Selfishness is a muscle midlife women need to flex
βοΈ Drink your coffee while it's still hot, plus resources on menopause and the workplace inside and outside the home
Selfish /ΛsΙlfΙͺΚ/
adjective
(of a person, action, or motive) refusal to remain at the bottom of the heap; concerned chiefly with oneβs own health (mental and physical), personal safety and nervous system regulation
Donβt believe the hype.
Getting up at 5:55AM in the dark βto writeβ before the rest of my household wakes up is both a hopeful and hopeless fallacy. I try every day. I fail every day.
By the time I sit to write at 7:55AM today, I have already done a dayβs work, yet still havenβt written. I have put my children back to bed in the dark, each with a galaxy light projector, a fan for white noise and a soothing sleep story on a speaker. I have wiped (human) bums; scooped (cat) litter boxes; reheated and proffered (human and cat) meals all refused on prior occasions; brushed my own and other peopleβs teeth; gathered dirty discarded laundry scattered around the house and washed it; glared at the intermittently functional tumble dryer; made and reheated myself a coffee from my freezerβs emergency stash; put the cats safely (their own, and for the safety of New Zealand native birds living in my neighbourhood outside the catsβ enclosure) outside in their enclosed catio; and opened all the doors and windows to ventilate the house.
Noise cancelling earphones now inserted. I have quiet, but no inner peace. In an intentional act of self-compassion I have somehow so far today resisted The Scroll, but I have unintentionally missed my opportunity to meditate and complete my morning yoga flow before being interrupted by the demands of my household.
I sit down at my laptop. Again. Is everyone settled? May I begin?
My husband is watching the All Blacks game, both children are playing Fortnite online with their friends. Ah, morning pages. Here I list all the unpaid jobs I have completed so far today. Every one of them insignificant, banal, unseen. Each one constant, repetitive, incomplete. Cyclical drudgery.
My sacred first coffee of the day is now cold, as am I. I get up to reheat the coffee in the microwave again, and plug in my electric heated pad for my lap. It seems I have a brief reprieve from my hot flushes - or perhaps my transdermal HRT is absorbing sufficiently today, and I wonβt overheat? My chronically dysregulated nervous system is unable to regulate my body temperature today, nor any day. It seems I canβt be comfortably warm in perimenopause - only boiling hot or freezing cold. All or nothing, thatβs me.
But is it just me?
The culture in which I, and many of us live, is a commercialist one. It tells us that we should show each other that we care about ourselves by buying products, services and experiences, all purporting to βself-careβ. Yet superficial and commercialised self-care only serves to briefly alleviate my discomfort in this worldly existence.
So how do I know what I really need to cope with the high demands of caring, when my energy is at itβs lowest?
I wish there was a instructional manual for this, or a proven model or strategic plan to support us at our most vulnerable. Autistic perimenopause is insidious, protracted and potentially dangerous.
By the time we enter perimenopause, womenβs role in wider society and within our own homes has been manipulated and conditioned to ensure we feel duty bound to serve the needs of others as default caregivers.
The cost of caring for others is often the sacrifice of our own individual needs. For those of us who do not bring in an income from outside the home - and therefore have no personal individual income - we pay our way with our time, our physicality, our energy, and all the while sacrificing our individual potential.
It is difficult to even think of ourselves as individuals when we are so often referred to as relational to others: so-and-soβs Mum, his wife, their daughter. When we donβt remember who we are or, in the case of many diagnosed neurodivergent later in life women, we never really knew who we were in the first place.
How do we know what we need to self-regulate? Self-regulation often feels out of reach anyway, given that the intensity demanded of us in co-regulating everyone else is so personally depleting, we are left feeling devoid of everything. And still they come back to take more from us. Is a bath bomb enough to save us? No, but drinking my coffee before it goes cold would be a good place to start. If onlyβ¦
I often (metaphorically) throw my Masters degree in my husbandβs face, since I stuck it out in higher education longer than he did. Thatβs one of my few assets to being the divergent one in a neuro-mixed marriage. This always comes from my own place of insecurity and intense frustration, since I complete the majority of the menial and essential domestic day to day jobs in our home. My MA stands for nothing, when βnothingβ is all I do all day, every day.
