Woman: Nurture Thyself

If the oxygen mask drops during an in-flight emergency, people are instructed to place the mask on themselves first, then their child. This advice applies in day-to-day life as well. It’s only to the extent that women care for themselves that they can do so for others, says therapist and author Stephanie Marston.

“Women are afraid if they slow down and consider their own needs, they’ll be branded with the scarlet ‘S’ for ‘selfishness,’” she says. “But if we don’t [self-care], we find we’re resentful, depressed,
we overeat, overdrink, smoke … and are stressed, which is very negative for our health.”

Marston recommends that women write down a typical day of activities and where they spend the most time. Then, write a second list of what they consider most important in their lives, be it their children, finances, physical health and well-being, etc.

“Nine times out of 10, where women are spending their time and energy does not match up with what they consider important,” she says. “The good news is, you
will have awareness that your life is out of sync and you can take time to make course corrections.”

Some suggestions for self-care and stress relief from the experts include:
• Plan and prioritize. Delegate. Ask for help.
• Establish and maintain a strong support system of family and friends.
• Negotiate responsibilities with your partner, especially if you have children.
• Don’t get caught in the TV trap. Unwind with a book or light exercise.
• Stop the negative self-talk.
• Start a gratitude journal, which shifts energy in a positive way.
• Rediscover or start a spiritual practice, even for five minutes a day. — M.Z.

Tending and Befriending

Hazel Caba of San Francisco, California, learned to care for herself after a bout with cancer two years ago. Today, cured of the disease, the mother of three relieves stress with her at-home sachet-making business. She also cares for herself with massages, pedicures, manicures and by simply slowing down and not push-
ing herself.

“My life before was spinning around. After the cancer, when my life was a lot slower, I was able to appreciate it more. I have a different perspective now.”

Managing stress is unique to each woman. But how women do that may answer the question of why they put others’ needs first. Studies have discovered that when women have had a stressful day at the office, they come home and spend more time with their children, whereas men tend to withdraw from family life. The study’s bottom line: Women have the instinct
to “tend.”

When “tending,” women release endorphins—proteins that alleviate pain—and
oxytocin, a hormone that causes calm and peaceful feelings. Both oxytocin and endorphins also cause women to “befriend.” By nature, females form close bonds with other women, but especially during times of stress.

Stephanie Marston, therapist and author, adds, “We have health insurance, life and car insurance, but women friends are our emotional insurance. It’s important to surround ourselves with their support.”— M.Z.

One recent winter's day, Gloria Johnson felt crunched from all sides. Her mother, usually in good physical health, had just had back surgery. Gettiner to her mom's house meant a good hour-and-a-half drive in an impending New England snowstorm.

It also meant leaving work early. The timing couldn’t have been worse. As a museum exhibit planner, Johnson was pushing a deadline. A major exhibit was scheduled to open in two weeks and its success depended on people and necessary funding coming through the door.

Helping her recuperating mother also meant that the divorced mom had to leave her two teenagers alone for the first time. And at some point, in the midst of it all, she would probably get a call from her mentally ill sibling, who would keep her on the phone for a rambling hour-or-longer conversation—time Johnson didn’t have to spare.
End result? Johnson felt like a rotten daughter, rotten employee, rotten mother and rotten sibling.

Johnson’s is a familiar story. Countless women today are
pinched and stressed—wearing too many hats, juggling too many roles and trying to be all things to all people. While they can only wistfully hope, as one woman said, of “sleeping an entire week,” they continue to parent, love, work in the home and in full-time jobs outside the home, tend and befriend. And they neglect the most important person of all—themselves.

“Women can’t do it. They can’t take 20 minutes for
themselves,” says Alice D. Domar, Ph.D. “They ask, ‘Who’ll watch the kids, cook dinner, do the laundry?’ Women feel guilty when they spend time on themselves,” says the
founder and director of the Mind/Body Center for Women’s Health at Boston (Massachusetts) IVF, fertility center, and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
Why do women find it so hard to give themselves a little TLC? Social and genetic programming have a lot to do with it, says Domar, also the author of Self Nurture: Learning to Care for Yourself as Effectively As You Care for Everyone Else.

In addition, women inherit the idea that others’ needs are a priority over their own, explains Deborah Aikens, Ph.D., director of the Northwest Center for Health Promotion in Eugene, Oregon. “This comes from our patriarchal paradigm in society … where women’s needs don’t count and men’s needs do,” she says.

