Having a self care practice has been one of the best things that has come out of the past year. It hasn’t happened all at once, and it took a while to figure out what it needed to look like. In fact, I’m still figuring it out, and it will probably change with time.

I’m excited that my kids will see me doing this for myself and know that I value myself enough to do it. When kids see their parents doubting their own worth (and one of the symptoms of this is poor self care), won’t they doubt the worth of their parents? And maybe, by extension, themselves?

The struggle is that in a household with so many moving parts, these moments of self care can feel ruined when something doesn’t go right. And then it can feel like it Didn’t Count.

Two days a week, our older girls have gone to dance class, and the Chaplain and I have taken the youngest four kids, the Littles, to the local bike/hike trail for a walk. We’ve tried many ways of doing this: different combinations of the Littles on foot, on scooters, and in strollers. The thing is, no one combination of these things guarantees a good experience.

Sometimes, everyone except the baby is on foot, and we walk for a blissful hour with the kids running up ahead and then doubling back to us, chattering about something they saw or showing us what they found.

Other afternoons, we get there to discover SOMEONE forgot to use the bathroom before we left. Or the kids are hungrier and thirstier than the snack I brought. Or someone doesn’t want to ride in the stroller, but also refuses to walk (*ahem* Six).

Recently, we had that type of walk. We got to the trail. I had snacks and full water bottles. Everyone was toileted. But one of our scooters was missing a handle. So Four and Five were taking turns between it and the working scooter. They would stop every few minutes, looking for a stick to substitute for the missing handle, or readjusting a stick they were already using. And every other time they stopped, they wanted to refill their pockets with the snack crackers I’d brought, which meant everyone had to stop while we pulled the crackers out of the bottom of the stroller.

I came to the trail in a good mood, knowing I was prepared, and ready to get some fresh air. But the stopping and starting was starting to get to me. The Chaplain usually sets a timer on his phone so we’ll know when 30 minutes have passed and we can turn around to head back to where we’re parked. When the alarm went off, we’d made frustratingly little progress. We decided to keep walking.

When we finally turned around, things were moving a little more smoothly. We’d put the offending scooter in the bottom of the stroller and had Four pushing Five in our umbrella stroller, which they were both getting a big kick out of. Six was willingly walking, something that can’t be taken for granted. Seven was mostly happy riding in the other stroller.

We ended up walking for two hours. I got what I needed. But when things weren’t going so hot earlier in the walk, I caught myself thinking, “This isn’t going to count if we can’t just MOVE for a little while! With all the starting and stopping, I feel worse than I did when we started.”

Can there be times when self care doesn’t count? It used to feel like this a lot more when I didn’t have a good system and just did it out of desperation. I’d leave the house alone for a break and end up mindlessly walking through Target in a daze. There was so much pressure for it to be relaxing and quiet and wonderful that I felt paralyzed. I’d get whatever was on my shopping list, and then buy a couple of things for the house out of our blow budget, and come home. It wasn’t quite what I needed, but I didn’t know what I needed.

Now, we have a regular practice of nightly walks, my weekly dance class, and fitness and dance on Saturdays about once a month when I can fit it in. I’m writing. I’m reading. And occasionally, the perfectionist brain, the one I’m trying to retire, or at least turn down the volume on, looks at the quantity and starts to shriek, but quality! And she tries to ruin whatever I have planned, if there’s so much as a sign things are going off my very narrow rails.

I’m listening to the audiobook Loving What Is, by Byron Katie. Intellectually, I understand about contentment, but I’ve been having trouble getting my brain on board with not fighting what I can’t control, or controlling the heck out of everything else. Besides making me cry frequently, the book, along with some others I’ve been reading, is helping me get out of my mental rut.

As I was feeling frustration growing on the walk, I was asking myself internally, “Could this feel like it counts if the whole walk is characterized by stopping every five minutes? What do I need from this walk? Could it be enough that we got here?”

I don’t have an answer for those questions. But I do know when I was able to start thinking about it in that way, it was the beginning of me letting go of my unrealistic expectations. It was the start of letting myself relax and start to think creatively.

I don’t think I could have come up with the idea of Four pushing Five in the stroller if I’d still been caught up in my ideas about what I wanted that walk to be. And that was a big part of what made the second part of the walk more fun and a little faster paced.

More recently, I had a couple more experiences with self care not going as planned. One involved a bike crash and a sprained ankle (not mine, but it sure cut the walk short). Another involved me melting into an anxiety puddle when I was supposed to be relaxed and enjoying music and movement, with a gentle but firm pep talk from a friend that left me fighting tears because I heard the truth in her words.

I’m becoming more aware of how perception makes a big difference to how something feels, and we can choose whether or not to believe the story our brains are telling us about a situation.

I know for me that certain things that I might want to file under self care aren’t usually going to give me what I’m looking for: certain types of music, comfort eating, mindless screen time, shopping as self-medication. I know other things are going to benefit me even if almost everything goes wrong: reading, other types of music, limit setting (for myself, mostly), walking. I would like to add rest to the second list, but I still haven’t figured out how to get rest when everything goes wrong. *wry smile* And with seven kids, a LOT can go wrong.

I don’t want to be fragile about my self care. I want to get something out of it no matter how it goes. I used to think there were at least a few ducks that needed to line up in order for my self care time to count. Maybe things had to be totally quiet, or I had to be alone, or uninterrupted. I didn’t want be stressed as I was leaving the house for some “me” time. One by one, those things have been debunked.

Maybe there’s a little maturity growing in me. Maybe it’s that finally, I’ve able to quiet myself long enough to be able to take direction from the Spirit about What I Really Need.

Whatever the case, there is a peace in knowing things don’t have to be a certain way in order for them to count. If that that weren’t true, nothing would count, and that’s not a world I want to live in.