I Was About to Devalue My Worth

Last updated on: January 13, 2011 at 2:17 pm by Nancy Qualls-Shehata

I Was About to Devalue My Worth 2011-01-13T14:17:00-05:00 Nancy Qualls-Shehata

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Bismillahi Rahmani Rahim

Salaam Alaikum wa Rahmatullah

Mornings are always hectic. I wake up, start the water for coffee and tea, make breakfast for my father-in-law, wake the kids, help find the inevitable lost shoe or missing homework paper, feed the cats, and try not to look too closely at the reminders of yesterday’s undone tasks.

There’s something new in the mix – my husband is now working from home. This means that, instead of seeing him hastily out the door with his coffee and an egg sandwich, I now have him underfoot for part of the day. Now, you ladies out there might react with either joy – Sweet! She has her hubby with her! or horror – Ugh! She has her hubby with her! Overall, it’s a good move. We’ve worked together before and we really mesh pretty well and don’t get on each other’s nerves too much. But it makes my day just that bit more complex, as I have to think about lunch for him in addition to the others in the house. He’ll ask me to do a random task, like calling a customer or answering an email, and I usually end up juggling the baby and typing one-handed, or plopping him in the crib to wail in abandonment for five minutes.

The biggest adjustment is to my attitude. I’m a naturally anxious person. I always feel that I should be up doing something. I know that, on the other side of the wall where I’m sitting, there are tax papers waiting to be sorted, a carpet that needs to be vacuumed, a window that needs a good cleaning – and that’s just one room. I feel guilty when I take any time for myself, and there’s always this tension between what I am doing and what I feel I should be doing. Toss hubby in the mix and it’s even harder. I know that he’s coming and going, schlepping boxes and lifting heavy stuff and packing and working very hard. I feel like if he’s standing up, I should be too. If he’s working, I should be as well. But that’s not the way it works.

My rational brain says “Lady, you are NEVER off duty. Do you remember you’ve been up part of the last three nights with a fussy baby? Do you remember that you’ve hardly been able to get him out of your arms long enough to write a coherent sentence? You realize it’s been three days since you had time to work on your knitting? If that baby goes down for a nap, don’t you dare head for the broom or the vacuum or laundry basket. You sit your butt down and rest for a few minutes. Yes, there are dirty dishes in the sink. They’ll keep.”

See, I think a lot of us women have the habit of devaluing what we do around the house. I may not be sweating under the hot sun at a construction site, or working in a small gray cubicle somewhere, or swearing in rush hour traffic, but I AM working. It never ends. Breakfast, snack, diaper, lunch, diaper, cleaning rug where diaper leaked, litter box, second lunch for kids at school, laundry, homework, tea for hubby, dinner, help kids with Qur’an, and on and on. If I don’t make a conscious effort to carve out time for myself when the opportunity presents itself, I can go literally for days at a time without a “me” moment. And here I was, about to get off the computer this morning and go do “something” even before I had drunk my coffee, just because I was feeling unjustifiably guilty for the mere act of sitting down and logging on to CNN.

And really, I do it to myself. My husband is keenly aware that I am chronically sleep-deprived and would happily relieve me if putting food on the table and paying the rent were not of primary importance. He supports my writing and blogging and even Facebooking, even though he shut his page down after a few months. He knows that I have said mornings are my “me” time, so that if he comes in around noon, when I head for the kitchen to make lunch, he’ll see the bed still unmade and dishes just drying on the counter. And he is fine with that. He’s downstairs. He can hear when the baby is crying – often – or when our toddler has a temper tantrum – also often. He knows that I make real food and that takes time, and that the kids can mess up a room five minutes after I’ve cleaned it, and he even apologized for rescuing the cats because he knew their care would fall on my shoulders. So I have him in my corner, and still I feel antsy for doing what I love to do.

So, this morning, I told my self, “Self, you are gonna sit here and make FB updates and take pictures of your knitting and make a cute comment about your cat and drink your coffee and watch CNN and do precious little else except see to the kids’ needs. And you’re going to quiet that stupid little overactive gremlin in your head who tries to make you feel guilty for doing anything that pleases you.”

I haven’t shut that gremlin up completely, but I did make him go sulk in the corner and leave me alone for a while. And that’s a good start.

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