That paradigm is at the base of the difficulty women have in self-nurturing, says the clinical psychologist who has conducted workshops on this topic. “Women inherit this [model] and pass it on from generation to generation,” she says. “But we are a transition generation, trying to change this legacy.”

Trying to break those eons of conditioning is difficult, admits Adele Brookman, MS, MFT, a San Francisco, California, therapist whose practice “Replenishing” emphasizes nurturing self-care. “Women are still the primary caregivers even if they’re working
full-time outside the home. They come home to another full-time job,” she states.

Women in the Middle
The truth is, many women today are working two full-time jobs—one as full-time mothers/ homemakers and the other in full-time careers. Despite their careers, however, work inside the home has not decreased.

Expanding their roles beyond their mothers’ generations and TV’s 1950s-perfect-mothers holds great rewards for women, says Stephanie Marston, MFT, of Santa Fe, New Mexico. But these new roles and expectations are also complex. “Women are in a bind to have to sacrifice themselves, spending time with their children, their spouses, cultivating personal relationships … their parents are aging and they need to attend to them. Women are caught in a tug of war of competing demands and needs,” admits the therapist, life quality expert and author of Chicken Soup’s Life Lessons for Women: 7 Essential Ingredients for a Balanced Life.

Women are also having children later in life, widening the age gap between generations. As a result, they are often caring for children and an aging or sick parent, trapped in the middle of the well-known “Sandwich Generation.”
In the United States alone, nine million people are in the Sandwich Generation, with 40 percent between the ages of 35 and 49, according to a survey by AARP, a Washington, DC-based advocacy group for people over 50. A quarter of these people care for an older adult.

Traditionally nurturers and caregivers, women find it hard to divorce themselves from this care, explains Martson. “There is your dedication and devotion to your children, but then, there are your parents who raised and sacrificed for you. It’s natural to feel this tugging at your heartstrings. These are responsibilities that are incredibly difficult.”
“If you have brothers and have aging parents,” adds Adele Brookman, “it is still expected that you, the woman, will do more caretaking than the male sibling … whether you live far away or close by.”

The migration of relatives has also left the elderly without support systems. According to AARP, one-third of adult children live more than 60 miles away from aging parents. This has created a whole new species of caregivers—the long-distance care provider.

“If you hear something in your mother’s or father’s voice on the phone, you may not be able to drive over and check out what’s going on,” says Stephanie Marston. “Families in that situation have found companies or organizations locally that can help set up care-giving.”

Marston speaks from firsthand experience. For a time, she traveled back and forth from New Mexico to her parents’ residence in New Jersey. When she finally couldn’t do it anymore, she found a reputable organization near her
parents’ home that could monitor their situation.

According to Alice Domar, the lack of extended family nearby also impacts women with children. When a woman had a baby 100 years ago, she was living with or near aunts, female cousins and sisters who would swoop in and take care of everything for her and the baby. “I have two children and no one swooped in to take care of my needs,” Domar states.

A Worldwide Challenge
Women in European countries and other developed nations experience much the same frustrations as their American counterparts. A pan-European study by the Whirlpool Foundation (Benton Harbor, Michigan) found that European working women remain committed to their jobs but also wanted greater time to spend with their families, clearly defining their dual roles as breadwinners and caregivers.

Women in Japan and South Korea are also bearing the brunt of being “sandwiched” as caregivers. “Women are trapped in caring for children and for aging parents. That’s all the more evidenced in Japan where the aging population has mushroomed,” states Irene Natividad, president of GlobeWomen, Inc., which collects data for companies and NGOs on women’s trends and issues.

The same applies in Canada. According to a report by Statistics Canada, working women there devote twice as many hours per month to elder care as their male counterparts—29 hours versus 13.

As tough as it may be for women in developed countries to carve out “me time,” the concept of self-care for many women in Africa, India and other developing nations is non-existent. These women live in strong patriarchal societies where they are expected to care for husbands and children before themselves. As women, many have no rights and earn as little as $1 a day. The struggle is just to survive.
Jill Gay, a consultant in reproductive health and HIV/AIDS from Maryland, says, “Obviously a woman who needs to survive to feed her children by doing commercial sex work is not going to be able to nurture herself.”

