Depending on the Kindness of Ourselves: Why Self-Care Isn't Selfish
- righttrackparentin
- Feb 17
- 12 min read
I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
When Blanche DuBois speaks this line in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, it's one of the most heartbreaking moments in American theater. She's being led away to a psychiatric hospital, utterly broken, clinging to the validation of a stranger because she has nothing left inside herself to hold onto.
Blanche is tragic not because she needed help—we all need help—but because she had no way to help herself. She sought validation everywhere except from within. She depended on the kindness of strangers because she couldn't offer kindness to herself.
As parents, we risk becoming Blanche—depleted, desperate for someone to rescue us, unable to see our own strength. We give and give and give until there's nothing left. We wait for someone else to notice we're drowning. We depend on others to tell us we're doing okay, that we matter, that we're worthy of care.
But there's another way.
What if we learned to depend on the kindness we show ourselves?
The Energy Vampire Reality
Children need us completely. Not just when they're infants—though that newborn phase feels like being consumed by a tiny, adorable vampire who feeds on sleep and sanity. No, they need us for years.
They need us to feed them, clothe them, answer their endless questions, wipe their tears, break up fights, find lost shoes, pack lunches, attend school events, drive carpool, stay up late helping with homework, listen to friendship drama, teach them how to be good humans.
It's not their fault. It's developmental reality.
But without self-care—without actively, intentionally being kind to ourselves—we become depleted, resentful versions of ourselves. We snap at small things. We feel guilty for feeling resentful. We wonder who we even are anymore besides "Mom" or "Dad."
We become energy vampires ourselves, sucking joy out of moments because we're running on empty.
I learned this the hard way.
June 1998: When Kindness to Myself Saved Me
I was married to my first husband Steve for six years when things fell apart. In April 1998, we'd just signed a lease on a rental home. Our daughter Calli had turned two in February. Our son Michael would be one at the end of May.
And I found myself at a crossroads I never imagined I'd face.
I was considering an exit plan from my marriage. I loved Steve so much. I loved the little family we were creating. But I could no longer trust the situation we were in. One week after we moved into the new rental, I spotted his truck in a shopping center parking lot while heading to the grocery store. I pulled in and discovered him using drugs.
My world shattered.
I had a toddler and a one-year-old who needed me to keep them safe. I kicked him out of the house. He went to a halfway house nearby. He got an amazing sponsor—Herman, who would eventually become Eva's godfather and who had such an incredible soul. (He died about ten years ago, and I still miss him.)
In mid-May, Steve came to the house to stay with Calli and Michael while I went out with friends. When I came home late that night, I succumbed to my deep love for him.
Baby Eva was made.
When the pregnancy was confirmed, I was utterly confused. My thoughts spiraled:
Maybe my fate is to work through this? I honored my wedding vows before God—maybe God sent me a baby to say "stick at this"? I chose Steve knowing about his issues, believing he was just young and would change. Will he do the right thing for me? I love being a mom—I can just focus on my children, right?
After Steve completed the halfway house program and had gone to 90 meetings in 90 days, I allowed him to move back in.
And then I did something that saved my mental health: I started keeping a daily gratitude journal.
From June 1998 to June 1999, I wrote in it every single day. I had a toddler, a one-year-old, and was pregnant with my third child. We named her Evangeline—from the Greek Evangelia, meaning "good news." Even in the midst of profound uncertainty about my marriage and my future, I chose to see her as good news. That naming was an act of gratitude itself.
Life was objectively hard. My marriage was fragile. I was exhausted. I questioned everything about my choices and my future.
But that gratitude journal became my anchor when everything else felt unmoored.
The journal didn't fix anything external. Steve's recovery was his journey, not mine. The uncertainty didn't disappear. The fear didn't evaporate.
But writing down what I was grateful for every single day—even on the hardest days when I had a toddler melting down, a one-year-old refusing to nap, pregnancy exhaustion, and a marriage in crisis—gave me an internal foundation that no one could take away from me.
That daily practice was an act of kindness to myself. It was self-care in its purest form.
The Research Backs This Up
Years later, when I enrolled in Dr. Martin Seligman's Foundations of Positive Psychology course at the University of Pennsylvania, I learned the science behind what I'd discovered intuitively in 1998.
Gratitude isn't just a nice idea. It's one of the most powerful tools we have for well-being.
Research shows that people who regularly practice gratitude experience:
Improved mental health and reduced depression
Better sleep quality
Stronger relationships
Increased resilience during difficult times
Greater life satisfaction overall
Gratitude rewires your brain to notice what's working, even when everything feels broken.
In my case, gratitude didn't fix my marriage (Steve and I eventually divorced in 2014). But it gave me the emotional stability to make clear-headed decisions about what I needed and what my children needed. It gave me energy to show up as a parent even when I was running on fumes.
It kept me from becoming Blanche—waiting for someone else to save me.
