Wow, December first already.  A side benefit of this "Just for Today Challenge" is that one day a week, I know what the date is.  But no, knowing what the date is was not my own challenge for this week.  This week, I was going to focus on moisturizing.  You might think, "Moisturizing?  Of all the things you could concentrate on for one day?  Really?  Using lotion?"  Yes, I really don't moisturize enough.  In fact, I have a condition called "contact dermatitis" or in layperson's terms "housewives' eczema."  It is caused by overexposure to...  (Drum roll, please.)  Soap and water.  (See, anything in excess can be harmful.)  My hands are dry and scaly and cracking (yes, they actually bleed) because I wash them (or dishes or counters or clothes) too often and moisturize not enough.

But I didn't actually end up moisturizing at all (surprised?) because I was too busy concentrating on something much more difficult: not watching TV.  Of all the things I do (or don't do) on my spiritual Wednesdays, I never thought that giving up TV would be one of the challenges.  I'm not anti-TV — I enjoy it — but I've gone years without owning a television and months on end without watching one, and have never really missed it.  Yet, last week, I really craved television.  I wanted to sit down and watch a crappy crime drama, something entertaining and relatively mindless, while the kids were at school.  It's a rare treat I give myself whenever I have an especially big pile of laundry to fold, and I was longing for that luxury.

Of course, I had to consider why it was I so desperately wanted to watch TV on that particular day last week, and I realized that I was tired.  I saw that I use the TV and the computer as a way of keeping myself from falling asleep while not overtaxing my brain with any of that difficult thinking stuff.  I wanted to watch TV because I didn't want to go to sleep, but I also couldn't handle do anything harder than digesting an episode of Cold Case.  So, instead of watching TV and folding laundry, I took a nap, which was just what my body needed.  But all that concentrating on not watching TV drove hand lotion right out of my tired brain.  Oh, well, maybe next week.

Did you do anything this week?  Share in the comments or post a link to a blog post in Mister Linky below.  And if you want to join in and change one aspect of your life for one day, click over to my introductory post to get more information and a badge.

Spiritual inspiration can come from the oddest bits of serendipity.  I was at a talk a few months ago by a Zen Buddhist who talked about making each moment sacred, about how we could light incense before doing the dishes and make the washing of each dish a meditation and a part of our practice.  That's a nice goal.  I like that image.  Instead, every day I engage in the totally unspiritual practice of washing dishes while playing yesterday's episode of the Colbert Report on my laptop: sometimes watching, sometimes listening, sometimes popping over to my e-mail.  And it turns out, that led me, well, maybe to the same place anyway.

A few months ago, Colbert's guest was AJ Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.  The premise of the book sounded like a take on the humorous e-mail that circulates periodically mocking Biblical literalists for calling homosexuality an abomination while ignoring passages that condone things like slavery and animal sacrifice.  It sounded interesting, but because my hands were wet and covered with dish soap, I didn't jump right over to Amazon to buy it.  And then, I'll admit, I forgot about it.  Until a few weeks later, when my husband and I were out on a date night and decided to use our last few minutes of babysitter coverage to browse in a bookstore, where I noticed the book and decided to buy it after page one made me laugh out loud.

I loved it. It was much more than a take on a joke e-mail. It was spiritual and funny, reverent and irreverent.  It reminded me in many ways of my own spiritual journey.  (And what's not to love there?)  It even (unknowingly) contained some commentary on what recovering sex addicts face in our culture (but more on that tomorrow).  The bit that inspired me was the author's relationship to the Sabbath.  At first, leaving work aside for a day and resting is an anxiety producing chore for Jacobs, who can't make it through the first evening without checking his e-mail.  But it gradually becomes his favorite day, the one around which the rest of the week revolves.

I thought about my own tendency toward constant work: how hard I push myself, how difficult it is for me to make time for rest and how overwhelmed with guilt and fear I become whenever I am not being "productive."  I thought about how freeing it had been when my computer was in for repairs recently, and I couldn't do some of my work.  And I thought the idea of a Sabbath, a day of rest devoted to spirituality, might be good for me.

I don't formally belong to any organized religion, so I can choose any day for my Sabbath and honor it in any way that works for me.  So I've been thinking about what it would look like to spend one day a week dedicated to my spiritual life and wondering how I can make it happen.  I don't have it all figured out yet, and I don't need to, but what I do know is that I've decided I'd like to make it part of my spiritual journey to find out.  And I suspect that will mean that, at least one day a week, I will turn off the Colbert Report and light some incense when I do the dishes.