Although the problems of middle class and affluent women in developed countries may seem trivial when compared with those for poor women throughout the world, the effects of stress on a woman’s physical and emotional health cannot be overstated. Women who do not take care of themselves do so at their own peril. And, the reality is that self-care isn’t always linked to a woman’s income level, says Natividad, a native of the Philippines who served as chair of the U.S. National Commission on Working Women. “The woman executive who doesn’t get a mammogram because there are just too many things on her plate, including her own family’s health care, is as susceptible to failed health—even though she has access to health care—as a woman farmer who is living at a subsistence level and is lucky to bring home two tomatoes at the end of the day,” she states.

Shifting a Delicate Balance
As women have assumed new roles and responsibilities through the years, significant changes in the old ones did not keep pace. Although many men help out in the home and with the children, the majority of those responsibilities still fall to women.

Linda Bovard typifies a woman who once tried to have it all but has since reassessed her priorities. “The message should be, ‘You can have whatever parts of it you want.’ Having it all takes a lot out of you,” says Bovard, of Eugene, Oregon. “Yes, you could have it all if you said to the men, ‘Here’s the laundry,’ but that isn’t what we did.”
For Bovard, 54, reaching her own journey to self-nurturing has taken time. At one point, she was working full-time at a high-stress job, carrying issues from the workplace to home and home to the workplace. She never could seem to escape the pressures of her life, so she started attending stress reduction workshops.

Married for 24 years with 17-year-old twin daughters, Bovard defines self-care as doing things she needs for herself in order to allow her to do what she’s supposed to do for others.

Today, Bovard has learned to self-nurture because, she says, “I’m worth it.” She takes time for morning walks with women friends. Now a consultant to companies making medical products, Bovard has made a conscious decision not to multi-task.

Calgon Take Me Away
For many women, the first step on the road to self-care is learning to accept help and that not everything has to be perfect. Gloria Johnson, the museum planner, learned to cope with the stress of her life with humor. Not everything is life or death, she says. So, during those few weeks that her normally hectic life became even crazier with her job and her mother’s surgery, she told her family there would be no home-cooked meals.

“I had the pizza place on speed dial on my cell phone. And now, I also have someone come in twice a month to clean the house. That was a huge thing because I hate the idea of someone else cleaning my dirt. But, hey,” she adds with a laugh. “I’m completely over that.”

Adds Hazel Caba, a 42-year-old cancer survivor and mother of three from San Francisco, California, “I used to be such a perfectionist. I realized after the cancer, things don’t have to be perfect. I don’t have to say yes to everybody. I’ve learned to prioritize and do what I feel is necessary.”

“No one ever died from dirty socks on the floor or from eating takeout,” Stephanie Marston adds. “If you’re running on empty, you have no internal resources to draw from. Would you drive your car when the gas gauge is running empty? Yet, we treat ourselves badly because we think we’re supposed to martyr ourselves, but the reality is, everyone suffers.”

According to Alice Domar, a woman who learns how to “dance the dance” when she cares for others and cares for herself, is going to be psychologically and physically healthier and a better mother, wife and friend. Caba agrees. “What I learned from my cancer recovery program is that you have to take care of yourself. If you’re not in good health you can’t take care of the rest of your family,” she states.

So how do today’s women reduce their stress? Cutting back is not an option for most women, says Deborah Aikens. It’s a question of managing those demands in a healthier way and adopting self-nurturing behaviors (see the sidebar)

One important strategy is for women to surround themselves with a strong support system, including close friendships. Linda Weaver, 56, has worked for years to bring balance to her life and depends on her women friends to help her through. “For me it’s so important to have a level of intimacy with women friends. It’s critical to be with people who can empathize, understand, listen, and give me feedback.

“I have a group of four to five close friends who really do that for each other,” adds the Eugene, Oregon, fundraiser.
Domar offers additional suggestions: When the alarm goes off in the morning, women can give themselves 15-20 seconds to choose one nice thing they will do for themselves that day. It may be as simple as buying a pint of blackberries and eating them on the spot or calling a close friend.

“Take as little as 10 minutes a day. Put on a piece of beautiful music, sit in the sun, take a hot bath, make a lunch date. Women need to make themselves part of their ‘to-do’ list,” states Domar. “And put yourself on that list in pen—not pencil—so you don’t erase your obligation to yourself.”

The sad reality is that most women are careening down the freeway of their lives at warp speed, Marston adds. “We need to pull out onto a country lane and slow down long enough to ask, ‘What do I love? What’s important to me? Who am I really?’”