Selfish=good?

Recently, I read a blogger whose point was that moms are not just moms, they’re also people—and how sometimes, they need to be selfish.

I find these kinds of posts difficult. It’s true that a mother needs to be able to express herself as a woman—and more basic than that, as a person. The same is true of fathers. She talked about taking time for the things that used to make your heart beat faster…a statement in which I recognized myself.

But I have to resist this point of view—because I know how easy it is to overbalance in the other direction—the selfish direction. The last two weeks, I have been gnashing my teeth over a lack of writing time. The paradigm is shifting in the house; Alex has finally graduated from nap taking, and Nicholas can’t get on a nap schedule because we’re having to run all over town to visit doctors and pick up Alex, and he’s always catnapping in the car.

At times like these, I question whether I’m really supposed to be writing at all. And yet I keep coming to the same conclusion: that writing makes me a better person. First, because I’m writing devotionals, which allow me to reflect on Scripture and God…something I probably wouldn’t make time for otherwise (ashamed though I am to admit it). But even working on my novel gives me spiritual exercise. It was writing my protagonist and hearing how she came across to other people that brought up the question of balance and selfishness in the first place.

And so I continue to carve out time to write. Someday I’ll reach the point where all my kids can dress themselves and open their own toothpaste tubes, when they are gone to school all day and when they’re home they don’t want me around, and then I’m sure I’ll be wistful (though not really wanting to run time backward) for the days when they were little and chewy. In the meantime, I just have to be very productive between 5:30 and 6 a.m.!