I'm a party pooper.  I'm a downer.  I'm no fun.  I ruin other people's good times.  (Because I totally have control over other people's good times, you know.)

You see, yesterday Mark and I had plans to take the kids to a pumpkin patch.  We were going to let them run around and jump off hay bales and find pumpkins and navigate a kiddie corn maze.  But I woke up a few hours into my night's sleep when one wet child tried to climb in bed with me and an hour later when another child sniffling from the tail end of a cold woke up early and was ready to start the day.  And, as people who don't get enough sleep will be, I was cranky.  Bite your head off cranky.  Stab you in the eyeballs with a fork cranky.  Blast your eardrums straight out the top of your skull with my screams cranky.  That is, if I could open my bleary eyes long enough to find you.

I decided that I needed to go back to bed.  And that was a good decision.  But there was that whole pumpkin patch thing.  Now, the kids didn't know we were planning it, because I'm no fool or at least not so much of one as I used to be.  I know that my kids get so hyped up about exciting events that they can't sleep.  (Not that they slept anyway on this occasion.)  And then they become sorely disappointed (read: wail all day as if the world has ended) if someone gets sick or it rains or the car blows a tire and we can't go.  So I rarely tell them what we're up to until we're up to it.

I knew that they were none the wiser, but it still triggered that whole party pooper speech in my head.  That whole "I should work harder and do better" speech.  That whole "Why is it that everyone else in the world seems to be able to juggle jobs and sleep and housecleaning and taking their kids out to one freaking pumpkin patch once a year and I can't?!" speech.

I knew those speeches were coming from a place of exhaustion, but they were still pretty persuasive.  (You do have a point there, crazy voice in my head, I can be pretty sucky.)  But I went off to bed anyway.  And hours later, when I woke up, all the crazy talk was gone.  I took my son out to a park while my daughter went to a friend's house to play and Mark took a nap of his own, and suddenly I felt like the most together Mama ever.  Amazing what a little sleep will do to turn the party pooper into the life of of her own party.

A few months after I first met Mark in college, we ran into each other in a campus dining hall. As we chatted, he admired my high school class ring. I held my hand out to let him see it more closely, and peering down at the ring, he said, "Would you mind taking it off?" So, I took off my ring and handed it to him, expecting that he wanted to look at it more closely still. To my utter astonishment, he simply said "thank you," pocketed the ring and walked away. I stood there in the lobby, open-mouthed and paralyzed with wonder, like a newly carved statue. Had this man just stolen my ring? Was this a joke? Had he taken it to show it to someone else? Was he intending to come back? What did he mean by it? What kind of person does something so odd and unexpected? And what on earth do I do now?

Fortunately, Mark's roommate, who had witnessed the interaction, approached me. "Come on," he said wearily, as if this sort of thing happened all the time, "Let's go get your ring back." He led me, mute and meek, through the building until we finally found Mark in a game room, playing pool. "Mark," said his roommate, extending a palm, "the ring..." Mark smiled at me, looking both sly and awkward, as he handed over the ring, and I knew then that it had been a joke and that he was disappointed that I didn't (or didn't know how to) play along.

Eventually, I got used to Mark's odd tricks, spontaneous decisions, sudden new interests and chance conversations. He'd point over my shoulder and say brightly "Look over there!" while deftly swiping whatever was in front of me and seeing how long it took me to notice. We'd walk down the street, discussing what flavor we thought of when someone said "milkshake," and when we differed, he'd stop the next five random passersby to ask what they thought, as if he were Jay Leno and I were his camera. He'd decide he'd want to learn Russian or juggling or how to play the recorder. He'd strike up a conversation with a strange couple at the next table in a restaurant and leave with their phone numbers. I'd say I was thirsty, and he'd run out of the dormitory, returning with a plastic champagne glass from the cafeteria filled with soda and a flower from the nearest accessible blooming plant.

And I greeted it all with a mix of delighted awe and nagging discomfort. I loved that he did these crazy things that I was too scared, too shy, too bound by rules, too afraid of failure to do myself, and as I grew used to him, little by little, I started to feel more comfortable with spontaneity and novelty both in him and in myself, which I thought was a good thing. Yet I'd often find myself appalled and apologetic. "Yes, I'm sorry he took your coffee cup. It was a joke. He does those things," and like Mark's roommate had, I learned to take care of the people he startled or embarrassed or to tie up the loose ends he left straying behind him like jester's ribbons.

