Self-Care Saturday

Self-Care Is Staying in Bed Until You Can't Anymore

It rained last Saturday.

I drive a school bus all week. I am surrounded by other people's children, and I genuinely love it, and them - truly, it's not just something I say. But by Friday I am done. Done with people. Done with noise. Done with being responsible for small humans who are not mine, and ready to avoid it all until Monday.

I love rain. When the sky goes dark, the sound hits the roof, and something in my body just... exhales.

I always cross my fingers and hope for a thunderstorm to come with it. I don't know exactly why, except that I do — the noise, the jump scare, the brief violence of it, and then the calm that follows. After the storm comes the rainbow. And that feels like a metaphor for so much of my life. The chaos first. Then the quiet. Then something worth seeing.

But I'll take the rain. The rain means I'm going to sleep well, and some weeks that alone is enough.

In my house, rain is basically a permission slip. Permission to step back. To slow down. To nap. To hide away a little longer.

This particular Saturday, I used it.

By 6am, the littles had already tried and abandoned about a dozen different foods — and I'm fairly sure the top ingredient in all of them was sugar. I'm also fairly sure my snack and reward candy had been severely depleted. They had moved on to a full diplomatic standoff over what to watch on TV. In my house, no one is ever satisfied with just one screen playing. There is always negotiation. There is always someone who feels wronged. There is always a kindle involved, and Jason's 3 screens are nothing compared to the number they get up and running simultaneously.

I could only imagine the chaos on the other side of the door. I could hear all of it from my bed. Where I was staying.

The dogs had already been out, which means someone had neglected to catch them coming back in with muddy paws, which means there was already a trail of evidence across the floor. We keep beach towels at every door for exactly this reason. We use them approximately 40% of the time. The other 60% is mud and optimism and avoidance.

Sure enough, the dogs and their muddy paws found me hiding out, and Tessa and Everett weren't far behind.

They took turns coming in to cuddle, which is the part of Saturdays I will never give up no matter how old they get. Tessa brought her chaos and her big heart and approximately fourteen opinions about cats she will never be allowed to have because I am allergic, and she knows this, and she does not care. Everett brought himself and his need to be tickled and the energy of a small engineer who has already mentally redesigned three things in the house before 9am.

If I stayed there long enough, I might get some cuddle time with Gena or Bella too, though they can outsleep the rest of us, so those cuddles might not come until tonight.Or tomorrow. There's a specific kind of emptiness that comes with waiting for my big girls to want affection. The littles climb on me, need me, drag me back into the world whether I'm ready or not. But the older ones are already halfway out the door in their heads. They don't always want to be held. And I can see the countdown to when they're too far away to climb into bed and tell me what they're thinking.

So I stayed a little longer.

Just in case.

When I finally emerged, I saw all the things I'd been successfully avoiding. The table covered in clutter. Dishes stacked because it's always somehow someone else's turn. Eighty-five pairs of shoes by the front door. Someone's pajamas in the guest bathroom because getting dressed in your own room is apparently very hard. Stacks of laundry on the stairs I'd been asking them to move all week. Clumps of dog hair everywhere - courtesy of Tater Tot, who I fell in love with as a 7-pound puppy and who has since grown into an 80-pound monster who still believes she is a lap dog and is deeply offended when she doesn't fit.

I read for a while. Worked on the website. Thought about this blog that had been sitting in the back of my head.

We played Minecraft. I am useless at Minecraft, so my job is always either building walls or digging holes. I've become a master at both. It looks like nothing from the outside. From the inside it's just time together, same space, no pressure.

That counts.

Those moments are the ones they will remember.

Jason was in his office, behind three screens and a closed door. He had nine clients that day - nine. Back to back, for most of our Saturday. The man who spends his days, and nights, and weekends helping people sort through their hardest stuff was doing exactly that, while I managed everything else.

And the kids? Every hour that passed, they inched a little closer to the ledge of my sanity — and probably their own. How many more clients does dad have? When is he done? Is he almost done? Each of them waiting for their own reasons. Their daddy-do lists, their requests, their need for him to just step back into the room. A whole day of him being so close, and so far away.

I asked the kids to clean up the table at least fifteen times throughout the day.

I counted.

The table remained exactly as it was.

This is one of those things I've made peace with and also have absolutely not made peace with. We have four kids, most of whom have ADHD, and two of whom are on the autism spectrum. Cleaning, following tasks, starting and finishing things - that's genuinely hard for them. It's not attitude. It's not laziness. It's wiring. Lots of good stuff tucked away up there. It just gets lost, broken, scrambled, forgotten.

The collective Kelley brain lives outside our heads, laid out for the world to see - on the floor, the table, in the sink, to be worked out in our own unique way.

Does this frustrate me? It does.

A lot? Absolutely.

Here's the part of self-care nobody talks about: most of the time it's not bubble baths and boundaries, or candles and quiet.

Sometimes it's staying in bed because the alternative is standing in the kitchen asking people to do things they will not do, and you have zero capacity for that right then because that ledge of sanity they've been chipping away at all day is ready to crumble beneath your feet.

Sometimes rest and avoidance look identical, and you're not entirely sure which one you're doing. And that's okay.

Sometimes it's just existing. Small as that sounds.

By evening the rain was still going. The mess was still there. Jason stepped out of his office looking like a man who had held space for nine people's hardest feelings and needed someone to not need anything from him for a little while.

Unfortunately, everyone outside that office needed things from him. He's dad. He's husband. He builds Legos and wrestles and carries a sleeping 9-year-old up the stairs. He props me up, mediates, explains. He understands more than we give him credit for - because to the people outside his office, he's just been sitting in there talking. They don't see what it costs.

The second his last session ends, he doesn't get the break I took that morning. He steps out of one room as the therapist and into the next as dad and husband, in a single step.

He's my Clark Kent. The kids' Superman.

Neither of us got the Saturday we needed.

But we got each other at the end of it. That counts too.

Self-care Saturday isn't the Instagram graphic. It's not showing up in anyone's Facebook highlight reel either.

It looks like beach towels piled at three doors. Minecraft in bed. A table nobody cleaned. A husband behind three screens and a closed door. Kids inching toward the ledge all day, waiting for dad. It looks like surviving the week and giving yourself one day to not perform being okay.

It's those 10 minutes sometime around midnight when we greedily grab each other and just be.

That's enough. It's more than enough.

— Holly | Life Behind the Screens