The Mother of all Evils

While I wash my daughter's hair after swim lessons I listen to the mother/daughter exchange taking place in the shower next to ours.

"Do you want to wash your hair here or at home?" the mother asks.

I look at the child who can't be more than 4 and wonder why she's asking the question.  She is already in the shower, shampoo in hand and the mother has already taken off her footwear and sidled up to the young girl.

"Here," she says in her thin voice.

"Are you sure?" the mother asks even as she reaches for the shampoo and starts to squeeze it over the bowed head. "I think we can do a better job if we do it at home."

At the end of the row of showers, a baby buggy sits. It is being jiggled from within.  This mother has another child patiently waiting for them to leave the community centre.

"Here," the child says again.

I look at the woman who appears to be in her 30s.  She clearly has a command of the English language yet seems to have difficulty communicating her own desire to her daughter clearly.

Who gives a sh*t what the kid wants?

Then I remember.  She is where I used to be and where I am still struggling to leave. She is so used to putting what she wants and what she needs at the bottom of the list, so much so, that she is willing to do whatever her daughter decides.

And it clicks... The clarity of how I came to self-neglect.

When I was in my 20s and expecting my first child, I thought that learning how to take care of her was going to be the hardest thing I ever had to do.  I read non-stop the entire time I was pregnant and when that wasn't terrifying enough I sought out conversation with mothers and doctors and watched television shows which were more than happy to educate me on how hard having a newborn would be.  By the end of it all, it wasn't really the thought or the experience of the 24 hours of labour I went through but the thoughts of the hours and days and weeks and years during which I had to continue to make the right decisions so as not to mess up this perfect blank canvas I had been entrusted with.

It was a glorious journey.  It was also one which over the course of her first few hours, days, weeks and months, taught me how little my personal needs mattered compared to hers.  As many people who stay at home with a newborn know, those first weeks are spent blurry-eyed. Babies don't respect your need for sleep, your need for food or your need to practise a little hygiene.

For me, who nursed on demand, my daughter's sleep schedule dictated the limited scope of things I could allow into my life. Every time she fell asleep I was faced with the same choices.  Should I a) eat b) sleep or c) shower. Almost everything else ceased to exist and I focused on these three core needs.  Eating always seemed to make it to the top of the list.  It was necessary if I wanted to be able to keep nursing and necessary if I wanted to keep my addled brain from slipping further into it's sleep deprived state.

Everything else was optional. I adapted, eventually to cook, clean and use the toilet one-handed because there was a problem. When my daughter cried, my milk come rushing in making me uncomfortable and wet and making it more difficult for her to latch on for her feed.

And this, right here is where I pinpoint my cycle of self-neglect as having begun.

Before the habit which formed from necessity could be eradicated, I had another child which reinforced my habit of putting myself on the bottom of my own to-do list.  Throughout the ensuing 18 years, I had two more kids boosting my total to 4 but also repeatedly reinforcing my new habit.

To compound the situation, I chose to homeschool until 4 years ago when my oldest reached grade 9.  Against her wishes and over her loud protests, I packed her off to high school where she flourished. By the time she was in grade 11, I found myself at home without children. With one in JK, I was slowly learning how to navigate the elementary school system and how to become a before and after school parent.

I was also slowly beginning to realise how burnt out and lost I had become. When the kids were home I would cook whatever they liked. Left on my own I realized that somewhere along the way I had lost my sense of what  my personal preferences were.  Given the choice between fixing myself lunch and folding my kids clothes, I overwhelmingly chose the latter. I allowed habit, the need to compensate for having shipped them off  as well as the sudden shift in our living conditions to hijack my right to re-discover the joy of being me.

It took a little while for me to understand that I didn't have to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch; to learn that it is OK to cook shrimp even though I'm the only person in the house who likes them; to comprehend that the 6 hours a day that I am home alone can be spent doing something other than cleaning or laundry or shopping or cooking.  I can cook lunch for one and I can write, or read or sleep without guilt.

I joined the local YMCA to start moving my body and started cleaning out closets, not to feel organised but because not hanging on to ice skates that nobody has used in three years creates space for new and exciting things to enter into our lives.

Admittedly, I sometimes slip and find myself doing things for a friend or my partner or my mother when I have things on my own list to attend to. I'm tyring to take it easy on myself, however and trying to remember that I am still unlearning bad habits.

So, now in my 40s I know that taking care of kids is pretty simple. Their needs change as they grow and you simply fill them and move forward. The things we sweat over, like the potty training and when to take away the soother and whether or not to co-sleep are pretty innocuous.  At the end of the day I'm pretty sure they're going to blame me for all their problems and I'm going to hope they choose a college that's far enough away that I can visit when I miss them. When one by one they ship out I'm going to hug them while silently praying they have a child who challenges them as much as they have challenged me and that I live long enough and close enough to be able to witness it.

In the interim, my recovery continues.