Happy New Year! Time for Some Self-Care
Why self-care is essential for parents, why SALTBURN is not for kids, and my latest and greatest IG posts
January is a big month for self-care.
Our New Year’s resolutions often center around it, one way or another, whether via promises to avoid/consume less alcohol for a while, or to make the gym a habit, or to drink more water, eat healthier, set better boundaries, cut toxic people from your life, etc. We all need self-care, and trying to kick off the year by resetting your bad habits and starting some good ones is a good idea, even if those behaviors don’t always last much beyond the winter.
As a parent, and someone who is responsible for caring for others, self-care can be a hard thing to practice—if it’s not a total afterthought. Moms talk a lot about self-care: their lack of it, their need for it, the impossibility of achieving it, the small ways they manage it.
Dads probably don’t talk about it quite as much (what else is new?), but we need it too.
I work a full-time job and manage my own “brand”, which includes various social media channels, this weekly newsletter, my upcoming book (pre-order it!), any potential sponsorships or promotional deals, a currently dormant podcast, a successful fantasy football team (runner-up this year!), and oh yeah, I also have two kids.
That’s a lot, anyway you look at it. Which isn’t to say, in any way, that my wife doesn’t have a lot too. It isn’t a competition, and I don’t want to get into a debate about gender roles and the expectation imbalance that comes with parenting performance or the stereotypical workload discrepancy between moms and dads. Parenting and gender roles are changing, albeit slowly and incrementally, and maybe one day I won’t need that disclaimer. Either way, every family operates differently, and we shouldn’t assume that one parent takes on more or has more anxiety/stress/need for self-care than the other.
(Besides, Mom and Buried manages the entire household, the kids schedules, the insane number of appointments and playdates and obligations they have, and she has a chronic illness that adds and extra layer of exhaustion and stress and time management to an already hectic schedule. If it were a competition, she would win!)
In my house, I have been the breadwinner with the job while Mom and Buried cared for our young kids, and I have been the stay-at-home parent while my wife pursued her career. We are a team, and we adjust and distribute and share responsibilities in ways that work for us. But often, even if things are as equal as possible across the board, it’s hard to find room for yourself.
Every parent - and every person - benefits from breaks, from downtime, from treating themselves.
There are different kinds of self-care. Obviously, I can’t speak for moms. I can’t even speak for dads; I can only speak for myself.
For me, self-care is the dreaded “Dry January,” just to slow down after the holidays and reset my habits. It’s adult time without the kids. It’s date night with the wife. It’s hang time with my friends (which isn’t easy to make happen when you’re all busy adults, and many of you are parents, and most of your friends live elsewhere, and you all refuse to talk on the phone). It’s alone time without anyone. It’s watching football (though whether watching the Dolphins counts as self-care or self-sabotage is up for debate) and playing fantasy football (again, up for debate) and watching a show after everyone has gone to bed and walking to the store with headphones on. It’s going to the movies for two hours and it’s listening to 15 minutes of a podcast in the shower or listening to Taylor Swift while unloading the dishwasher (I’m not ashamed!). It’s whatever I can get, whenever I can get it. Because those 15 minutes or two hours or, if you’re supremely lucky, that weekend away with your pals is not extracurricular to life as a parent, it’s essential.
For you, self-care might mean going to the gym or going for a run, to power through some of that stress and anxiety. For others, it might mean - gulp - therapy, because having someone to talk, even - especially! - a stranger, can be helpful, particularly for us men who are well-known for stoically holding it all together all the time, and don’t always have the kind of friendships that allow for raw honesty and emotional exploration. (I’ve only just delved into a bit of therapy myself and it definitely takes some getting used to, but if you find the right person, it can be pretty, um, therapeutic.) Self-care might even mean medication, if your doctor or therapist thinks so, and/or if your self-medication has gotten a bit out of hand. (No, that’s not why I’m doing Dry January!)
Taking care of yourself is important (a fact that’s even more obvious when you put it that way and remove it from the trendy lingo of “self-care”!) whether it’s developing a hobby just to get a breather or it’s talking to a doctor to try to resolve something deeper. I don’t know what it looks like for you, and I don’t need to. You just need to make it happen. I encourage you to find some self-care any way you can—so long as you make sure it doesn’t come at the cost of your relationships with your partner or your kids.
Because self-care shouldn’t mean selfish.
You should get yours however you can, but you should also make sure that your partner has the opportunity to get his/hers as well. Needing to decompress is valid, but inconsiderately leaving someone else to hold the bag while you do it isn’t.
Both I and my wife are better parents when we give ourselves and each other space, and permission, to not be a parent for a spell—even if it’s just when I’m watching Monday Night Football while folding laundry—and I guarantee that you are too.
Social Media Round-Up
Pop Culture Stuff
At long last, Christmas movie season is over and we can get back to the real stuff. I saw a handful of noisy, potentially Oscar-baity type of movies over break, including:
SALTBURN - which is entertaining and empty and nice to look at and nonsensical and I hope you like Barry Keoghan because he has a lot to show you! More like BARE-y Keoghan, amirite?! (I like him, but not *that* much!)
THE IRON CLAW - Zac Efron’s hair looks ridiculous but he is quite good in this solid and incredibly sad story of a wrestling (WWE-style, not Olympic) family. Mom and Buried was devastated by this movie but she also won’t stop talking about it.
THE HOLDOVERS - leisurely-paced and affecting movie about a grumpy teacher and the kid he’s forced to look after over holiday break at a fancy prep school in 1970. The movie is well-made and the acting is great across the board, but I’ve seen raves and I didn’t quite get there with it. We tried watching with our 13-year-old and he was out as soon as he saw the credits: “It’s boring!”
MAY/DECEMBER - it’s sort of a fictionalized version of the bizarre Mary Kay Letourneau scandal in which the 30-something teacher had a relationship with a 12-year-old that eventually progressed to marriage, but it’s more of a psychological thriller—minus the thriller. Natalie Portman plays an actress studying Julianne Moore to learn what made her do what she did, but neither woman seems entirely stable. I really liked it, partially because I also want to know what makes a woman get involved with and marry a child, and exploring that - and the fallout from it - is pretty compelling, even if the movie ultimately provides no answers. We did not try watching this with Detective Munch, who is now older than the real-life victim of the story. 😬😬😬🤮🤮🤮
We did start watching Disney+’s Percy Jackson show with him though. A huge fan of the novels, he’s been waiting for this show for years. So far he’s thrilled with how much more faithful it is than the movies (thanks to author Rick Riordan’s involvement). We’ve only seen two episodes but it’s definitely a step above most of the shows we’ve watched together (like Locke and Key, for example).