Am I selfish to stay at home raising our neurodivergent children, fulfilling everyone elseβs needs day in, day out instead of working outside of the home for our familial and local/national economyβs financial gain?
I have faced enough criticism for making the parenting choices that feel best-fit over the years, and always from those closest to me. Visiting friends with my firstborn over a decade ago, I enthusiastically said that I had handed in my resignation from my teaching job to be a stay at home parent. My friend, a fellow mother, was shocked and told me that I should be working. When I pointed out that raising children is work, she exasperatedly stated, βBut you arenβt earning any money, Sam!β
I can still feel the shame from her judgement and outrage. No status, no support, no respect. Was I being selfish?
Why would it have been deemed better that I paid people to provide childcare for my children, whilst I was being paid to care for other peopleβs children? That inefficient logic still baffles me.
Care work is work, no matter how invalidating others may be about it.
The Fawcett Societyβs full report published in 2022: Menopause and the Workplace
Women in employment - outside of the home - experiencing perimenopause often have to reduce their working hours or leave their jobs entirely due to symptoms, the shame of not keeping up with workload due to cognitive and/or bodily changes, and workplaces being unfamiliar with nor supportive of the needs and rights of menopausal employees.
Exhausted midlife women have to be selfish to balance out the selflessness that our society demands of us. Regardless of our employment status, lifestyle choices or constraints, our selflessness knows no bounds. We give and give to whomever asks anything of us, whilst our own voices and needs are drowned out. We feel washed up, dumped at the bottom of the heap. Sacrificing and sacrificed.
I have always had a dream that βOne Dayβ I will get a PhD in - I donβt know what. I donβt have the capacity to think about it, and I have a lot of parenting to do before that βOne Dayβ comes, my kids are βAt Uniβ and I have βTime For Myselfβ. For neurodivergent parent carers of neurodivergent children, we are told this is the goal, yet there is no proven reliable formula or strategy to get us to this time and place.
What if I am so burnt out by that point (should it ever come), so dysregulated, so broken, that I have nothing left of myself for myself? I dream of walking Aotearoa New Zealandβs Te Araroa trail - from Cape Reinga at the top of the North Island, to Bluff at the bottom of the South Island - βOne Dayβ. That βOne Dayβ to me is like most peopleβs equivalent of βWhen I Win The Lotteryβ. A nice fantasy to wistfully get us through the hard days, which is every day for neurodivergent parent carers.
Basically, I donβt know what I need, who I am, nor where I am going with this. Subsequently, I donβt know what you need and nor does anyone else. A bath bomb probably wonβt hurt (although my perimenopausal, thinning, angry, sensitive skin might disagree) but washing down my ADHD stimulant medication with a (hot!) coffee is a good start, and something I wouldnβt hesitate to recommend.
If a corporation (coffee shops aside) wants you to pay them on promises of your enhanced wellbeing, ask yourself whether it is really worth your money. Goodness knows, we still donβt have gender pay equality yet and, with most of us working more for less, your money needs more protection than that of the breadwinner in your life. It is presumptuous of me to assume that the majority of breadwinners and not the ones baking it, buttering it and proffering it to picky eaters, whilst trying to stop cats from eating it. Apologies for my presumptuosness, but the odds are not in our favour and they wonβt be for unpaid work is fairly distributed, paid work is fairly distributed, and women are not forced out of jobs due to their hormones.
Be selfish and drink your coffee while itβs still hot, because it isnβt actually selfish at all.
This might have been the very topic of my conversation with my therapist this morning...
I read a book awhile go, Pooja Lakshmin's "Real Self Care". It emphasised the idea of boundaries as the first step in self care, and I see a lot of the same ideas reflected here. Thanks for a thought provoking read