I must admit, I’m finding this whole plight of “self care” rather difficult to employ right now.  Funny thing is, we’re talking about ME here — someone who never made two bones about taking care of myself in the past.  I never would have sacrificed my serenity, my work outs, my sanity, my rest, my hair color, my toe nails, my vacuum lines in the carpet for a date with the queen before I had kids.  But now, I’m finding it hard to obtain one MINUTE to myself long enough to even post in this blog!

I’ve written numerous blog posts over the past week that still remain in my draft folder.  Perhaps this one will too.  The problem is, I have never been able to finish writing one over the past few weeks without being interrupted by a child who awakes, losing my train of thought or merely falling asleep while writing.  And the funny part of it is, I’m very sad about it.  I want to write in this blog, dammit!  I want to do a lot of things actually, but this blog has been my place of healing, and I desperately need it to gain some clarity and hopefully insight into this wonderful chaotic life I’m living.  I hope people don’t ever think I’m using it as a brain dump, but admittedly, I think I have been doing that lately.  Oh well…sorry!

If you haven’t been following my non-posts or any of my posts before my non-posting, I recently took a telecourse entitled, A New Way of Being, and one of the classes really hit home for me on the topic of self-care.  This seems like such an easy shift.  In my feeble mind, I was thinking, “Oh yeah…I need to do that!” as if it was as easy as just deciding to do it and moving forward on the path.  That’s how life has always worked for me.  I decided I wanted to major in Music Education, so I did.  I decided that I wanted to travel abroad, so I did.  I decided when I was putting on few extra pounds that I needed to nip that in the bud and get the weight off, so I did.  In the past, I have decided to do a lot of things and done them.  This time, however, it is not so easy. 

(Let me interrupt my train of thought to write a disclaimer to those who may be reading:  I am not throwing a pity party or meaning to complain about motherhood.  I love my life and my beautiful children.  I am not depressed, although I might be if you read this post and write me a frantic email asking me if I am.  I am not regretting becoming a mother, although some days I would love the peace of a quiet house where I’m free to do whatever I want when I want.  There are people in this world who have bigger fish to fry than I do  and worse problems to deal with than sleep deprivation and lack of time.  I’m aware of that.  I am merely writing my stream of consciousness and hoping to gain some perspective while doing so.) 

OK, so now that I’m back to what I was thinking, I realize very clearly that I will not be able to finish this blog post either as my 3 year old is running around the house naked and screaming for joy as he just got of the shower with his Dad (his new favorite pastime) and my 6-month old just awoke from his very short (15 min) nap.  So, in an effort to quickly wrap things up, I will say that I am struggling with this thing called self care.  I don’t know if it exists for mothers…let alone, for anyone.  We work our fingers to the bone to make ends meet.  We work our butts off as parents.  We work too hard as singers.  We our a culture of butt busting, over extending, over engaging and non break taking.  And, ironically, we have it pretty good in comparison to former generations or other cultures who don’t have the luxuries we do. 

I will talk more about this later (ha ha ha ha) when I am able to get back here.  It’s an interesting topic that needs some investigating.  It’s certainly fun to imagine and dream of being a possibility.