When, years later, he admitted to his sex addiction, much of that spontaneity didn't seem like fun anymore. I started to see that some of his tricks and jokes were ways to test people's limits, that collecting contact numbers wasn't always in the name of friendship and that he hadn't taken Russian so much from a sudden passion for the language as a sudden passion for a Russian classmate. And in an attempt to protect myself from more hurt, I started to wall off and become even more of a compulsive planner, even more rigid about rules, even more strict about structure, even more wedded to routine than I ever had been before.

Spontaneity is still extremely difficult for me. The other night Mark came home after the kids were asleep and said, "Honey, I'd like to take a shower and then make love to you." And as he showered, my mind raced: "That's not right! That's different. It's supposed to be make love first and then take a shower. That's the way it always has been. Has he been with someone else? Is that why he wants to take a shower first?" For a moment, I was as paralyzed as the first time he took my ring and walked away. What did he mean by it? What kind of person does something so odd and unexpected? And what on earth do I do now?

But I have a new guide within me now. One that gently led me to see that a shower was hardly a purloined ring, and not being able to tolerate even so small a change in routine without pain is the damage of disease. But it also led me to see that the gift of recovery is being able to talk to my husband honestly about it rather than pretending the fear and anxiety don't exist (because they "shouldn't"). And I trust that eventually, as my recovery continues, my need for that protective wall of structure will slowly slip away into balance with a new and healthy spontaneity.

There is a parable in the book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People about a person who works harder and harder to saw down a tree because of a perception that there is no time to stop, take a break and sharpen the saw. I have never been a big saw sharpener. I like to push and push and say, "Just this one more thing and then I can take a break. I'll stop when this is finished. It would be selfish of me to stop when other people aren't." And because I'm a perfectionist, I have rarely been able to get that one more thing to a state where it is finished enough to satisfy me, so I hack away endlessly at that tree with an old toothless saw.

This summer, my kids been staying up later, enjoying the long summer days, and I have been getting less by extension. We've had more visitors, as people travel in the summer and between the kids and the guests, I haven't had much time for solitude, something I deeply need to sharpen my own mental and spiritual saw. I've been striking a better balance than in years past, by prioritizing and cutting back on activities (like blogging), but as the summer draws to a close I've still be exhausted and cranky in a way that I'm not during the school year, when I can count on a little time each day where I can at least use the bathroom without anyone needing me. And, unlike in times past, I could recognize the wear and the need for time to repair it before I collapsed.

So, a few weeks ago, Mark volunteered to watch the kids while I took the weekend off. It wasn't anything fancy, just a cheap room in a nearby hotel for two nights. And I didn't do anything fancy, just slept and watched a few cheesy movies I'd rented. But when I came back home, I felt so much better. As soon as I walked through the door, Mark said, "You look so much more relaxed." And I was.

I was also profoundly grateful that, guilty as I felt about taking time for me and spending money (especially with both the economy and Mark's work situation a little shaky) on me, I was able to do it: able to have the resources and help I need to make it possible right now and able, through the past years I've spent working my recovery, to ask for what I need and allow myself to do it.

I'm not one to keep busy during the summer, at least not in the sense of running the kids from place to place, activity to activity.  Yet, not being busy — whether inside inside the house playing board games or (more often) just keeping the kids from driving each other crazy, or outside swimming or at the park or at a library or museum — isn't always relaxing.  Well, it is for the kids: just not entirely for the mama who has to make sure that those kids stay fed and safe and moderately hygienic, the mama who (since those kids are entirely school free) gets not a moment alone.  (If you're a mom to young kids, you can know this can quite literally be true; not even bathroom time is sacred!)  And since those moments alone are the way this particular mama recharges her batteries, summer can be draining.  It's a good thing I don't have anything planned, as I could hardly be productive at it...

So evenings — when I slate some time to take part in everything from 12 Step to yoga — become a delicate self-care balancing act.  This week as I got ready for my 12 Step meeting, I felt drained by the mere thought of it.  Sit in a room with people?  Who are talking?  Ugh!  All I wanted, what I would have paid dearly for, was a quiet room where I could sit down by myself for a few minutes.  So when the time came to leave, I didn't go.  I went upstairs, shut and locked the door, turned on some white noise to drown out all human sound and took a deep, refreshing breath of solitude.

It's funny, for four years I didn't go to 12 Step meetings, and now I feel a little twinge of guilt whenever I miss one, even when I know that what I'm missing it for is important too.  So I did feel a little twinge, but only a very little.  It was gone by the time I exhaled.

