Nurturing Yourself in a Family Dynamic
I’m going to get a little raw… I don’t mean it as my way is the only way… just my opinion, how I view it, how it shows up in my life and what I know it to be…
I believe there is a difference between nurturing ourselves, and caring for ourselves… nurturing someone else, and caring for them.
To me, nurturing is when I encourage the growth and development of myself, in all aspects: mental, physical, emotional, spiritual. Whereas caring to me means to look after and provide basic needs, usually only showing up in the physical aspect.
As parents, we take care of our children’s basic needs like making sure they are fed, healthy, get enough sleep, have clothes and a roof, etc.. But it is also our responsibility to make sure they are nurtured: that they know how to regulate their emotions, communicate how they feel, express themselves safely, feel heard and seen and validated, that who they really are is encouraged to grow and blossom.
It is possible for a child to be very well cared for, and not be nurtured.
Tenets in a nursing home are very well cared for, but not necessarily nurtured.
It can get a little more tricky to identify nurturing and caring when it comes to relationships with our peers. There are some crossovers here.
For me, it's very easy and second nature to care for my kids and spouse: I can make a menu, buy groceries, take care of the finances and pay the bills, make sure the cars and things around the house are taken care of, make check up appointments to keep my family healthy, remind them to drink water, make sure they are always fed and laundry is done, and on and on and on it goes. I’m so good at it, I can do it without thinking. I can literally sense when they will need something.
However, I’m embarrassed to say that nurturing my family is much harder, and not something I did very well for a chunk of like eight years in the middle there. That survival mode kicked in and all I could do was care for them. I struggled to be emotionally available to them, by just listening instead of fixing, and although I was great at cheering them on, I wasn’t that great at pushing them out of their comfort zone and trying new things. (My kids turned out pretty awesome anyways. Like, not great, they are still learning, but definitely going to be okay when they go out into the world on their own.)
I used to be fairly good at caring for my friends: bring a meal, let me drive you, I’ll pay for this, let’s schedule a meet up, and I can babysit. But these days, it has shifted to more of a nurturing role, where I can listen and be present, encourage when needed, and mostly, just offer grace and flexibility for the ebbs and flows of life.
So here’s where I’m going with all of this…
How do you nurture and care for yourself, when you still have to nurture and care for others?
I feel on one hand it would be ideal to be alone to learn how to nurture and care for ourselves without other responsibilities. But then, one way we learn is by being around others that spark feelings in us, and make us realize what we do and don’t like, which aids in the cultivation of developing ourselves.
How do I nurture and care for myself, while I still need to show up to care for and nurture my family…
I really need to get VERY clear on something… For me personally, I have a husband who is willing to change, be flexible, even go with the flow. Not that he always does it willingly, that he doesn’t get mad or triggered or shut down and dissociate… but that while I personally changed, and our family routine changed, and “things were different”, he wasn’t a stick in the mud. He gave effort. So as you read on, just know, I didn’t have to push my husband very hard to move him… I changed, and he came along for the journey, while working on his own stuff.
My self nurturing started with a holistic coach, where I could easily carve out an hour here and there to just talk about what was on my mind, and together we worked through stories I believed. Journaling was so important to me at the time, I felt it was the ONE thing I could do without disrupting the family… because well, I thought disrupting the family routine meant I was selfish. I got lucky with my schedule being flexible, because one kid was homeschooled and self-sufficient, the other was “easy”, and so when everyone was taken care of for the day, I would sit down and journal and work through whatever I was feeling and whatever questions the coach asked. And then summer came and I just kept with the routine because it was so potent and helpful and supportive, I couldn’t give it up. For the first year of this nurturing journey, I journaled every day, and scheduled a one hour call with my coach when I needed it. And there was a super luxurious spot there right before the one year mark, where both kids were homeschooled, and every morning at 7:00am I would eat breakfast and journal for two or three hours before the kids woke up. It was bliss… filling my cup so full.
After my year plus of quiet self development, I had to slowly start transitioning our family dynamic, by asking for more help and being more vocal about my needs, boundaries, and expectations.
How did all of this show up in our family?
I stopped taking out the garbage. It started with me asking someone to do it, and then it morphed into me saying nothing because come on, everyone knows when the garbage is full and needs to be taken out. Several times it would pile up and fall on the floor, and one time my husband asked, “What’s going on here?” I just said, “It looks full and I shouldn’t have to be the only one taking it out.” And he responded with something like that’s why we have a son, you should tell him to do it. And I said, “You’re a parent, you can tell him.” And from that day on, I’ve taken out the garbage like three times.
