Saunas and Sheet Masks: A Theology of Self-care

We have made it to February, my Dear Readers! February! And for those counting days a little differently, it’s Day 12 of the Resistance (actually, it’s been longer than that but …)! It’s time to revisit (or learn about) self-care.

Setting snark aside, winter in the Midwest is challenging never mind being a woman of color. These are trying, difficult times. I know that some people have wished their Facebook feeds to return to the days of  cat memes and news about everyone else’s perfect families (there was one woman in the neighborhood but she unfriended me). But my feed has never been void of politics, challenging news, religious commentary, and the occasional crock pot recipe. Social media for me was never about escapism, but I think for some people it was and because things are hitting closer to home or politics and policies are finally hitting you in a new way you’re exhausted. For others, like myself, we have been exhausted for a very long time.

But we were not designed and created to stay in a state of perpetual exhaustion and anxiety. God did not spend a metaphorical six days of creating to spend the seventh day fretting. We need to care for ourselves – physically, spiritually, emotionally, mentally, psychologically not only to fight against oppression and injustice but also to simply be. Our healthy whole selves, I believe, are meant to be a testimony to God’s goodness even in times like these. Especially in times like these. Because more and more of us are waking up to the reality that there are real people and forces who do not want many of us, particularly people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ, Muslims, to live, let alone flourish.

So, Kathy, what do you do to take care of yourself? What do you do for self-care?

I actually do a lot. You cannot work full-time, write on the side, help raise three children and not lose any of them on a road trip, stay married for what is now almost 24 years, love Jesus, and not do some level of self-care and not drop dead or hurt someone. And trust me, when I haven’t loved myself, respected myself I have hurt others. Ask my kids, my husband, my parents, my sister, my friends, my colleagues.

So self-care isn’t about spa treatments and weekend getaways, though those are AMAZING if you can afford them in time and money. Self-care isn’t about avoiding or numbing the pain. If I find myself roaming resale shops and the sale racks for no reason I know that I’m just trying to avoid dealing with myself and my pain. SeIf-care is restorative and preparation. Remember the year of beauty treatments Queen Esther had? I can’t help but wonder if that year also helped her be prepared to lead her people. So, on that note I think of self-care in three categories:

REST

Many of us are walking around sleep-deprived. I’m not talking about parents with infants or young children. I’m talking about all of us. We are also bombarded with information and glowing screens all the time, even the kiddos. Screen time isn’t restful, in fact, my own unscientific study of my friends’ Facebook posts recently have shown an uptick of people feeling more stress and anxiety from social media and wanting to take breaks. We need to rest. Remember, God took Day 7 OFF. Things to do for straight up rest include:

  • GO TO BED BEFORE MIDNIGHT. Lately I have been shooting for seven hours of sleep. (My kids are 21, 17, and 15 so I have other reasons to be up late and worried but sleep-training isn’t one of them.)
  • Take short naps if I need them.
  • Technology is my nemesis. I need to be better at getting off of my phone or computer at least one hour before I go to bed. Anyone want to be my accountability partner?
  • Nagging my spouse for years about his snoring. Turns out he has sleep apnea and now uses a CPAP machine. Very sexy. If your partner isn’t sleeping soundly chances are you aren’t either.
  • Cutting off caffeine at 3 pm but my problem isn’t caffeine. It’s the glass of wine with the evening news, which doesn’t help with sleep.
  • Readers. My eyes are older and turned against me last year and because I love to read, when the words started moving and growing fuzzy I gave in and bought some reading glasses to rest my eyes, which helped my headaches, which helped me sleep.
RESTORE

Once I had a better handle on a sleep pattern and rhythm (just like we try to do with our infants), needing rest wasn’t urgent because it was part of the routine. Feeling refreshed and restored is different than just getting enough sleep. I think of rest as turning off my engine. Restoration is filling my tank.

  • EXERCISE! This will also help the quality of your sleep. My favorites are walking, yoga, and kickboxing. Walking gets me outside into the fresh air. It gets me out of my head (I don’t always have my headphones on) and if I’m alone it’s my time to rant with Jesus. If I’m with friends, they are a stand-in for Jesus. Yoga has helped me connect my body awareness to my breathing. Kickboxing is great cardio, and I like to hit the bag.
  • Saunas and sheet masks are a given. I go to a Korean sauna monthly to sit in dry saunas and hot steam rooms. I go alone because silence is a good. I go with friends because friends who don’t care about seeing each other naked in the steam room are friends worth keeping. Sheet masks and general “spa” like things are about caring for my body as well as connecting with others. After the Women’s March it was sooooo good to be in a room with four other amazing Asian American women talking about the day, lying on our backs, moisturizing our faces, and delighting in each other’s company.
  • My tank needs 10 mg of Lexapro daily. No shame. My brain needs a daily adjustment. If you have healthcare, don’t get me started, GO SEE YOUR DOCTOR and make sure all your levels are where they need to be. I was worried I was falling into a deeper depression last year so I called up my doctor. Turns out I was anemic.
  • Spend time in community. When I am in a funk, the last thing I want to do is go out but it is often the thing I need to get myself out of myself. Invite friends over for dessert. Take lunch to a friend. Talk with other people. Be around other people.
READY (to go)

