Self-Care Is Just Another Job for Moms

Let me start with this: my sleep routine is basically a nightly performance art piece titled “Woman Attempts Rest.” There’s an eye mask. A white noise machine. Ear plugs. Lavender essential oil. A sweatband alarm clock that vibrates me awake. And of course, the strict no-screens-for-an-hour rule that I try to enforce even when emails and phone notifications are breeding like bacteria and I'm wondering if I actually RSVPd to that birthday party or just thought I did.

I’ve basically constructed a bedtime protocol that would impress a monk in training or a Silicon Valley biohacker.

I didn’t go this deep because I’m obsessed with wellness. I went this deep because I’m a working mom. A mom with two kids under five, a high-powered career leading a team of 30, and an elderly, wheelchair-using dog named Franklin who requires manual bathroom assistance and insists on being involved in every single household decision, whether asked or not.

Any time people ask how old my kids are, they tell me (without fail), “Oh boy, you’re in it.” As in: still immersed in the physical, all-hands-on, all-the-time phase of parenting, where there are diapers, pouches, and sleep regressions involved. And they’re not wrong. But I’ve realized something: we’re all still in it. Whether it’s caretaking responsibilities, stretched finances, dreams deferred, or just being a human in the general hellscape of our sociopolitical environment, everything feels like it’s in overdrive.

But for moms—especially working moms—self-care, replete with its tools and tropes, feels like yet another job. Another productivity metric to hit. Another area to perform in.

In the midst of all that, self-care culture arrived in the late 2010s with perfect branding. Take the bubble bath. Buy the bullet journal. Light the candle. Do the dry brushing. Use the jade roller. Heal your nervous system. Breathwork and bath bombs and blue light glasses, oh my!

But for moms—especially working moms—self-care, replete with its tools and tropes, feels like yet another job. Another productivity metric to hit. Another area to perform in.

And perform I have! There was a stretch where I woke up at 5:30 a.m. daily to “win the morning” with journaling and meditation, like peace of mind was just a productivity hack I hadn’t mastered yet. I read roughly 600 self-help books. I journeyed to the farthest, dustiest corners of the app store to download all the wellness apps I could find: habit trackers, breathwork timers, digital gratitude journals that sent me push notifications like, “What are you grateful for today?” (Honest answer = silence.) I optimized rest like it was a freaking Q4 KPI.

But under all that structure, I wasn’t feeling peaceful; I was feeling pressured. I was performing wellness instead of experiencing it. Peace became yet another thing I had to earn.

Then one night, unceremoniously, after another elaborate wind-down and still feeling wired, I cracked. Quietly. No aromatherapy sleep mist. No mouth tape. Just me, a pint of ice cream, and an algorithmic feed of Pinterest outfit inspiration.

Weirdly, it felt like a turning point.

For once, I wasn’t trying to deserve rest. I was just… resting. That night became a quiet pivot. I stopped asking what I should do for self-care, and started asking: what actually makes me feel like myself?

For me, that looks like:

• 90 minutes of deep thinking time every workday morning
• Prioritizing reading (physical books!) over keeping up with all the TV shows
• Doing a brain dump when there are just too many mental browser tabs open, then actively de-prioritizing stuff that’s not urgent
• Keeping my electronic drum set in my home office and banging out a few songs between meetings
• A biweekly session with my executive coach (aka career therapist)

It’s not about balance in a 50/50 way. It’s about alignment. Feeling present, fulfilled, and in control of the things that matter, at home, at work, and with myself. I love my kids. I love my career. I love my wildly high-maintenance dog. I have the best life partner on the planet. I just want to feel like I’m inside my life, not racing alongside it.

The goal isn’t to escape the chaos. The goal is to build a life where you can be fully human inside it.

I still use the white noise machine, the eye mask and the earplugs. But the biggest shift has been that I stopped treating self-care like a checklist. In my mind, the most radical act in this season of life is not to fix everything. And it’s definitely not to be everything. It’s choosing to stop trying so hard in the first place. It’s to stop strong-arming your calendar into color-coded time blocks, or over-engineering your bedtime like it’s a product launch. It’s resisting the urge to optimize every waking minute. It’s refusing to mistake effort for worthiness.

It’s to just be in it.

Because the goal isn’t to escape the chaos. The goal is to build a life where you can be fully human inside it. Sometimes that means making space for deep thought, quiet mornings, and an actual book. And sometimes it means sitting at my drumset between back-to-back meetings, headphones on, just to remember that I’m here, I’m whole, and I still know how to keep a beat.

And for now, that feels like more than enough.