I didn’t feel well last weekend. From Thursday through to Sunday, my head thumped, my muscles ached and my energy all but deserted me. Instead of resting though, I ploughed on. Thursday I wrote, I did the school run, I cooked the usual sausage and mash dinner for my mother-in-law’s bi-weekly visit. Friday, after I cleaned the house, I joined my weekly Spanish lesson, unable to bring myself to cancel. “Sí, estoy muy bien,” I lied, when my teacher asked how I was. Telling the truth felt like an admission of failure. Taking time out, the same. It got me to wondering, why can’t I just rest?
The origin story
When I was 15 or 16, my mum got me a temp job working at The Royal Show. The annual agricultural event was local to us and they needed caterers. This being my first job, and me being a shy kid, I was nervous. As it turned out, I loved it. I remember laughing and joking with the other people my age, especially the guys. Never popular with the opposite sex at school, this was new to me. I felt myself come to life under their attention. I was certain though, that whilst I was having fun, I was also working hard.
When the manager took me aside and told me that somebody had complained about me, I was mortified. One or more of my colleagues had singled me out and accused me of not pulling my weight. Now, I would argue that I was being punished for being young and attractive. I would ask why the guys were not being tarred with the same brush. But, back then, I was young and inexperienced and I took it very personally. Paranoid that everyone was talking about me and worried that I had let my mum down, I wanted to run out of there and not look back. Instead, for the rest of the contract, I kept my head down and worked as hard as two people.
This experience set the tone for the rest of my life, working or otherwise. Needing to be seen as productive became integral to my sense of worth.
My own worst enemy
This didn’t bode well for my working life. In my first long-term job, in a bid to seem industrious, I inherited so many extra responsibilities, my work crossed in to pretty much every department in the company. When I left my last role, they hired four people to replace me. This isn’t a boast, just a fact. I took on additional work, year-on-year, without complaint. I didn’t feel as though I had the right. There were times when assistance was offered to me, but I turned it down, worried that it made me look incapable.
Outside of work too, I felt like I needed to shoulder every burden; some of that due to ‘oldest child syndrome’ definitely. I tend to be the organiser of events, the buyer of presents, the booker of holidays. At home, I do the majority of the childcare and all of the, historically deemed, ‘women’s work.’ I entered into this arrangement willingly. It’s what I’d had modelled to me in my own childhood and I didn’t realise that I had a choice. Still, I liked the feeling of taking care of my loved ones. I heard the poet Maggie Smith say that she would mother everyone who lived in her house, even if that was a grown man. Same! Even if my husband did offer to help, I wouldn’t accept it, knowing that I could do it better myself.
It’s not wonder I can’t rest
It’s no wonder then, that I can’t rest. It doesn’t matter if I am sick, or overwhelmed, or just tired, I push on. That’s not to say I do so without complaint; I complain, a lot. To be sure that people know, I make a point of telling them just how busy I am. I know I’m not alone there, being busy is a badge of honour that a lot of people wear.
It’s even more difficult now that I am working from home and for myself. I struggle to distinguish between my work and home life and every day feels like a work day. But, it’s something that I am working to change. It doesn’t feel like as much of a failure now, if I delegate a task. Other people are, it turns out, just as capable as I am.
In the end, I cleared my calendar this weekend. I gave myself full permission to relax. I spent two days on my back, listening to an audiobook, my headache making it difficult for me to focus my vision. When my husband came into the bedroom at 11am on Sunday, he looked confused to see me still in bed. An early riser, 8am is the middle of the day to him and he doesn’t understand the meaning of the term lie-in. He’s also not used to seeing me doing nothing and I think it struggled to compute. Instead of jumping up and busying myself, like I felt inclined to, I buried myself further under the blankets and continued on with my book.
You know what happened when I let myself rest? I got well.
