Need Some Me Time? Create a Sanctuary

One of my favorite children’s books is A Little House of Your Own by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers. This gem of a book shows a little girl creating a multitude of hideaways – little escapes from the world – in her day to day life. These include a fort constructed with a blanket and a table, a tree house, and a corner in a garden.

While this book is written for children, its message is universal. Animals have dens, birds create nests, babies long to be held and cradled. We all need a little house of our own, a place – both physical and mental – where we find comfort, feel safe, and can become reacquainted with ourselves. This is crucial for women whose energy is usually directed outwards, to others. Without this sanctuary, we feel deflated, resentful, and haggard, with a chronic undertow that something’s missing in our lives. If we are deprived of this safety net, we look to inferior substitutes – shopping, surfing the internet, gossiping, drinking, eating – to fill the void that a sense of sanctuary can provide.

How can you create a sanctuary, a little house of your own, a place of refreshment in your life? Virginia Woolf once quipped that every woman needs a room of her own for just such purpose. I agree, and someday, I intend to have one. In the meantime, I share my home with five other people. This entails balancing my need for solitude and a personal haven with my family’s need for a home that meets their need for play and fun. How do you balance these opposing needs? How do you create a nest when you don’t have a room to call your own?

Fortunately, creating a little house of your own is more of a mindset, than a locale. Here are ways I create nests, little pockets of solitude and inner reflection, throughout my week:  I have my husband take the children on an errand so that I have the house to myself; I go outside for a run or a walk; I make cards, bead, or knit in the living room after the children are asleep; I read in bed; I meditate, I pray, and I lay in bed and daydream. I also created an altar space on a small table in my bedroom. It has two windowboxes that my children made me, gifts from girlfriends, and a statue of a woman in a lotus pose. My children understand that this table is off limits, is solely Mommy’s, and is not to be used for play.

I know some women who spend the night at a friend’s house or in a hotel as a get away. I know others who have claimed a part of their homes for themselves, in the form of an office, craft room, or exercise space. I even know a woman who uses the 30 minutes between dropping off her daughter at school and going to work to listen to an inspiring audio tape in her car.

There are a multitude of ways to create a nest. And, as you take the time to create this space for yourself, and make it a regular habit, you have the opportunity to explain the gift of self-care to your children with concrete language that they can understand. So if your children try and interrupt you while you’re praying, or having some quiet time, you can say, “I’m in a little house of my own right now. I’ll be available in 20 minutes.”

The beauty of this habit is that it gives every mother an opportunity to offer her children a language of self-care, words to describe the need that we all have to reconnect with ourselves, our spirits, dreams, passions, and inner truth. Your children will delightfully surprise you by their awareness – they will get it – and will then request solitude for themselves.

What a blessing. Can you think of a better skill for a child to have, or to know and understand? We all want our children to be true to themselves. Likewise, we all want to be mothers who are true to ourselves. Making space in our lives for nesting, for sanctuary, for retreating into the deepest, truest core of being, is how we bring our inner truth out into the world, aligning our behavior and our actions with our deepest values.

• Are you interested in learning more about reconnecting with yourself? I would suggest starting with Abby Seixas’s warm and practical guide, Finding the Deep River Within.
• You can discover more authors like Abby when I feature them as guest contributors to our newsletters.