Like I said, this isn’t about spa treatments. This is about taking care of yourself because it’s not just about you. What is God inviting you to do, to become? I think of President Barack Obama’s chant, “Fired up? Ready to go!” I think of Jesus telling the disciples, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations…” or the angel telling the women at the tomb, “Come and see…go quickly and tell…”  I love moisturizing my skin, but our beautiful strong bodies are meant to go. How will you be ready? This is where I feed my heart, soul and mind.

  • Read. Do the work of feeding your mind. Read authors of color. Read fiction and non-fiction. Read poetry and young adult novels. Listen to audiobooks and podcasts if you don’t have the time to sit and read. (But remember, we always have time for the things we make time for.)
  • Use both sides of your brain. Look at art, listen to music and then make some art and dance to the music. Resistance takes work but there has to be joy and hope…and laughter. So tap into the joy and hope otherwise what are you fighting for?
  • I’m a Christian so I pray. I miss praying with friends so I’ll need to do that again/more. I pray aloud and silently. I write my prayers. I walk my prayers. I breathe my prayers.

So help me and each other out, my Dear Readers. What self-care practices do you keep or want to try? How can you help others practice self-care?

Beauty Pageants & Bible Stories

A former Navy reservist killed 12 and then turned the gun on himself yesterday, so why on earth am I still  blogging about racist comments directed at Miss America 2013 Nina Davuluri?

Because even things that don’t seem to matter can give me an opportunity to pause, learn, reflect, and apply to life. And everything I learned about beauty pageants I learned from the Bible before I watched my first Miss America pageant.

Felt-board Queen Esther became queen because her predecessor, Queen Vashti, refused her very drunk husband’s order to display her beauty to all the people, despite the fact that she was busy doing her own thing (Esther 1:11). King Xerxes and his wingmen/wise men decide she must be punished because if the queen can refuse to prance around in front of his drunk highness and his drunk friends then all women in the kingdom would assume they too could refuse their drunk husband’s requests. In order to put all women back in their place, a proclamation announcing the queen would be replaced and that every man should be ruler over his household (Esther 1:22) is sent to the entire kingdom “to each province in its own script and to each people in their own language”.

Esther becomes queen because she is beautiful and because she keeps her family background and nationality a secret. I don’t know what the Persian beauty standards were at the time, but Esther isn’t Persian. She is Jewish, and she hides it. And because she is beautiful she is rewarded. Sort of.

She wasn’t crowned Miss America. Miss America gets scholarship money, a national platform for a year for the cause of her choice, and the support and scorn of a country that worships and destroys all forms of beauty. Esther was crowned queen in title with no power, no platform. Would it be too crude to say she was a sex slave who was called into the king’s presence whenever it pleased him to see her? Or should I write “see” her? The kind had a type – beautiful virgins – and he liked to keep several around and name one queen. One day it’s Vashti, and then the next it’s Esther. It’s a man’s world, and it’s rolling with  beautiful women.

And that was part of the lesson I learned growing up – Queen Esther and Queen Vashti were beautiful, and there is a great deal of power and danger in that. You are set apart if you are beautiful. You are desirable if you are beautiful. And sometimes you have to hide who you really are to be considered beautiful. And then I learned all of that from the world around me, except that there were too many things I couldn’t hide. I couldn’t hide my “almond eyes” or flat nose. I couldn’t hide my un-American last name or the smells from my home. I couldn’t hide my brown hair and brown eyes. And as a little girl I played with dolls and watched beauty pageants – faces that never, ever looked like me or my mother or sister or aunt or anyone in my family. I was a chink and a gook and a jap. I was told to back to China, Japan, Viet Nam, but never Korea because most of my classmates had not yet learned of the Korean conflict. Even in high school I heard those words coupled with other profanity and saw words written on posters when I ran for class president. Some things you never forget because it’s important to remember. Kids are kids, but kids grow up to be adults to are examples to others…

Fortunately God does a lot of redeeming in my story and in Esther’s story. For Esther to find real power in her God-given identity she has to claim what she has hidden and denied. Her uncle, who once told her to hide her identity as a Jew asks Esther to use whatever power and access she has to speak out for her people, to speak out for what is right. Her uncle never says he was wrong, but he is asking to behave differently. She has to side with her people who are under threat of genocide, by defying the rules. She must risk death by approaching the king without being invited and hope he welcomes her, recognizes her (because it’s been more than a month since the king has seen this particular queen). She finds her voice, her identity, her power, and she speaks out against genocide, against the racist hate mongering, and she does it with strength and conviction and grace.

