It’s Monday, and I’m sitting in the emergency room with my eldest daughter. What a way to start the week. I had been getting ready to take the littlest one to the playground when Abigail messaged that she had been throwing up all morning and her whole body hurt. My first question was, “Did you eat any vegetables or lettuce recently?” What in the world are we coming to when that’s the first thing I ask?
She doesn’t usually ask me to take care of her when she’s sick. She’ll text me and let me know what is happening, but asking to go to the ER is different. So the playground plan disappeared, Nick kept working from home, and our three teenage daughters inherited the usual routine. There wasn’t really a decision to make. No matter how old our children are, when they need us, we show up.
Last week, I wrote about the invisible things a spreadsheet couldn’t measure when I considered my worth. Right on schedule, the universe handed me another example. These moments, the ones where I’m typing in the corner of an ER while my daughter scrolls on her phone and waits to be seen, are part of what I leave behind. There is no line on a paycheck for being the person your adult child calls when she is scared enough to need help, but that doesn’t make the work invisible to her.
I think my response to my children is so immediate because of the way I’ve always understood parenthood. I made the choice to create life. My daughters did not choose the lives they were born into. None of us do. We are handed a life by our parents, along with their choices, mistakes, and traumas, until we become adults and begin making choices of our own. Regardless of my daughters’ ages, I still feel the weight of my choice to bring them here. Their need becomes real before I have time to negotiate with it.
My own needs are apparently entitled to a full hearing, complete with opening arguments and several appeals. I can turn almost anything I want into a question. Do I really need to rest? Should I be downstairs with everyone? Is Nick looking for me? Will he be hurt if I don’t say goodnight? Should I make sure the house is closed up? What can I do tonight to make tomorrow easier for everyone? There is always something I feel like I should be doing, and my brain is very good at presenting it as evidence against choosing myself.
That isn’t because Nick doesn’t help. He does, constantly. He takes on Evelyn, who is usually the biggest moving piece, and he encourages me to do things for myself. When he asks what he can help with, I often can’t process an answer because he is already helping. The obstacle isn’t a lack of support. It is my guilt about receiving support if it might shift even a small burden onto someone else.
Choosing myself intentionally would mean not automatically dropping my routine whenever someone else wants or needs something. Even writing that makes me feel selfish. I rarely say no, and when someone asks what I want to accomplish this week, I rarely have an answer. My days are mapped around everyone else, with little pieces of my own life tucked into whatever space remains. If that space disappears, I move my plans somewhere else in the week or decide they weren’t a deal breaker anyway.
And this week, my brain was already consumed with choices. Eat the ice cream or grab something that will make my body feel better. Keep saying I want to lose weight and restart the routine again on Monday, or make the choice in front of me today. Free will is a wild concept when you stop to think about it. We use it constantly, sometimes to improve our lives and sometimes to bend our own rules for five minutes of satisfaction, fully aware of how we’ll feel afterward. YOLO, right? Apparently I would like to live only once but restart my routine approximately forty-seven times.
Sitting in the ER, I kept yawning even though I had gone to bed around 8:30 or 9:00 the night before. My body was tired because I had made time for all the things except the things it has been asking for: move it intentionally and feed it intentionally. Do you see the pattern? It isn’t simply the choice. It is the intention behind the choice, followed by the action that gives it life.
My mantra has been, “I choose abundance and steadiness for my family and myself. Both are allowed without losing who I am.” I believe that when I say it. But I realized there was still a piece missing. I am very good at choosing abundance and steadiness for my family. Choosing them for myself requires an action, not just a sentence I repeat while standing barefoot on the floor.
Meanwhile, back at home, the girls rose to the occasion. Nick did have to remind them that when Evelyn is awake, they are not lifeguarding her from the couch. It’s eyes up and interaction. I have to remind myself of that sometimes too, and Evelyn occasionally gets more screen time than any of us planned. The house did not run exactly as it would have if I had been there to manage it, but it ran. That distinction is one I am still learning to trust.
Part of me still felt guilty that I wasn’t home to mitigate those moments for Nick while he worked. I worried I was interrupting what he needed, even though he never suggested that I was letting him down. The girls needing a reminder didn’t mean I should have been in two places. Extra screen time didn’t mean the day had fallen apart. It meant other people were carrying pieces of the routine while I did something that mattered elsewhere.
There is also something humbling about recognizing that our teenagers’ age-appropriate selfishness exists partly because of the life we created for them. They have lived through divorce and complicated family dynamics, but we have also worked hard to let them remain kids with priorities that are supposed to be selfish sometimes. I honestly don’t remember being that way as a teenager, but maybe that says more about the responsibilities I carried than the ones they should be carrying now.
None of this means I need to stop showing up for the people I love. Choosing myself doesn’t always have to mean saying no to someone else. Maybe it starts with refusing to disappear completely when somebody else needs me.
Which brings me back to the emergency room. About every thirty minutes, I stood beside my chair and did one minute of goblet marches. Yes, in our room at the ER. Abigail eventually took a video to send to Breanna and announced, “I’m dying” (an exaggeration) “and Mom is doing exercises.”
I told her, “Momma is trying to get herself back.”
It wasn’t a workout plan. It wasn’t enough movement to transform my health, and I’m fairly certain no fitness influencer will be asking for my ER routine. It was one minute. Then another one later. But I had gone to bed the night before telling myself that today would be different and that I would follow through on something for myself. For once, showing up for my daughter didn’t have to erase that promise.
Maybe living intentionally is an overused idea because it sounds bigger than it has to be. I used to think it meant building the perfect routine and protecting enough time to carry it out. Today it looked like taking my daughter to the ER without question, trusting the people at home to figure things out, and lifting my knees beside a hospital chair for sixty seconds while my sick child documented the absurdity.
There will always be choices I don’t question. I will show up for my children. I will adjust plans when something truly needs me. But I am starting to understand that choosing them doesn’t require abandoning myself every time. Sometimes I can be the mother in the ER and the woman trying to get herself back. Apparently, today, I can be both, one goblet march at a time.
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