Is it Okay If I Take a Shower?

Blurred lines between taking care of yourself and self-care

“You deserve a haircut,” my husband said to me when our daughter was about four months old. It was March. I had not had a haircut since September.

“Everybody deserves a haircut!” I snapped back. “It’s basic hygiene.”

“No,” he backpedaled, terrified that he’d prodded the pit viper of my new mom moodiness by saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. “You… you need a haircut.”

My husband had done nothing to interfere with my getting a haircut, apart from getting me pregnant. He’s always encouraged me to do things for myself during the times that he tags in for baby duty. And I know why he phrased it that way initially– “You deserve a haircut”-- it was the gentlest possible way to comment on the fact that my hair was starting to have the wild quality of the little girl who crawls out of the well in The Ring, which, combined with the fact that I was wearing a lot of enormous near-nightgown-length tee shirts as outfits at the time and wasn’t getting much sun, probably produced an unsettling effect.

It’s me, the spooky ghost of your formerly fun and cool wife. I died, and I’m mad.

Josh never stopped getting regular haircuts after Juniper was born. It’s wild. He will just ask me if I have any work conflicts on a specific day at a specific time, and if I don’t, he’ll just go ahead and leave the house, returning home in a couple of hours with noticeably shorter hair. Even though I know from both intuition and experience that it would not be a problem for me to do the same thing, there’s a part of me that feels guilty for even scheduling one.

I ask for permission to take showers. I do not need to ask for permission to take showers. My husband just takes a shower when he needs one.

When I have a few hours to myself, to really kick back and relax, I do not kick back and I do not relax. I clean. Cleaning has become the way I spend my time when the baby is down for a nap or out of the house. My husband actually takes time for himself during those times. He reads books. He goes to the gym. The other week, he went thrifting. Like a normal human being with occasional free time.

One afternoon during my free time, I indulged myself by throwing a bunch of clothing I acquired between the years 2015 and 2019 into a garbage bag and putting the bag in my trunk. Then, the next time I experienced the incredible self-care opportunity to leave my house, I drove it to a Goodwill and dropped it off. Then, I went to the grocery store and took my sweet-ass time purchasing cleaning supplies, like some kind of baroness.

When I came home, I felt guilty.

My post-baby brain has developed a malfunction where it can no longer differentiate between what constitutes “doing something for myself” and what constitutes “basic self-maintenance.” It has conflated “self-care” and “taking care of myself.”

As a thought experiment, I’ve asked myself what would happen if I lived a little more like Josh-- never shirking my responsibilities at home, but also still functioning like a normal human being. What would happen if I resumed getting regular haircuts, taking showers without asking for permission, or putting the baby down in her crib for a bit while I went outside and took care of the garden? The answer is: probably nothing. The medium-case scenario is that maybe she’d have to wait as much as thirty seconds to a minute longer to have a parent or caregiver respond to her crying. The worst case scenario gets into absurd territory involving mythical creatures sneaking into our bedroom and abducting her from her crib like the goblins at the beginning of Labyrinth.

I’m not trying to be a martyr in a way that feels conscious. I have internalized the idea that if I am not giving 100% of myself to my daughter at all times, I could be giving more and am thus a sub-optimal mom. Mathematically, I am correct, but on a practical level, it’s unsustainable. Every other member of my household doesn’t seem to have any guilt about how much they bathe. Why should I?

Maybe I’m still asking permission so that I can give it to myself, and remind myself that taking a shower is not a little treat; it's basic hygiene.

And yes, I both deserve and need a haircut.

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