What Self-Care Isn't

Self-care.

Could there be a buzzier, more millennial mom catch-phrase than that? Honestly, I roll my eyes a little at myself just typing it.

Not at what it entails: I am here for all the self-care. It’s important to know what fills us up, whether a book, a movie, or the now synonymous with self-care pampering that is a bubble bath with a glass of wine. I applaud the fact that women are stepping up to say they are no longer interested in being martyrs, but in the care of ourselves as entire people with emotions and thoughts and physical and mental well-being to think about. I don’t want to go back to the time before self-care was part of our collective consciousness.

No, I’m rolling my eyes at how ubiquitous the phrase has become. It’s been co-opted by capitalism as virtually every other post in my Instagram feed tries to sell me everything from skin serums to beach towels to smoothies all under the umbrella of “self-care.” (Okay, but I did buy the skin serum, though.)

But what makes me roll my eyes most of all is when I see things labeled as self-care that just…aren’t.

A few years ago, an influencer I followed posted a photo of herself at a doctor’s appointment. In the caption, she discussed how she’d finally made a doctor’s appointment to get something checked out that she should have been seen for a long time ago. How she got a babysitter and that was self-care. How she was so proud of taking this step in self-care. And ended with a rejoinder to her fellow moms to make their own doctor’s appointments that day for the sake of their own self-care. (Really, the post was littered with “self-care.”)

It was then that my brain exploded.

Because hear me out: taking yourself to the doctor for something that should be medically checked out by a professional is not self-care. It’s just what you should do.

Read the rest over on Twin Cities Mom Collective

Life Lately

Sarah Bessey wrote this week in her newsletter about the “Kin-dom of God…or what theologians call the ‘Now and Not Yet’ of God’s goodness at this moment in time and space.”

I was thinking about that “Now and Not Yet” part the next day, except I’d bastardized it to “Almost but Not Yet.” Until I looked up her post to refresh my memory because “Almost but Not Yet” didn’t sound quite right.

Then I realized it sounded exactly right. Because my life now feels like nothing but Almost but Not Yet.

We’re almost to summer and a major change in our schedule, but not yet.
Nolan is almost in school full-time, but not yet.
I’m almost to a new stage in life, but not yet.

It’s not exactly the middle, but it’s also not quite the end, and it’s definitely not the beginning. It’s like the end of the middle? Or the beginning of the end? (Well, that sounds terrifying.)

I guess we’re all living in a version of the Almost but Not Yet.

The Almost but Not Yet of vaccinations, or of second vaccinations, or of reaching herd immunity.
The Almost but Not Yet of summer, of warm weather that lasts, of the possibility of taking vacations, of playdates and restaurants and gatherings with our people.
The Almost but Not Yet of taking meaningful action on climate change, on healthcare for all, on paid family leave, on racial justice. (I mean, I hope these are Almosts but Not Yets.)

I suppose a pandemic’s worth of Almost but Not Yets piled on top of launching my youngest into the elementary school world only adds, enormously, to this feeling. It’s a restless kind of feeling. I’m tired of feeling restless. Staying in this Almost place so often feels impossible. I feel it most in the afternoon before it’s time to pick Caden and Brooklyn up from school when there’s not much to do around the house. When the laundry is done and the dishes are clean and there’s not quite enough time to tackle anything meaningful and I’m in this limbo—its own Almost but Not Yet—where a good chunk of the day is done and the after-school marathon of activities and dinner and bedtime is on the horizon, but we’re not quite there. When it’s 3:00 pm and Nolan asks to play another game of Sequence, or for a snack, or to read another book and I could scream at this day, just another in a long string of days.

Everything will be different this summer. And again, in a big way in the fall.

Almost. But not yet.

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Action Item

I’ve been looking for a way to recycle old clothes for years. Especially kids’ clothes—it’s one thing to donate old shirts or jeans that are still in good shape, but what about the ones that are stained or ripped or worn beyond reasonable use? I can’t in good conscience donate those items.

