Love Yourself, Actually
Do you know that feeling when you leave the grocery store and you have bought everything? Like everything you needed and then back ups for all the kids’ favorite snacks AND you managed to nail the ingredient list for all the weekly meals?
It is a unicorn mom grocery moment.
I have had that grocery experience maybe twice since my kids turned 5 and started demanding enormous amounts of specific snacks.
I recently grocery store unicorned by buying lots of cucumbers and other brine worthy vegetables in addition to our weekly shopping list.
Why all the cukes? This weekend, I was looking forward to resuming a new skill I attempted in 2021 but didn’t last. Pickling.
Yep, I want to be an expert in brine.
I did not fall down the sourdough bread pandemic rabbit hole because I got sidetracked by the garden cucumbers. It was a skill that died off in the early months of 2021 after buying a full pickling set.
So, I decided that learning how to pickle would be the my new hobby for self care in 2023.
Time for Self Care
As a therapist, I spend a lot of time with my clients asking “how did you take care of yourself this week.”
And the answers eventually lead back to how they took care of others.
There are sooo many avenues for inspired self care and in mainstream culture it's become an expected thing people do.
From face masks and baths, to daily walks and meditation apps, the self care industry is booming.
Self care also seems to now be something people “have to do” like paying the bills and buying groceries. And taking care of all the others in your family.
Somewhere along the way self care became a check box on our long To-Do lists.
The Missing Cukes
My daughter is an expert in self care, much of which is inspired by teenage social media trends.
Her self care has typically involved activities related to feeling physically better and her skin.
By age 10, Mia was expertly putting mascara on thanks to YouTube tutorials.
She currently has an entire skin care routine that I wish I had been smart enough to think of in my early 20’s.
Mia has been dedicating time to self care consistently, and in fact its not actually self care, its become her daily routine.
Imagine my surprise when I went to pickle my cucumbers to discover most of them had been used in her daily skin care routine.
In her homemade breakfast smoothie, in her nightly water, and of course on her eyes.
This is not a unicorn mom moment; these are the types of moments moms are all too familiar with.
When what we planned to use has been consumed seemingly in the dark of night.
Or before we even get all the groceries inside.
I did not get mad. I actually was impressed that a 12 year old, who has a busy social life and after school activities, had consistently dedicated time to take care of herself daily.
Her Own Fancy
Mia’s definition of self care includes taking the time to not just do what she wants but to completely do it.
She is not just drinking water; she’s drinking cucumber water.
She doesn’t just use some weird roller thing on her flawless, collagen filled 12 year old skin.
Mia cuts up cucumbers for her bath while rolling the weird jade thing on her face and sipping her cool cucumber water.
She basically consistently creates a spa like environment that many of my 40 something friends pay to experience.
The kick is she doesn’t think this is fancy; she thinks this is how you should take care of yourself.
By dedicating time each day to truly immerse yourself in your self care activity so it becomes an expected, daily routine. More importantly, something she finds truly pleasurable.
The Cost of Self Care
Apart from my increased veggie grocery budget and the trips to Ulta, the biggest cost for Mia is time.
Time, as a mom, is my scarcest commodity. Something she arguably has a lot more of than I do.
Which brings me back to my therapist question.
How am I taking care of myself? And why am I not creating my own fancy?
My daughter instinctively created her own fancy at home. And it became her daily routine.
Why am I not at least thinking about how to create a few minutes of fancy?
Where did my fancy go?
Every time I am visit a spa and drink the cucumber water, I immediately feel fancy. I have never considered making myself feel fancy in my own home.
Instead, I have wisely chosen to pay someone else to make me feel fancy.
Why do I only drink cucumber water when I am paying a lot of money for a massage or a facial? And why am I going to take time to brine but not cut up cucumbers for my own water?
That was my “ah haa” moment while staring at all those floating cucumbers in her water glass.
I am willing to research how to pickle but not take the time to cut up cucumbers for my own drinking water.
Time, the Thief of Fancy
Time is the biggest commodity we have and it's the one we tend to lease out for the cheapest rent.
It's of of the hardest things I hear as a therapist, the regret of time not spent or the desire to have spent it in a different way.
And how caught up we can get in not having even enough time to breathe let alone make cucumber water.
The To-Do list that becomes an urgent task master that is more about finishing and not about enjoying.
Mia’s cucumbers are all about enjoyment and my pickles were more about accomplishing a new skill before I moved onto the next one.
At 12, Mia has figured out enjoyment while I am chasing task completion.
This has led to my realization that creating your own fancy is not a to do moment that we should accomplish and move on from.
Fancy is a state we can hopefully create and slow down enough to enjoy.
Love Yourself
I have started intentionally shifting my conversations in my therapy office about self care to self love. Asking how are you making time to create self love?
To intentionally encourage my clients to think about how they love themselves, how they talk to themselves, and how they view themselves in their world.
How they make time for themselves in ways that increase their overall pleasure and experience in life?
Even if that time is just a simple glass of cucumber water.
The short version: how to love yourself and create your own fancy.
Maybe that fancy only last 5 minutes. But its 5 minutes we can hopefully extend to longer moments in the future.