Self-Care Isn't Selfish
Somewhere about five years after having my first three children (my first child was nine days past her third birthday when baby #3 came along), I made a conscious decision: taking time for me to pray, exercise, or ponder the Universe would be necessary if I was going to maintain my mental and emotional health.
I concluded that carving out time for myself wasn't a selfish act—it was an act of self-love.
I realized I could not give all day long to my then-husband, my three small children, my two dogs, and the children and families I served as a speech-language therapist without exhausting myself.
Once I made the decision to work some time for myself into my days, I felt more energized, hopeful, and at peace when the demands and challenges of life were happening.
Here's what I learned through experience (and what research on self-care confirms):
The Paradox of Self-Care: Whenever I minimized the importance of self-care, gave it up, or forgot about it, my joy and gratitude as a parent plummeted and I wasn't as good of a parent as I wanted to be. But when I prioritized self-care—even in small ways—I had more energy to give, not less.
Regular and consistent matters more than grand gestures: I tried signing up for a twice-weekly exercise class. I loved it. I desperately wanted to feel invigorated by exercise and came to depend on the endorphin boost I received from working out. But "Mommy guilt" set in (or my husband-at-the-time dropped the ball on parenting in my place, so I told myself I had to be there for my kids), and I wasn't able to maintain the self-care regimen. Trying to find time or fit it in on an inconsistent or irregular basis definitely doesn't work for me. Self-care needs to be woven into the fabric of your life, not added as an afterthought.
Saying yes to everyone else means saying no to yourself: For years, I was unable to say "no" when someone asked me to volunteer at my kids' school. I became known as one of the reliable parents who would always say "yes." It felt like self-care to be doing activities with other adults—plenty of adult conversation, problem-solving, and physical activity. But since my kids were with me and I was always there to help others, it wasn't truly self-care. I was missing out on "me" time when I could let my mind wander while walking in the woods, write my novel, and dream about ways to build my private speech-language therapy business.
When I finally realized that making more space for myself would require me to stop allowing others to beg me to help out and to choose how I would spend my time, I was much happier as a parent.
Self-Care Snacks: When You Can't Find Time for a Full Meal
One idea that came to me while reading Julie Burton's book The Self-Care Solution for my parent coaching coursework is what I call "self-care snacks."
When it's difficult to find time as a parent to eat, we snack on a bit of food. When we can't find a full night's sleep, we take naps.
Along those same lines, we can snack on self-care when we don't have a lot of time to devote to it.
Self-care snacks take 30 seconds to 5 minutes. They're not meant to replace deeper self-care practices (just like snacks don't replace meals), but they sustain you between bigger moments of care.
Examples of self-care snacks:
Write a quick note in a gratitude app or journal
Do 5 air squats or stretch your arms overhead
Give yourself a hug (seriously—wrap your arms around yourself and squeeze)
Concentrate on a photo of your child and think about the good feelings that happened in that moment
Send a quick "thinking of you" text or gif to a valuable friend or family member
Open the fridge or pantry and smell a food you love
Count clouds in the sky for 30 seconds
Take three deep breaths and notice how your body feels
Listen to one favorite song all the way through
Step outside and feel the sun (or rain) on your face
With the idea of self-care snacking in mind, parents won't have to feel like this is one more thing to add to their "to-do" list. The self-care snacking can take place throughout the day in small spurts to help them be better, more calm, more joyful parents.
Timelines: Remembering Your Strength
Another self-care practice I discovered through grief work has become essential to how I support parents.
When I lost my second husband Chip to cancer in 2020, I attended a grief support group. The grief counselor encouraged us eight widows and widowers to make a grief timeline—to look back at all the challenging transitions we'd already weathered in life (parents divorcing, moving homes as a child, loss of a job, losing a pet, relationship endings) in order to better understand how grief was affecting us after losing our spouses.
The timeline showed me something crucial: I had survived hard things before. I had coping mechanisms I'd already developed. I had resilience I'd forgotten about.
This practice translates beautifully to parenting. Life is full of transitions and challenging times. Being aware of the "coping and self-soothing mechanisms" you've employed in the past can help you deal with the stresses of parenthood.
Two timeline practices for parents:
1. Life Transition Timeline: List times in your life when you dealt with challenges and got past them. What did you do? Who helped you? What inner resources did you draw on? This brings awareness of how you sought happiness and resilience in the past so you can apply it to bringing happiness to the challenges of parenthood.
2. Happiness Timeline: Identify moments in your life when you felt genuinely happy, content, at peace. What were you doing? Who were you with? What conditions supported that happiness? This helps you tap into the happiness you felt at other times in your life to help you through the challenges of parenting.
These timelines remind you that happiness and resilience come from the inside—and that you've accessed them before.
Breaking Generational Patterns: The Deepest Self-Care
Here's something I've learned through years of therapy, parent coaching training, and lived experience:
We're all healing from something.
Neglect. Parents who were alcoholics or who were overly critical of us. Fears we inherited. Losses we never processed. Wounds we didn't even know we were carrying until our children triggered them.