Enter: the For Days Take Back Bag. I ordered the large bag, filled it up (EASILY. There will be more Take Back Bags in my future FOR SURE.), scheduled a USPS pick up, and will receive a $20 credit to their website once they receive it. Easy-peasy.

For Days doesn't take undergarments, but NEVER FEAR because I’ve figured that out for you, too. Please see the Knickey Recycling Program. They take your old undies, bras, tights, and socks and give you a free pair of underwear with your next order as soon as the post office picks up your package. Their underwear are my new favorites-comfortable and they stay in place. Be forewarned that the high rise briefs are prettttyyy high, even for me, a self-proclaimed high-rise enthusiast. I still recommend a couple of pairs of those and a couple of mid-rise hipsters, though my sweet spot seems to be the mid-rise briefs.

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Around the Internet

• The title of this satire piece: As a Republican, I Believe White Men Are Boys, Boys of Color Are Men, and Underage Girls are Consenting Adults says it all and also where’s the lie?

• AHP preaching: “Stick with me here, but what if people weren’t lazy — and instead, for the first time in a long time, were able to say no to exploitative working conditions and poverty-level wages? And what if business owners are scandalized, dismayed, frustrated, or bewildered by this scenario because their pre-pandemic business models were predicated on a steady stream of non-unionized labor with no other options? It’s not the labor force that’s breaking. It’s the economic model.”

• This essay, on names and blackness and parenting, gutted me.

• Another thing that gutted me? This poem.

• I didn’t know I was nostalgic for the flamboyant movie theater carpet we all grew up with, but here we are.

• “You-got-this motherhood, in all its iterations, is, at best, a seriously limited rejoinder to the interconnected problems of patriarchy and capitalism and to the mental health struggles that result from their longstanding collusion.”

+++++

Eating

• These noodles remind me so much of the lo mein my family ordered on a weekly basis from our favorite Chinese restaurant growing up. (RIP Tai Pan.) The texture of these noodles is perfection. (I use four packets of noodles for our family of five, so the box gives us two dinners + some lunch leftovers.) I omit the bean sprouts but add in one diced chicken breast and some snow peas, seared in some oil over very high heat.

• I picked up a box of these chocolate-covered Greek yogurt bars from Costco and they are the best midday treat.

+++++

Fun Things

• I’m loving this Vitamin C serum. Love the bottle, love the price, and love that it’s faded some old acne scars within a matter of weeks.

• I bought this mirror for our living room. Now looking for the perfect little succulent to place on its shelf.

• How cute is this shirt? I feel like spring when I put it on, even when the weather is 38 degrees and cloudy. (Of which we endured far too much this past month.)

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I’m supposed to say, I think, that we should embrace our Almost but Not Yets. It’s just a season! I’ve got this! We’ve got this! Lean into it! Rah-rah-rah.

And I do feel that. At least, to a certain extent I do. But to completely dismiss and try to paper over the Almost but Not Yet limbo feelings doesn’t sit well with me.

I think a lot of the Almost but Not Yet ties into the feeling of languishing which Adam Grant so geniously introduced us all to this month:

It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing.

Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield.

Grant goes on to say that “Psychologists find that one of the best strategies for managing emotions is to name them.” This makes sense to me, even though I might have said one of the best strategies is to sip on a good margarita. I think it’s why my entire Internet bubble seemed to grasp onto the label of “languishing” over the past couple of weeks—a name for that thing we’ve all been feeling!

Honestly, realizing that a lot of what I’ve been feeling lately is being in this place of Almost but Not Yet helps me feel at least a bit more content with where I am now. Not to dismiss where I am, but to name it. This Almost but Not Yet place. We’re all dealing with it, the best we can these days. Feel free to join me. We might be languishing but at least we can name it. And I can mix us up a mean batch of margaritas.

Scream Day

Does anyone else feel like they could walk out to their backyard…

…or lock themselves in the bathroom…

…or drive around alone in the car…

…or shove their face into a pillow…

…and let out one long, loud, visceral scream?

