It’s low hanging fruit, but it feels like a win

Finally figuring out what I need to take care of myself in motherhood

Hello from an airplane en route Scottsdale, AZ. I’m flying solo, exhausted, and ready to crash for a few days by a pool with a book, my phone on DND, and catch up IRL with one of my best friends.

Both my husband and I have found ourselves much busier than normal at work for the past month and a half, and it makes this trip feel even more urgent. I hate that I’m showing up for it basically feeling like a shell of a person, but I’m hopeful that some sunshine, no agenda, a chance to sleep through the night and wake up after 7 am, brings me back to New York feeling a little bit more human.

Typically, my job is relatively straightforward and keeps me in the usual realms of an eight hour workday. For the three days a week that I have to be in the office, I leave between 4:45 pm and 5 pm to relieve our nanny, so I usually log on after Zora goes to bed to play catch up. That’s the dance I know that a lot of working parents do and I’m fine to join them. Bill’s job is similarly pretty straightforward and I consider us lucky to have jobs and careers that are hardly high pressure all the time.

But when we find ourselves in busy work periods that deviate from the norm, the ebb and flow of our day-to-day life clashes hard against the cold reality that modern society isn’t sustainable for two full-time working parents.

When work is less hectic, we can find and sneak pockets of time from the workweek to support the ongoing maintenance of our family life. That looks like running a load of laundry during a lunch break, keeping the dishes moving during a WFH day, getting started on dinner in-between calls at 4 pm so that by the time the other parent is home from the office and Zora is back from being out with our nanny, we can all eat together at a reasonable time.

There's been a lot of pressure on the work that I'm doing right now and for the last month, I've probably worked until 10pm or 11pm most nights. I've been sending emails at 9 pm on Fridays trying to play catch up.

Working like this is soul sucking and zaps me of energy. My husband and I walk around our house like ships passing in the night, zombies who don't really have a conscious connection other than the shared mission of keeping the household running and our child alive. I feel very resentful for the way that being a parent¹ in this type of capitalism robs me of time, personal space, and mental energy.

But this newsletter isn’t a critique of our country’s fragile family and social support system, I very much do not have the emotional energy to go there.

In the midst of this insane work period, it became abundantly clear that I’ve failed to establish real ways to take care of myself in this phase of life - motherhood.

The two years I spent trying and getting pregnant required a lot of intentional care for my body and spirit, and that wasn’t for my needs alone, it was for the greater good of building our family. So when I subtract that time from the time that I’ve been a mother, I’m going on almost four years of more consistently putting the needs and wellbeing of others above my own.

This realization recently came to me as I felt my mind short circuiting and my eyes struggling to see the words on the screen of my laptop, which was precariously balancing on my knees while I laid horizontal on the couch clicking away at 11 pm on a Tuesday evening. There was no ease in any part of my body, and I honestly felt scared at the level of disorientation I felt.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the next evening I went to the gym at 8:00 pm. I was so burnt out, I felt like my body was going to explode. In the book Burnout, the authors talk about needing to complete a stress cycle, and I knew that nothing would shake the cycle that I've been in for the past few weeks better² than some loud music in my ears and moving my body at the overpriced gym that I haven’t been able to go to enough lately.

That night at the gym gave me a good mental reset, and I tried to spend the rest of the week working within my normal hours. I told my husband that I needed a chunk of time during the weekend to think about how to take care of myself and catch up on life admin, and he happily told me to get lost. I got a facial, and then camped out at one of my favorite spots for writing and literally just thought about how to take care of myself.

I started tackling the life admin that’s been swirling in my head, because getting shit done is 100% a big part of how I take care of myself. Things like making a dentist appointment, following up on some personal emails that I’ve let linger too long, and oddly-specific-to-me things like putting my hair care routine in my calendar. Being able to have the mental energy and the time to do these little life admin things makes me feel like my headspace isn’t solely dedicated to my corporate job. It’s low hanging fruit, but it feels like a win. Later that night, I spent alone time curled up in bed, listing out all the things that I need and want regularly in life to feel like I’m taking care of myself. My list didn’t include anything extravagant, which I hope means that it won’t be too hard to incorporate or reincorporate into my life.

Little things like:

• Time in the morning to get ready and feel put together. Shower, enough time to tackle my curly hair, and put minimal makeup on. None of it is complicated, but having the 30-40 minutes to get that all in makes me feel like a real person.

• Spending time outside most days, for at least 20 minutes. Ideally when the sun is still up, but I’ll take an evening walk around the neighborhood just to get it in.

• Being social and seeing friends regularly, and ideally a few times a week instead the once a month meet ups that’s I’ve been barely able to achieve.

• Having time to take care of myself through food. I’m a three-meals-a-day kinda girl who generally eats pretty nutritiously because it makes me feel good and for health reasons. When my personal time is swallowed up by work, this is usually the first thing to go and I find myself either skipping meals or eating food that doesn’t fuel me and it further exacerbates the spiral.

• Getting quality time with my kid. Fast moving mornings and rushed evenings aren’t enough. I need deep, intentional time to play and be together without the distractions of tying to multitask through a moment of connection.

• A solid chunk of time every few weeks where I can just be an adult out in the world only responsible for myself. My husband and I try to trade off weekend where each parent gets 4-5 hours of uninterrupted personal time and I always come back feeling refreshed and reconnected to myself.

• Making time to unwind before bed, versus my current habit of slamming my laptop shut, washing my face, brushing my teeth, and dropping into bed. Ideally, I have a slow-paced wind down that allows me to ease into bed, with enough time to read for about 15 minutes and fall asleep by 10:30 pm.

These are all ideal scenarios, and I’m realistic enough to know that I’m in the season of life where getting all of these all of the time is near impossible. But, naming my needs feels important. Taking the time to visualize, articulate, and remind myself that taking care is important is a form of care in itself.

External factors will always be out of my control, but besides doing this for myself, I’m doing it to show my daughter that it’s okay to make space for your needs. I want her to be able to say one day, “My mom was really good at taking care of herself and watching her taught me how to take care of myself, too.”

It’s nice to be back in the Substack world after a brief hiatus (see above lol), and I hope to see you again next week. Instead of a playlist this week, I’m recommending Bon Iver’s recently released album, SABLE fABLE. It’s nostalgic and fresh and moody all at the same time, and it’s been on repeat for me ever since it dropped last month.

Curious to know how you might be finding ways to take care when you’re deep in parenthood or a busy period. Feel free to share below.

Happy week, friends. I hope that you’re finding ease in all the little spaces.

Meghan

1. I know I very actively decided to become a parent, so yeah, I made my bed and here I am laying in it. But I think we need to hear MORE in the public discourse of how hard it is to be a working parent in a society that needs current and future workers. A $5,000 baby bonus and a fucking motherhood medal of honor dose jack-shit to make this an compelling choice for a lot of people.

2. Actually, my preferred mode of stress release is a big, ugly, SOB. Like, crying so hard your nose is leading snot, but honestly I think I was/am so far burnt out that I can’t even cry.