As I wrote in a previous blog: those unhealed wounds become our children's wounds. We pass them on—not because we're bad parents, but because unexamined pain doesn't just disappear. It travels.
My childhood wound told me that mistakes were unforgivable. That I had to be perfect to be loved. That my truth was too much, too messy, too inconvenient.
And I almost passed that wound to my children.
I almost taught them to hide their struggles. To present a perfect face to the world. To believe that vulnerability equals weakness.
But self-care—deep, authentic self-care—isn't just about bubble baths and gratitude journals (though those help). It's about confronting our wounds without shields and swords.
It's about doing the hard work of healing—through therapy, through honest conversations with friends, through acts of kindness to ourselves, through love that asks us to grow—so that we don't unconsciously hand our children the same broken scripts we inherited.
When I share this story about Steve and the gratitude journal, I'm doing something really brave—not just sharing the story, but breaking the generational pattern that says my truth is a mistake.
My kids will see their mom being honest, vulnerable, and strong. That's powerful modeling.
They'll learn that it's safe to tell the truth about hard things. That survival stories matter. That we don't have to pretend everything was always fine.
This isn't a mistake. This is me becoming even more fully myself.
And that's the deepest form of self-care: choosing to heal so that the next generation doesn't have to carry what we carried.
Being Kind to Ourselves So We Can Show Up for Others
Here's what Blanche DuBois never learned: You cannot pour from an empty cup.
When we depend entirely on the kindness of strangers—or even the kindness of our partners, our parents, our friends—we give away all our power. We become fragile. We break when the external validation stops coming.
But when we learn to depend on the kindness we show ourselves, we become unshakable.
Self-care isn't selfish. It's how we show up fully for the people who depend on us.
My children needed me—desperately, completely—during those years when I was keeping a gratitude journal with a crumbling marriage and a surprise pregnancy. If I had waited for someone else to rescue me, to tell me I was doing okay, to make space for my needs, I would have shattered.
Instead, I rescued myself. One gratitude entry at a time.
Investigative Parenting and Self-Care
Here's how the Investigative Parenting framework applies to self-care:
Wonder before you worry: When you're feeling depleted, resentful, or disconnected from yourself, wonder: What am I missing? What do I need right now? What would feel like kindness to myself? Don't immediately worry that you're a bad parent for needing something.
Imagine before you interpret: When you feel guilty about taking time for yourself, imagine what it would look like to model self-care for your children. Imagine them learning from you that their needs matter, that rest is productive, that kindness to oneself is strength, not weakness. Don't interpret your need for self-care as selfishness.
Create before you catastrophize: When you can't find time for a full workout or a weekend away, create self-care snacks throughout your day. Create small rituals that anchor you. Create a gratitude practice or a happiness timeline. Don't catastrophize that you're failing at self-care because you can't do it perfectly.
Your Turn: What Does Kindness to Yourself Look Like?
Take a moment to reflect:
What self-care practices have sustained you in the past? (Even if you've let them go, they're worth remembering.)
What self-care snacks could you incorporate into your day this week?
If you created a Life Transition Timeline or Happiness Timeline, what patterns would you notice about your resilience?
What would it look like to depend on the kindness you show yourself, rather than waiting for someone else to offer it?
The Kindness We Owe Ourselves
Blanche DuBois is a cautionary tale. She valued herself only through the eyes of others. She had no internal anchor, no self-kindness, no way to depend on herself when the world stopped validating her.
We don't have to become Blanche.
We can be kind to ourselves—through gratitude journals that anchor us in storms, through self-care snacks that sustain us between bigger moments of rest, through timelines that remind us of our resilience and happiness.
We can teach our children that self-care isn't selfish—it's essential.
Because here's the truth: our children don't just need us to be present. They need us to be whole. They need us to model that taking care of ourselves makes us better able to take care of others. They need us to show them that depending on the kindness we offer ourselves is how we survive the hardest seasons of life.
That gratitude journal I kept from June 1998 to June 1999 didn't just save my mental health during a crisis. It taught me a lesson I've carried into every hard season since:
The kindness we show ourselves isn't a luxury. It's how we survive. It's how we thrive. It's how we show up fully for the people we love.
About the Author
Cynthia Z. Stevens Copeland, MA, CCC-SLP is a speech-language pathologist with 30+ years of experience and the founder of Right Track Parenting. She created the Investigative Parenting methodology, teaching parents to "wonder before you worry, imagine before you interpret, create before you catastrophize." A certified parent coach and student of Dr. Martin Seligman's Foundations of Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, Cynthia writes from lived experience as a mother of five scattered across three continents, a widow, and a fierce believer in the power of self-kindness. She lives in Vienna, Virginia with her youngest son and two dogs, who have collectively decided that Mom's random pausing, stretching, and cloud-gazing is just part of life—and honestly, they're not wrong.
© 2026 Cynthia Z. Stevens Copeland. All rights reserved.
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