I’m still writing about the racist comments that may have disappeared in the constant flow of tweets, FB statuses and 24-7 news outlets because the Miss America pageant, as outdated, bizarre and sexist as it seems, the idea is as old as time. It’s as irrelevant and sexist as it relevant and sexist, which is to say I have no idea how God might redeem the Miss America pageant, but it’s not beyond God to do such a crazy thing. I’m not particularly fond of nor a fan of the pageant, but honestly if I could have won thousands of dollars in scholarship money because of my beauty I would not have thumbed my nose at that chance. And according to a PBS documentary on the Miss America pageant, someone like me or Ms. Davuluri or Vanessa Williams couldn’t have participated in the pageant in its heyday anyway.

But now we are a post-racial society with a lame duck, second term African American president and a Miss America of Indian descent.

The racist comments thrown at a beauty pageant winner matter because even if the laws say we belong, our neighbors, the ones I as a Christian am supposed to love, are spewing hate. My neighbors, who may even claim faith in the same God and Jesus I do, are the brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, friends and neighbors, of people who are using violent, ugly, racist language to remind me and millions of other Americans we don’t belong, are not welcome, are less than. Some of my neighbors are wondering why I’m spending so much time on Miss America when 12 people lost their lives in a shooting in Washington, DC.

It’s not either or.

You may not be on Twitter, but that doesn’t mean racism doesn’t exist. There are racist tweets about the shooting in DC just like there were about the new Miss America. Did you hold your breath when you heard about the shooting and hope, “Please, don’t let the gunman be White.”? (If you don’t understand the question, just trust me. There were plenty of Americans, Christian and not, who were hoping that the gunman wasn’t Black, Brown or Yellow.) The gunman, the murderer? He was Black. Did you hold your breath when you heard about the new Miss America and think, “It won’t be long before the racist comments hit the airwaves.”? (Are you thinking, “Why would anyone think that?” Trust me. There were plenty of Americans, Christian and not, who knew this racist stuff was going to happen.) The pageant winner? She is Brown. You can be the beauty or the beast but in America neither is safe from the vicious words and hearts of some of my racist neighbors. You can’t win.

But this isn’t about winning anymore than Esther’s story is about winning. What I also learned in the Bible is that God invites the most unlikely people in the most unlikely circumstances to do the most unlikely things. So who knows what is to become of the Miss America pageant or Twitter or who will be the heroes and the villains in the next tragedy. Esther’s story is about speaking truth, stepping out in faith, fighting for justice, finding your voice, leaning on others, owning your power and space, even if you think it’s crazy, or not your place, or something you’re really not interested in getting involved in right now because it isn’t your thing like risking your life or your reputation or your time on something as little as few hateful, vicious words written in English about someone who is my neighbor.

Will You Be Watching the Wedding?

I am not getting up at 3 a.m. to start watching the pre-show, but I will be watching Prince William marry Kate Middleton at some point during the day thanks to the dvr. And then I most likely will watch it again later in the evening with some friends. And I hope to laugh and giggle and learn a little bit about my friends and their weddings and marriages and share bits of mine as well.

Do you remember Lady Diana getting out of the carriage? Her head and feet with her hand reaching out for balance peeked out … and her dress kept spilling out, yards and yards of shantung silk all wrinkled but royal. She was getting ready to walk down the aisle to meet the Prince, if not her prince, to become a princess. I remember thinking that was the longest train I would ever see and I did dream and wonder what my own wedding would someday be like.

Here in my happy green office sits a tiara. I did not wear it in a beauty pageant or in my wedding. I wore it as the emcee to an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship women’s conference. Our speaker preached out of the book of Esther, and my shtick was to wear the tiara when coming up to make the sometimes awkward but important transition between prayerful silence to logistical announcements by paying homage to the story of Queen Esther, whose story I often heard spun more like a fairy tale than the story of deliverance and courage that it actually is.

The story of Queen Esther is one I go back to at least once each season because it makes me reconsider beauty, tradition, identity and courage. It makes me consider how we can read Esther’s story as a fairytale of an orphaned girl finding her place in a palace as queen or as a harsh story of a young girl winning a place as a concubine whose husband may or may not choose to acknowledge her.

Under all of the pomp and circumstance of this royal wedding are rules and traditions, beauty and glitter and the things beneath it all that aren’t so brilliant or beautiful but must have its place. And, in its circus-y, over-the-top way it is something I want to see and take in. I suspect it will be just as beautiful and simultaneously broken as the first royal wedding I saw, just as it was even in my own wedding.

So I think of William and Kate a bit like a fictional fairytale version of love and marriage and weddings and a bit like the true story that we are all a part of. I want so much to believe William and Kate will make it and not bear the sins of their parents, and I want to believe that even in real life there is a bit of happily ever after.

So I will be there in front of the tv at some point with my tiara.

Will you? And why or why not?