My husband taught himself to grill several years ago, but during the work week, I would grill because I was in that “caring mode” of trying to ease his burdens when he came home. “The least I could do was cook dinner,” was the type of story I believed. So, again, in the transition of me taking some things off my plate, I would ASK him to grill dinner that night. Most of the time, he was happy to, and other times when he didn’t want to cook dinner either, we would do takeout. Not a big deal, we ate dinner and no one cared how it got there.
My kids were (are) teenagers, so I stopped physically making them breakfast and lunch. It started with me buying freezer food, and then transitioned into me asking them what they wanted, and now they are expected to take care of it themselves. Meaning, they think about what they want for the week coming up, add whatever they need to my grocery list, and then when they are hungry, make the food they want.
I have always taken care of my husband's lunchbox, but through some conversations with him, it has now come down to: he gets whatever I put in there, and if he wants something different or special he will let me know, and I’ll get it next time I’m at the store. He doesn’t eat much, so it’s fairly easy.
That helped I asked for when it came to grilling, sort of morphed on it’s own with my husband now taking the lead when it comes to cooking just about any type of meat. These days we both give equal effort when it comes to dinner, which mostly looks like me being his sous chef.
House cleaning, well that’s a whole other story for another time because basically, it’s in limbo. None of us want to do it… don’t have a massive care to do it… So right now when I have the drive and desire, I clean my own bathroom, wipe down the kitchen counters, help regulate the kids doing the dirty/clean dishes every night, and we all do our own laundry. Yard work, I do most of it because it’s like my favorite secret addiction to calmness… but I’m still learning to ask for help because although I love it, I don’t love feeling so exhausted afterwards. Like, shut down, leave me alone… sort of a backfire to the calmness.
My husband changed his work schedule a tiny bit so he could take our daughter to school one day a week. I never asked this. He just did it… because I started showing that I needed help in some areas.
I spoke up and told my husband I was struggling emotionally to teach our son to drive, so he took more of that on and pushed our son through getting his license, and now I have one less kid to “worry” about when it comes to scheduling… our son just drives himself wherever he needs to be.
My husband will ask what our weekend plans are, and I’ll speak up and say what I want to do, or what I am doing, and he’ll clarify if I expect anything from him; most times, I don’t, and most times, he joins me and asks, “You want me to do that?”
I know my husband's evening routine is very sacred to him, and honestly something that secretly keeps me balanced, so I respect that space and try my hardest not to disrupt it. I do occasionally go out with a friend for dinner, or take a pottery class one night a week, and although it’s lovely to have those things, and by no means a rule that the evening routine can’t be changed, we just function more calmly when on a general basis we spend the evenings together.
The coaching and journaling was by far THE most important piece in my journey. Through these changes where I had to be more vocal, I was able to support myself when I was met with resistance from my family. Knowing myself, what I believed, and shedding shame, kept me grounded and focused, and made it easier for me to nurture my family through it all.
When someone said, “This sucks, I shouldn’t have to do this...” I knew not to take it personally and they were expressing a valid feeling that something different was happening and they didn’t like it. That’s okay. It didn’t mean I had to feel guilty and do it myself, it meant I could hold space for them to complain, and still expect them to do what I asked.
I was able to be more empathetic, and less defensive, when my husband had a hard time supporting a new change I wanted to make. He’s only ever known me to be one way, and our routine to only ever be one way. So naturally, asking him to take on more, or help enforce new rules, will trigger some things in him; even just the natural human feeling of discomfort during change.
There’s a lot less caring I do for my family these days, and a bit more nurturing going on. The changes I’ve seen in myself, that contribute to our families rhythms are: no more dinnertime chaos and stress, because I eat more food and nurture myself throughout the day and have help at dinnertime; I’m able to regulate my early morning stress so there isn’t a rush to get out the door and an angst that keeps us on edge; I don’t have to make anyone feel better when they have a bad day, which removes the panic and guilt of keeping the peace; when someone complains, I don’t take it personally and choke back tears, I make sure it doesn’t actually pertain to me and then ignore it; I have good days and bad days, but for the most part I’m no longer on a roller coaster of emotions; I’m able to have fun and be present for my kids; and most of all, my worth and who I am is not tide to anything I do or don’t do in my family. Having such a solid foundation of SELF has truly made our family dynamic less dramatic, and more cohesive.