If so, you’re not alone. I’ll join you. And it’s not just me: the idea of screaming out the entirety of our frustration, bewilderment, pain, and anger from the past year has become so popular there’s been a push in the United Kingdom to set aside an official holiday: Scream Day.

According to the official Scream Day website, “Scream Day was created to bring awareness to the benefits of screaming.” I went down my own Internet rabbit hole to research those benefits, which are primarily related to the way screaming helps our bodies release intense emotions. Similar to our body’s need to complete the stress cycle—through exercise, deep breathing, crying, and more—screaming can help complete the emotional response to events in our lives. 

Psychotherapist Zoë Aston sums it up on the Scream Day site by saying, “Screaming creates a chemical reaction that is similar to the one you get when you exercise—you get a dopamine hit and some endorphins going.”

While I don’t remember everything I learned once upon a time about brain chemistry, I do know dopamine and endorphins are exactly the kind of chemicals I want flowing through my body. And those are probably the exact chemicals we’ve been missing out on far too much over the past year.

The New York Times also caught on to this idea earlier this year, creating their own Primal Scream line, especially for moms. Women were invited to call in to record their own primal screams, to rage, vent, and let it all out. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing quite as cathartic as a good vent in a safe space to clear the emotional room in my brain.

Read more about Scream Day over on Twin Cities Mom Collective.

Read, Watched, Listened

I love reading just about everything (okay, you won't see any horror or sci-fi picks on here), watching things that make me think and especially if they make me laugh, and wholeheartedly embrace the podcast. Here's my two cents worth.

READ
(Follow the links below or click through to bookshop.org to find all books referenced in this post and past Read, Watched, Listened posts. And here’s your friendly reminder that these are affiliate links!)

A Promised Land
To absolutely no one’s surprise, Barack Obama is a writer’s writer. While this memoir sometimes got lost in the weeds of policy, that’s also The Point of a presidential memoir. You have to defend every single decision of our presidency. And while that could be interesting, my favorite parts were when he talked about the more personal, behind-the-scenes moments of his presidency. I can’t believe there’s a whole second volume still to come!

Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch
I think it’s hard to get what I want from a biography of the queen. I want the details, the nitty-gritty, the exploration of personal relationships. That’s just not available from someone who guards their privacy and image as much as she has. This biography was well-researched, if tedious at times. Also long, but please explain to me how else you write about a monarch who’s been on the throne for 60+ years?

A Good Neighborhood
Meh. I didn’t love this one. The racial and religious themes felt trite. I feel like it could have been an interesting exploration of those things but it wasn’t. The ending was disappointing and didn’t make sense to me. Gah, I’m such a downer on this one.

My Life on the Road
LOVED this one. I checked the library for some Gloria Steinem books after watching Mrs. America (see below!) and this was perfect. The book’s premise of being about travel wasn’t all that interesting to me, so I was hesitant. I’m glad I went for it because this was lovely and a fascinating peek into history.

Amari and the Night Brothers
I wanted to love this one more. Also, please note this is a middle-grade book so I am decidedly not the target audience. I almost set it aside at one point. I couldn’t help but make comparisons to Harry Potter which also feels like The Most Unhelpful Thing of All Time—as if no one else can write a magical/fantasy book ever again? Still, I can’t help but admit that I wished I were reading Harry Potter the whole time. But don’t trust me. Please give it to the middle school kid in your life and see what they say.

The Fourth Child: A Novel
This novel was…intense. It’s a multi-generational novel about a mother and her daughters, one who was adopted after intense trauma from Romania, and touches on everything from religion to motherhood to pro-life groups to attachment disorder. The novel really focuses on the mother, Jane, and her oldest daughter, Lauren, as it tracks their coming of age. It’s by turns fascinating, disruptive, and challenging—I considered putting it down a couple of times. I’m still not 100% sure how I feel about it.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
I don’t know what to say about this book that hasn’t already been said. All of America needs to have a come-to-Jesus meeting with this book.

