Is It Selfishness or Simply Smart? Something For Yourself
Years ago, Cheryl Richardson, a life coach and author of Take Time for Your Life and many other books, was booed by the audience of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Why? Because she suggested that mothers need to take time for themselves.
My co-author, Holly Scherer, and I used to get a similar reaction to our first book title, Help! I’m a Military Spouse—I Get a Life, Too! People would say, “That’s selfish.”
By whose definition? Research on happiness in life indicates that one of the keys to happiness is to know what you want in life and to work toward that goal. That includes doing activities you enjoy for work and for play.
Supporting your service member’s career and taking care of children does not mean giving up your own life. If you give yourself up in the process, you have less to give. Think about it: What do you have left when your service member retires and your children leave home?
“The best way to have a happy life with the military is to have something that you do for yourself,” says Amy J. Fetzer, a Marine spouse, mother of three children, and author of more than thirty novels and novellas. She’s been involved with the military community, moved many times, lived overseas, and still managed to carve out something for herself. “Establishing yourself and your work as an individual where individuality isn’t the norm means not just being a wife or mother. I was each of those things, still am, but I was always a writer, too. It gave me the separation as a person that I needed to be happy with who I was.”
That’s one of our key messages in talking with and writing for military spouses—the importance of having something for yourself. And no, we aren’t just talking about careers!
Here are four reasons why it is so important that you engage in the activities that matter to you as you move with the military in support of your service member:
1. Sense of Self
Having something you do just for you gives you a sense of self, a sense of identity. Having a sense of self is important to your self-esteem.
Silke Hagee, wife of General Michael Hagee, former Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and proud Marine spouse for more than thirty-five years, agrees. She loves music and plays the cello. She says her music has always been a lifesaver for her because it gives her great joy as it’s all hers. She stressed how important it is to have something in your life that makes you your own person. “Most of the time we are someone to someone else: the wife, the mother, the daughter. Find an interest that is all yours.”
2. Connection to Community
Having an abiding interest gives you an immediate way to connect with like-minded people as you move. You connect with people inside and outside of the military world, and it’s an easy connection to make. I can point to deep and long-lasting friendships with people I met through the National Speakers Association and my many writing groups as we moved.
3. Respite and Sanity
In stressful times, it makes the alone times not so lonely. Many spouses told us that it was that interest—whether it was a job they loved or a hobby like scrapbooking , quilting, or a community project they were intensely involved in—that helped them through deployment. As one woman said, “It saved my sanity. For at least a few hours each day, I could manage to forget about my husband’s deployment danger. It kept the constant anxiety at bay.”
4. Lifelong Interests
When you have interests all your own outside of your spouse’s military life and your children’s lives, you not only enjoy today more, you prepare yourself for the future. If your entire world is the military and/or your children, you can have a difficult transition when your spouse retires and your children leave home. Your own interests keep life interesting and full. And they make you who you are, a much more interesting and happy person for your spouse and children to have around.
That isn’t selfish, it’s just plain smart!
