Learning to Take Care of Me

I’m extremely self-sufficient. I don’t like asking for help. I don’t like accepting help. My father taught us an extreme kind of self-reliance in which we gave things away to other people that we needed for ourselves and never complained because giving felt better than having. As a mother myself, I rarely took care of myself before my kids, and if I did, it was something physical where I felt like there was a rational reason I needed to drink water or eat, for instance, in order to produce milk for an infant.

When I married, I wanted my husband to take care of me in some magical way that would make me feel safe and loved and cared for. And when I divorced, I wanted my kids to take care of me and fill in the gap of what I needed. What I didn’t want was to have to learn to take care of myself. It doesn’t make me feel strong or empowered. It makes me feel selfish and it is, frankly, annoyed. It just doesn’t feel like it has a use-value. Because I’m not sure that I have a use-value, if you take away my work ethic.

Recently, when I injured myself, I found myself saying out loud over and over, “You’re going to be OK” as I drove myself, not to the hospital, the doctor, or to the Insta-Care, but to work because I didn’t want to be late. Yes, I was on auto-pilot, but I also needed help and reassurance. I’m not used to offering that to myself, but I AM used to saying “you’re going to be OK” to my kids, even if I have no idea if they’re going to be OK or not, after a lot of blood has spewed out of their face onto the floor, which I will clean up later—after the emergency has passed.

I think it helped me to become a mother to myself, to imagine my mother taking care of me, perhaps better than she ever did in real life. I think I only got through the pain of this event because I divided myself into two parts, the mother, and the child. I was both of them, but I needed a mother to take care of me, so I became the mother and treated myself as a third person. It took me about ten hours to actually make a doctor’s appointment for myself. I had to get out of emergency “do what has to be done” mode and think about how to take care of myself more analytically. It isn’t at all instinctual. Getting things done is instinctual. Being competent, being useful—that’s instinctual to me. Maybe that is even safety to me?

I’ve been trying to figure out how I can learn to alter my instinctual mode to be more caring of myself. Or even to believe that I have a value that goes beyond what I’m willing to sacrifice for others, how hard I’m willing to work, or how much pain I’m willing to endure (this is more my mother than my father, on reflection). It’s a hard thing to change when you’ve reached midlife. My brain isn’t as flexible as it used to be. Teaching an old dog new tricks, as they say, is close to impossible. Learning a new default is, well, not going to happen anytime soon.

Maybe it will never happen and all I will be able to do is to notice when I’m not taking care of myself, and remind myself that actually, that’s my job, not anyone else’s. It’s my job to advocate for myself at a doctor’s appointment. It’s my job to set the appointment. It’s my job to believe that I deserve to have an appointment with a doctor, even if it seems useless and like it will take time out of my workday and cost me money that I would rather spend on someone else.

One thing that has been extremely useful has been to think about a friend of mine (hi Rebecca!) who has been suffering after a concussion and other problems from the result of a car crash a couple of years ago. She writes sometimes about nausea and dizziness and general body weakness and about her physical therapists, who keep trying to convince her that no, exercise is not the answer and double no, working harder is not the solution, either.

Because Rebecca just needs to sit on her butt and rest for most of every day until her brain starts getting better. And it seems so obvious to me when it is her, but for some reason, much harder when it is me. So if I can think of myself as her, then obviously my friend Rebecca deserves rest and self-care and whatever she needs until she is actually better. Obviously Rebecca doesn’t have to prove she has value as a human being by working so hard she literally can’t see straight or think straight. Obviously.

I’ve heard it said that self-care is creating a life that you don’t have to escape, but I think for me, self-care starts with believing that I deserve things that I want and things that I need. Self-care starts with the impulse not to pay attention to pain. It begins with noticing, and becoming the mother to myself if necessary, and allowing that I don’t have to wait for other people to believe that I deserve good things before I get them. I’m not even trying for self-love here. I’m way back at self-attention, self-interest, maybe some self-like. Not self-hatred, anyway, which appears to be my default.