There's a picture of me somewhere, when my son was a few months old, sitting at the computer and uploading pictures of him to share. I got lots of advice to sleep when the baby slept. I was told by plenty of people that those early sleepless days of parenthood are temporary, that things settle down eventually and I would sleep again. When that shift happened, I would have time for those things I ought to put off in favor of sleep now. That all made sense to me, yet I look at that picture and think about how isolated I felt and how desperately I wanted to do something that wasn't caring for an infant or sleeping, in spite of my utter, mind-numbing exhaustion. I was shocked at how completely my life, and even my body, was not my own anymore and I was determined to wrench some part of my time back to me, even at the cost of much needed rest.

I can't always see what self-care looks like. Was it good self care to push through sleep deprivation to do something that was fun for me and helped me reach out of my isolation to connect with loved ones? Or was it bad self care to add to the exhaustion that exacerbated my postpartum depression and contributed to near daily migraines?

It's something I struggle with to this day. I've had a tough week, full of difficult situations and painful emotions. And I've had to ask myself: is it good self care to skip exercise and meditation in favor of sleep or to skip sleep in favor of exercise and meditation? It's certainly not good self care to down several sugary, caffeinated Cokes and handfuls of cookies in order to stay awake. But it's also not good self care to snap at my kids and my husband because I haven't been able to carve out a quiet moment to myself to connect with my higher power and unwind.

The best I can do is feel my way through, because while I don't always know what self care looks like, I do know what it feels like, and I know, based on how I feel now, that whatever I have been doing, hasn't been quite the kind of self care I need right now.

Earlier this week, I had a rough morning with my daughter, my son was sick, I had an IEP meeting scheduled (those of you who don't know what that is, be glad you don't) and on top of it all, I couldn't find a family pet (which would later turn up dead). After I got my daughter off to school, I called my husband Mark at work. He answered the phone hurriedly, as he often seems to at work, and said, "Is everything ok? Can I call you back?" This is the point at which I usually answer, "Yes, it's ok. Call me back."

I tend to treat calls to Mark like calls to 911: unless it's a life threatening emergency, I let him go. And there wasn't anything so wrong. There wasn't anything he could do; I didn't need him to rush to meet me at a hospital anywhere. I had one kid with a cold and another still on the cranky tail end of one and I couldn't find a pet that would probably turn up just fine in an hour or so. I thought I "should" be able to deal with that without interrupting his work day. But instead, I said, "No. No, I'm not ok."

I told him we were all well, but I was scared and worried about our pet. I told him that I was stressed and exhausted from caring for sick kids, and I just wanted to hear a safe, friendly voice: the voice of someone who loved me. I felt terribly guilty for taking time from his day for something so seemingly trivial. But it felt good to talk to him. It was what I needed right then. When I hung up the phone, I looked at the time the call had taken: 5 minutes and 9 seconds. And I thought, "That was it? That was the huge, unreasonable need I was so reluctant to ask him to meet?" Five minutes on the phone with my husband, my life partner and very best friend, out of a work day that usually lasts twelve hours. Five of the 720 minutes he works. Less that a hundredth of one workday.

Look at that. My needs aren't the huge burden my distorted thinking would sometimes have me believe. And it's ok to ask for help when I need it, even if I feel I "shouldn't" need it. Years into recovery, that is still hard to remember, and harder still to execute, but it still feels so good when I do.

When my son Austen was two, my husband disclosed his addiction and spent a morning on the phone desperately looking for a marriage therapist willing to see us on a weekend. But once we had that appointment, having no family nearby, we had to spend another crazed interval looking for someone who could watch Austen while we went out. And I still remember how I, unable to bear speaking to anyone, I covered my puffy, red eyes in sunglasses and waved from the car, like a devastated celebrity, while Mark dropped Austen off with some friends of ours.

There's nothing like having your marriage almost fall apart to scare you into spending time working on it (and nothing like falling apart yourself to scare you into working on yourself). And thus began our own need for regular, reliable childcare. But where to find the right person? We've tried a number of methods, as have other friends with special needs children, and (without giving away any anonymity blowing details) here are some things that have either worked for us or for others:

• Post "sitter wanted" notices at local colleges, universities or training schools. Look for places that offer programs in child development, nursing, occupational therapy, speech therapy, psychology, etc. Students in these programs will be most likely to be interested in (and most likely to be skillful at) caring for children with special needs.
• Ask friends with special needs children if they know a good sitter.
  
