Limits As Far As The Eye Can See: Scarcity and Self-Care

I went a bit off the rails in November.  My kids are in school full time these days but I’m very good at starting new volunteering positions, taking on writing projects and generally filling up my time with stuff.  I found myself feeling very ungenerous throughout the fall.  Everything asked of me was just too much.  I didn’t have enough time, I didn’t have enough energy and I certainly didn’t have enough patience for the things being asked of me.

Didn’t people know I was trying to get this book written?  Didn’t people know how much time I was spending trying to make sure my kids were getting what they needed?  Didn’t people know how much I was caring for other people in my life?  I didn’t have time to give without limits.  All I could see were my limits.  I was never enough.

It only took me two months to figure out that maybe….my old ways of self-care weren’t working any more.  I was still drinking my tea, and exercising, and taking time to read books and talk about them.  But I still didn’t have anything left to give.  Maybe they were the product of a past form of generosity – when parenting young children required me to be present and patient and physically ON all the time. 

But this new stage has brought new demands.  Not just the schedule juggling (to be honest I love that puzzle), but bigger problems.  And more than that, problems that I only get one or two chances to deal with.  If my kid comes in sullen from school and tells me they feel like they have no friends, it turns out that the whole rest of the afternoon really does hinge on what I say next.  I don’t have to be present that much.  In fact, I’m not really wanted around a lot of the time.  But how I react?  These days my words bear weight.

It occurred to me (with the help of some very manic therapy sessions) that this season of my life might require different self-care.  It might require me to unburden myself and do things that do not matter.  That I can fail at and absolutely no one will be writing about it in journal time at school.  So I repainted half my house.

It was incredibly disruptive to my family.  They sat in a cluttered living room for a week.  They walked around paint cans and on top of drop cloths and rearranged furniture for me.  But at the end of it, I was able to be generous again.

All this to say, if you’re finding it hard to be generous?  Look at what’s going on inside you before you consider what’s going on outside you.  The world will always have too many needs for you to meet.  That’s the beauty of community, we do it together.  But if you start to think that those needs will never get met because you can’t meet them?  Maybe take a week to get your head on straight.