Pachinko
As a self-professed lover of long, slow, family sagas, I adore this book. That’s exactly what this book is, set in Korea and Japan over most of the last century. Min Jin Lee is a master at creating characters.

The Joy Luck Club
This is a re-re-re-read for me, though I don’t think I’ve read it since high school. Amy Tan’s novel about Chinese mothers and daughters is a modern classic. The storytelling is beautiful, even when the subject matter isn’t.

RE-READS: Anxious People, Kitchens of the Great Midwest

WATCHED

Framing Britney Spears
Obviously, as a millennial of a certain age, I was so excited to watch this. I wanted so much MORE from it, though. Could we turn this into a mini-series? I want an episode to deep-dive the sexy-virgin culture of the late 90’s/early 00’s. I want another episode to deep-dive the child stars (particularly female child stars) of that era. I want an episode on the boy bands of that time and their experiences and how they all intersected the female pop stars in the culture. I want it all. There’s so much to unpack here that an hour-ish documentary can’t do it justice.

Schitt’s Creek
I’m pretty sure I’ve listed this here before but now we’ve finished the entire series and I don’t know what to do with my life now. Start it over again, maybe?

The Trial of the Chicago 7
This movie was SO GOOD. We’d put off watching it for a while, A. because of the 2+ hour length, and B. because I thought it would be kind of depressing. I was wrong. I mean, parts of it were a little depressing. I said, “Same story, different day” approximately a half-dozen times while we were watching. But it was also insightful and bitingly funny, which I didn’t expect at all. We will be watching this again.

Mrs. America
This. Series. I know I’m kind of behind the times but…wow. I could not get enough of it, even while it was totally infuriating to watch. Phyllis Schlafly is the actual worst.

Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admission Scandal
I questioned the sort of pseudo-movie style of this documentary, as actors played roles to re-enact certain parts of this story. It kind of worked, though, even while I don’t think there was anything particularly insightful in this documentary. Then again that might be my own fault for reading All the Things about the college admissions scandal when the news broke.

LISTENED
I could not get enough of Under the Influence with Jo Piazza. Give me alllllll the deep-dives into the mom/influencer internet, please.

Have I begun The Ringer’s deep-dive into every Taylor Swift album? Yes, yes I have. So far I’ve listened to the Folklore and Evermore episodes and they are * chef’s kiss *.

After the Pandemic

I was sitting at my desk last Friday while all three kids were at school, a rarity the past several weeks, and I was avoiding writing, because paradoxically this is what people who call themselves writers do. I decided to hop on a vaccine finder website and work my way down the list, an effective way to kill ten minutes, knowing I would encounter rejection after rejection, “No vaccine appointments available near you.”

Except, this time, when I clicked the first link for a random Walgreens, a green notification popped up.

“Appointments available near you!” 

I sat for a second in disbelief before clicking through, certain they would all be gone in the matter of seconds it would take to select an appointment time and click through from one page to another. 

But it worked. It worked enough that I was able to log myself out, create an account for Tyson, and log back in under his name to create an appointment for him, three days later but still with several time slots available.

I didn’t expect to feel the euphoria I did in that moment.

I called Tyson. (Who was two floors beneath me working in the basement, please let’s bemoan the laziness of our society and the general perils of cell phones. Kidding, it’s freaking fantastic.). 

“Guess what I just did?” I asked him excitedly, my voice full of exclamation points.

“What?”

“I got us vaccine appointments!” 

I sat back, mind buzzing, and what little productivity I may have had left vanished. I couldn’t sit still long enough to focus on words or the screen in front of me. Instead, I possessed a restless energy, which led me to wander around the house to tidy the kid’s desks and organize the mudroom. 

I felt excitement tangled with anxiety in my stomach and marveled not for the first time at this strange new world.

