Working incredibly hard. Keeping everything going. Being the most amazing mother/wife/ daughter/friend. Always thinking of others, sacrificing constantly.
Most of us, as women, will have been complimented on one or all of those virtues at some point in our lives, and applauded them in female friends. Made to guess though, I’d say no woman has ever been celebrated for selfishness. Probably, we’ve not praised a friend for always putting herself first and – least likely – measured ourselves and our success by how self-centred we are. Because selfishness is not our training, or our MO in ordinary times and even less in a pandemic.
We were the ones, provenly, more likely to sacrifice income to home-school. Anecdotally, it was us turning over our desks, bedrooms and kitchen tables to partners and children, and managing our own career from the stairs. Us, putting in welfare calls to parents, letting no WhatsApp go answered, while operating an industrial catering operation on the side, or acting as companion-animal to roommates.
But now that, please-universe, normal life is returning, is it time to put ourselves first? I don’t mean, by reinstituting the hour a week of socially sanctioned me-time, which our pre-Covid selves took towards the seemingly-ultimate female virtue that is work-life balance. I mean, having done and lost so much lately, have we earned the right to be properly selfish, for a reason entirely and individually ours, just for a season?
The only way to do the thing I’d delayed my entire adult life, out of learned selflessness, was to put myself absolutely, utterly first, and for an entire year
I became a mother at 25 and gave up my not-yet-blossoming career at The Times to be at home with my daughter and two years later her sister. It was a choice and I was grateful to be able to make it, but in doing so, I signed myself up for a decade and half of coming last. Then in 2019, age 42, daughters both teenagers, I realised or, rather, remembered I wanted to write a novel.
I’d heard an author say writing 'can’t be as well as, it has to be instead of' and it is true. The only way to do the thing I’d delayed my entire adult life, out of learned selflessness, was to put myself absolutely, utterly first, and for an entire year. The work was hard but far harder was the guilt that went with being that selfish, for that long.
Also. It was also the best thing I have ever done. The happiest I have ever been. I made no attempt at balance. It damaged friendships. It cost my family. And, selfishly, I don’t regret it.
'Write a novel' could stand for start a business. Finish a degree, single-mindedly save for something, paint, act or (soon) travel. Whatever it is that, if you don’t, you’ll never feel like you.
For my friend with three children under four, selfishness is taking annual leave from motherhood, going away by herself for two weeks a year. It is hard, against her instinct, and she has felt judged for it but she also knows, deep down, it’s critical to her coping, the rest of the time. For another, it’s deciding that she won’t, post-pandemic, be the sibling who plans, hosts and caters every-single-family-function-ever. I know, from experience, there’ll be raised eyebrows, shock, outright ire the first time she says no.
But if family eating semi-thawed lasagne in her brother’s unhoovered-flat enables her to keep everything else going, if annual leave makes my friend a better mother/wife/friend, if my year as a novelist showed my daughters hard work and a sort of sacrifice – that is, all the things deemed praiseworthy in women – we should be admired or at least privately admire ourselves for the first, necessary virtue of selfishness.
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason is published by W&N in hardback, eBook and audio download__, out now.
READ MORE: No, It Isn't Selfish To Have A Baby Later In Life