Self-Care Sunday – 2

Here in my part of North Carolina, we’ve gotten socked by a little snow and a lot of sleet, which is MILES better than freezing rain, but is still a bother. Fingers crossed that the predicted gusty winds don’t bring down tree limbs and power lines, especially since I’m at my childhood home helping my parents during the storm and this house – which I love – is old, drafty, and has no alternative heating source should the electricity fail. (Don’t worry – we’ve got bug-out bags packed and a solid “Plan B” ready to go.)

Snow days often are wonderful opportunities for self-care since you *really* can’t go anywhere. Oh sure, a few household chores still need to be attended to, but then there are stretches of time to fill when you’ve already seen the weather report seventeen times and you come to the conclusion that a nap or a book or a card game are just as legitimate as scurrying about.

Looking over the last week, I see that my version of daily self-care has taken a variety of forms.

As I have said a number of times, self-care isn’t all hot baths and indulgent pastries – although those DO have a place! At its heart, self-care is concerned with building a life you don’t want to run away from. So, sometimes the best way to demonstrate self-care is to act like a grown-up. Make those phone calls you don’t really want to make, set up those medical appointments, deal with the stack of bills, buy the groceries you need to have on hand in order to eat a healthy breakfast, and so on. Once you get started doing those things, you discover that they aren’t nearly so bad as you thought they would be. With that in mind, this week I have:

  • Set up an interest-free payment plan to take care of a surgical bill.
  • Taken the first steps on getting a handle on bills, budget, and another mortgage application so we can truly shop around on that.
  • Treated myself to a matinee – Sing 2, which has an amazing voice cast.
  • Treated myself to an old movie with my love – the wackadoodle Orson Welles/Rita Hayworth noir The Lady from Shanghai, which is so discombobulated in parts that the president of Warner Brothers exclaimed during a test screening, “I’ll give a thousand dollars to anyone who can tell me what this movie is about!”
  • Gone to my nephew and his wife’s baby shower for their soon-to-arrive bundle and saw family and friends come together to welcome the new addition to the family. Truly, the circle widens.
  • Drove up to my parents’ house for the winter storm and set up the portable record player and coaxed my Dad into choosing a record to play. He picked The Ink Spots and I was treated to seeing my parents slow dance in the kitchen.

There have been some other things as well – turns out I quite like flipping through the record collection (listening to Sinatra right now) and I took the time during today’s snow storm to make actual cocoa, instead of the instant stuff. It’s quite easy – just use the recipe on the brown box of Hershey’s, add a dollop of Cool Whip and use a vegetable peeler to shave a bit of dark chocolate onto the top and voilà! Fancy-ness.

Take care of yourselves, Divas – so we can take care of the world.


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