• Ask your child's teacher or school for leads.
• Use a private nanny or sitter agency. Private agencies can sometimes help find caregivers for children with special needs. There are even some agencies who specialize in finding help for special needs children. Be sure to let the agency know what your child's needs are so they can help find the best match.
• Check for respite services available in your state.

The advantage of using an agency or service is that most will do some type of pre-screening in the form of: an interview, a background check, a reference check or some combination of all of these. (When hiring my sitters I make sure to do all of these, either myself or in combination with an agency.) The disadvantage of private agencies is the higher cost of their services, while the disadvantage of state or local agencies is that you may not have the same individualized choices available with your own search or a private agency.

In addition, some states subsidize respite care services for individuals with disabilities, so getting out may not be as expensive as you think. I was not able to find a nice, easy nationwide "who to contact" database, but a state Department of Health and Human Services or Social Services or a state agency dealing with disability services is a good place to start.

In the six years since that day when we dropped Austen off with friends for an hour to rush out to the emergency therapy session that started us on the road to saving our marriage and sanity, we have made an effort to go out kid-free (for therapy, meetings, religious/spiritual services or just date nights) once a week. So, we've had ample opportunity to try many of the methods above for finding sitters. We have had a number of wonderful sitters, who were with us for years and whom we've been deeply sorry to lose when they had to move on, and we've had some truly awful ones who didn't make it past the first visit. And we've found a method for finding sitters that works for our individual family. So, in spite of the fact that we lost a sitter recently, I do know that we have a very good process for replacing her.

Next up... Training a babysitter to watch a special needs child...

I am getting better at saying no, when I mean no, but it's still an area where I have a lot of work to do. Saying "yes" to requests is like a reflex to me. Tap my knee and my foot bounces up, ask me for help and I say, "Yes." Oops. Wait. Let me think about that. The "yes" is so deeply ingrained that I don't always see it...

I learned early on that "no" was not an acceptable answer, at least not if people pleasing me wanted to continue to please people. The folks in my life would give lip service to saying no — "You should get your priorities straight and learn how to say no" — but the message that rubbed itself into me was: "You should learn how to say no to other people, but not me" or maybe "You should learn how to handle saying yes to everyone else and no to yourself." This meant "I can do anything if I want to" warped itself years ago into "I should be able to do everything if I just try hard enough." And with that came an endless string of yeses.

In my senior year of high school, I was taking a full load of courses, most of them for college credit. I was applying to colleges. I was studying for SAT exams. I was participating in extracurricular activities and doing part-time and volunteer work. I was trying to enjoy the last little bit of time left I had with the friends who were like a second family to me. And through it all I was getting straight A's, right at the top of my class. If someone gave me an assignment or asked me to do something, like a good young codependent/workaholic, I did what it took (at whatever hidden cost to my physical, emotional and mental health) to get the job done.

One of the classes on my schedule that year was Advanced European History, a class I'd been looking forward to taking (yes, I was a nerdy child) after enjoying the introductory level of same subject a few years earlier with a different teacher. But it wasn't long before I found I hated both the class and the teacher. (Hated isn't too strong a word here either; over twenty years later, I ended up having to put that teacher on my resentment list when I was working on my Fourth Step.) The cost of being in the class — the drain on my time, energy, resources and emotions — just wasn't worth it to me. Recognizing my limits (in a surprisingly good and healthy way), I decided to drop the class.

The teacher kept me after class and said (in what was supposed to be a motivating way) that he knew I could handle the work, and dropping the class was just an indication that I was lazy. The criticism stung, as only criticisms that strike a nice, rich vein of insecurity can. Here I was, by all external measures an excellent student and citizen, working each day from dawn to dusk, and I really, deep down did feel like it would be lazy to take care of myself by dropping this one class. I hated that teacher because I thought he saw right through to the idle, worthless core of my being. And I can hear that voice whispering even today whenever I sit down, whenever I stop, whenever I say no: "Work harder, do better. You're just not trying hard enough. If you tried harder, if you were better, you wouldn't need to stop, to rest or to say no."

So, learning how to say "no" doesn't mean learning to form the word and let it float off my lips; it means learning to cope with people pushing back on my boundaries. It means learning to withstand the firestorm of criticism that can follow. It means learning to be completely free from the need for external validation. It means learning to be enough for myself no matter what anyone thinks of what I do. It means being ok with the possibility (or reality) of losing awards and accolades and jobs and promotions, with losing social standing and the respect of my peer group, with losing friends and family members. It means being ok with "losing." It means finding my truth and knowing how to live in it.