to begin adjusting what I ate and the way I used my body. I began concentrating on my food intake as to what made my body feel good and useful and productive. I began exercising as much as possible. Soon, watching my body’s strength and endurance increase became more important than the pounds that were slowly dropping off. But there was another key to this puzzle for me – one that I discovered quite by accident. The key of forgiveness. Forgiving others is something I have worked on and fairly mastered: the only thing to remember is that their thoughts and actions have nothing to do with the real me. The key was self-forgiveness. No one talks much about self-forgiveness, but it has proved vital in my life. There was a lot of baggage and self-anger I was carrying around with me over mistakes and decisions I had made in the past. The things I had chosen to do that had not worked out, the reactions I’d had to things I wish I could retract, all these things were still inside me feeding my feelings of self-doubt and worthlessness. Finally I sat down to look at these things and began to realize that, though I might regret some things, I learned a lot and grew from every one of those mistakes and decisions and through that growth ended up happily married with a wonderful son. I then realized it was time to forgive myself, to have compassion and understanding for myself, and to love myself again instead of turning away from who I really am in criticism and denial. This sense of self-forgiveness really helped eliminate a lot of the trash talk in my head. I have come a long way in how I look at myself, but this doesn’t mean I never think a bad thought because unfortunately I do. It is almost like an addiction, this disliking yourself. It keeps you down, it keeps you hidden and it keeps you in a constant state of excuse. How can anyone, even you, expect great things of yourself when you are: Fat? Worthless? Unattractive? Nothing? They can’t, you don’t and you won’t. There are still many times when suddenly the same person I saw in the mirror yesterday who looked fine, the same person who was active and useful and moved with purpose is now the person I despise. I will look in the mirror and see a saggy woman who is a failure. I will think these things until I am quite unable to do anything. And then I will cry. But now, a small voice comes through reminding me that I have begun to rediscover the real me, and she is just waiting for me to look in her direction again. This voice reminds me that God created me, and that by diminishing myself, I am really diminishing Him. I am saying that He is not powerful and loving and full of life, but is small and ugly and worthless. In the Bible, God announces Himself as the great I AM. Since we’re His reflection, it follows that when we use the term, “I am..” to describe ourselves, we are attaching those labels not only to us, but to Him as well. And don’t we deserve more than that from ourselves? There is no need for guilt when it comes to body image or lifestyle or career when the choices we are making are ones that make us feel good. But as women we have a part of ourselves that often believes we are unworthy and so are guilty for exactly what we deserve / need / makes us happy. Recently I lost track of the good steps I’d made and was falling into a pit of despair all over again. I knew what I needed was some perspective, a change of scene. I needed to get out of the house and responsibilities that were keeping me locked in and be quiet and alone long enough to rediscover what I knew to be true about myself. My husband and mother graciously stepped in to help make a weekend alone possible. It was exactly what I needed to get some balance back in my life. But I almost cancelled the trip out of guilt for taking the time for myself, because for some reason I believed I did not deserve it. I brought this up to my mom a couple days before I left and she told me how when she was first divorced from my dad and finally living on her own she felt such an overwhelming sense of freedom. Immediately on its heel came guilt. She was talking with an older woman friend of hers one day and told her about this guilt, and the woman said, isn’t it a shame that we have to feel guilty for what we deserve? This woman owns a large home that she loves and uses every room in, yet she said she finds herself constantly defending her ownership since it is only her living there. We have to remember that God created men and women and so we are all an equal reflection of Him. Society since the beginning has placed women into the Adam dream – the idea that we came from a man and therefor owe something to man. God is our only creator and it is only to Him that we owe anything – and all He wants from us is everything: happiness, success, freedom, love, independence, active lives and spirits. And most of all a love for who we are and with that the ability to live as fully and wonderfully as possible. As women we need to listen to ourselves more. We get so busy listening to everyone else – their needs and opinions – that we often forget the sound of our own inner voice. This is the voice that gave you your dreams, your loves, your own valuable opinions and ideas. Taking time to truly hear what your voice has to say again will open the channels to knowing who you are, and what you deserve and truly desire. Writer John Hargreaves explains that we are never given a desire that God hasn’t already fulfilled. This does not mean that if you want a yacht one will magically appear on your doorstep. What it means is, if you have a true desire for the openness and freedom and power that a yacht would bring, you are recognizing this desire because God has already established a way for those things to be present in your life. Writer Richard Bach says something very similar, “You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true.” But to fulfill these wishes and desires we must be open to seeing them as they present themselves in our lives and to do this, we must be in touch with ourselves. Taking the time to care for your needs – putting yourself at the top of the list instead of the bottom – is not a selfish thing to do. In fact, quite the opposite. It is a gift we give to our family and friends. Dr. Phil says that we teach people how to treat us. Teaching people the correct way to treat us is not only a gift to ourselves, but is a gift for
them since it brings into their experience respect and understanding. It teaches our daughters to grow with self-respect, it teaches our sons how to be wonderful and loving men, and it gives the gift to our husbands and relationships of keeping alive the true woman you are, the one they truly love and know is there. So whatever that means in your life at this moment – demand and expect it. From yourself first. Live life full of yourself and see how it feels to remember you.
2007-03-22
Read more
