The school holidays have ended. The Easter break was a great one. You spent time with the kids doing all those fun things which you don’t normally get to do because homework, extra curricular activities and early school night bedtimes don’t allow as much mother and child time.
But how are you feeling 🤔?
As the kids go back to school it is imperative that you take time out to look after yourself. When my daughter was still at school, I remember how frazzled I would get.
The long lag time between the Easter break and summer holidays starting in July left me wondering, at times, whether I was going to crack.
I held down a job (like many of you), kept homelife going, looked after my sick partner and worked hard to keep my daughter’s routine going. Looking back, I do have one regret and it’s that I did not carve out some ‘mother me time’.
I previously blogged about how important recuperative time is.
While it’s important to remind yourself that you need some downtime it’s important to bear in mind that your self-care isn’t a luxury or a time for selfish indulgence. It’s a time for wondering about nothing or anything or everything but with the caveat that it ought to be about you.
Are there books that you want to read? Are there programmes that you want to watch on TV? Is there a personal development article that you have been putting off reading? I had stacks of career articles which I kept printing out but threw away in the end because I hadn’t made the time and these became outdated.
Is this you?
Setting aside ‘mother me time’ is about putting the hectic white noise of family life and listening to your needs and thoughts. If you don’t look after yourself you will burn out. You may be a mum but you are human. You may be juggling home, a job and family life extremely well but keeping on top of things can be overwhelming at times.
‘Mother me time’ can help you lessen the number of overwhelms and the intensity of it.
What ‘Mother me time definitely isn’t about is doing all the normal stuff on your own.
You may be so attuned to doing things for the family that you may have forgotten what it means to be a ‘YOU’ so here are 5 suggestions for doing something for yourself:
- Daydreaming – some of my best ideas have arisen out of daydreaming. A wandering mind can be fertile ground for new ideas or solutions to problems. Forget what you were told about daydreaming being a non-productive exercise.
- Exercise – Having a busy life, driving your kids from school to home to swimming classes doesn’t count as exercise even though you may feel as if you are in perpetual motion. When my daughter was young, my physical activity comprised of walking to the school, to the train station to get to work and the return journey again. I may have done 10,000 steps a day (I am guessing because this was in the days before step counters were widely available) but I often felt unfit.
- Journalling – Writing your thoughts down can help you evaluate what is important and not; what your priorities are and how to go about achieving them. The act of writing things down on paper is a stress reducing way of thinking through your own life. Journalling has proven benefits of mitigating against negative thoughts which, let’s face it, plague us as women.
Do make ‘mother me time’ part of your daily routine and do recognise that the amount of time you devote to it could vary from day to day.
There maybe days when you can devote an hour and, on others, 15 minutes. The important thing is to factor it as a crucial element of your days without setting high targets and beating yourself up over it.
Happy ‘Mother me time’.
