The importance of pampering ourselves

I come from a home with wildly differing attitudes towards illness. My mother was a pamperer, my father (who died when I was eleven) was a dismisser. I have both their voices in my head a lot of the time when I am ill.

My father

My father had no time for illness (either his own or anyone else’s) he kept going when he was ill and expected other people to do the same. His voice was the one I listened too when I first started to be ill with ME/CFS. I kept going, trying to keep working, trying to pretend nothing was wrong.

I’m sure that sort of stoic attitude served my father well. He didn’t have an easy life; he lost his own father in the first world war, his first wife and new born baby just after he returned from fighting in the second world war. He had to keep himself going (he had an eight year old daughter to take care of).

I only came along towards the end of his life. He was 55 when I was born, hardened by his losses and very set in his no-nonsense ways (pampering definitely counted as nonsense in my father’s eyes). So from my father I learnt that we need to keep going, and that pampering and self-care were often viewed as giving in, a sign of weakness.

My mother

My mother on the other hand believed in pampering. She too had more than her fair share of losses; a baby brother when she was five, a dearly loved sister to cancer and of course my own father when she had a young son to look after (me!).

The difference between her and my father was that that she was very ill a few years before I was born. She suffered with a brain tumour that left her in bed for many months. She learnt how vulnerable and lonely illness can make us feel, and whist there is often a need to fight and keep going, she realised that is only half the equation, we also need love and care to give ourselves room to recover.

Self-care

It took me a long time to learn to listen to my mother’s voice rather than my father’s when it came to how I dealt with my own experience of ill health. In my forties I am much better at looking after myself than I was when I was younger, especially when I have some sort of acute illness. During my recent bout of flu I’ve been indulging in many cups of wonderful hot ginger tea, dosing myself up with very comforting elderberry cough mixture, making myself hot water bottles and sitting on the sofa wrapped in a duvet reading Enid Blyton! My mother would approve I’m sure.

The challenge for me (and maybe you too) is dealing with longer term health issues. Suffering from a chronic illness means ill health in one form or another is a daily experience, and the sort of gentle kindness that may be easier to give when illness looks finite (maybe lasting a a few days or a week at most), becomes far more difficult. It is then that my father’s voice becomes much harder to ignore.

Learning to pamper and take care of ourselves on a day-to-day basis when others (and even we) stop seeing our illness, is where the real challenge lies. Taking care of ourselves needs to become a habit. If it does then we are far more likely to recover quickly, or at very least make our experiences of longterm illness an easier one.

How can you pamper yourself a little today?

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