+++++ 

The post-pandemic world fills me with almost as many questions as answers, almost as much anxiety as relief. Though I primarily identify as an ambivert, my introvert side totally and completely took over this past year. The idea of regularly meeting up again with other people sounds daunting, unnerving, draining. It sounds like a lot.

Honestly? My biggest challenge the past year was the sheer amount of time the kids were home. If only I could have quarantined at home, by myself, with stacks of books and cups of coffee, tea, and Moscow mules at the ready, I feel as though I could have sailed through. (This was my pandemic daydream, during day 482 of togetherness with the kids when one was crying, another shred scraps of paper all over the floor, and the third raided the panty for the 38th time that hour. I understand those who flew solo during the pandemic experienced their own challenges. Please leave me alone with my flawed-yet-idyllic pandemic fantasy.)

As I celebrate each and every vaccination card photo in my social media feed, I can’t help but wonder: what does re-entry look like, anyway? I see so much about not returning back to normal. How this past year—socially, politically, racially, psychologically—has affected us all so much that it would be impossible to return to our normal of the Before Times.

I agree I don’t want to go back to normal. But I’ll also admit I don’t even know what that means. What was normal before? The kids going to school and attending activities—give me alllllllll of that back, please. The ability to meet up for drinks on a whim, to hire a babysitter for a date night, to get a pedicure, to plan a trip without any guilt: these are the norms I’d like to return to.

I think, at least sometimes, the more progressive wings of my internet bubble mean they don’t want to return to the norms of society, of mass shootings, systemic racism, sexism, and general oppression. Please read: I don’t either. And also: radical change of the criminal justice system, paid family leave, gun control, and healthcare for all aren’t exactly going to happen overnight.

So I’m not sure what the new normal looks like, what this new normal is that people want to enter into. I do want a new normal. To dive back in and dismiss the entirety of the past year would be to have missed the whole entire fucking point. 

Maybe a new normal does include kids attending school and playing baseball and taking vacations. But maybe it also includes more intentional family time. Maybe it continues to include making homemade pizza every Saturday night. Maybe it includes getting more involved in our local communities. Maybe it looks like getting more involved in politics, in door knocking or phone banking or emailing our representatives or attending meetings. Maybe it includes shutting myself away from the world for awhile because sometimes that’s actually really nice. Maybe it involves, decades from now, a conversation where we say, “Remember that year we all stayed in our homes?” and instead of dismissing it with some sort of, “Yeah, that was wild. Remember all the toilet paper memes?” we actually remember what it felt like, the amount of pain and lives lost, the ache of broken systems that left us without childcare and education and healthcare and the time and space to grieve.

Maybe a new normal means we actively remember what happened, that we hold it deep in our bones. If March showed me anything, it’s that my body is holding onto the trauma of the past year whether I want to or not.

+++++

I received my first shot on Saturday. I imagined my vaccine moment to be the type I’ve heard friends and others on social media talk about, with tears and a collective “look at us we’re doing it” sort of vibe. In a large, communal room with appropriately spaced chairs and some sort of quip-y banter, perfect to post on social media, with the nurse.

My experience...was not that. Please remember I was at the most random of Walgreens. The pharmacists, probably because it was noon on a Saturday, were overwhelmed with people who were there to pick up their prescriptions both inside and out, as well as with people like me who had made vaccine appointments. 

After abruptly receiving my vaccine, no quip-y banter to be found, I sat in a chair at the end of an aisle to wait my 15 minutes. The vinyl on its padded seat was peeling and I faced a display of wart removal options. The soundtrack to this historic moment was listening to one of the pharmacists continually shout “What’s your name?” to someone in the drive-thru who I hoped had better eyesight than hearing, what with the fact that they were driving and all.

I tried to work up some emotion in this anticlimatic environment. Instead, I scooched out of the way for people walking by, found a place in my wallet for my vaccine card, and scrolled my phone. Maybe the getting out of this pandemic and into whatever new normal there is to be found is going to be as unceremonious as it was going in.