Guilt-Free Me-Time Story by TRACY GARDNER BENO Photos by JANNA COUMOUNDOUROS
The title alone sounds delicious. For many of us, it also sounds unrealistic, unattainable and unnecessary. It shouldn’t. Finding time in our busy schedules for Me-Time is not only a luxury, it is vital to our emotional and physical well-being. Busy is a loaded word these days. Many women feel pulled in all directions at once except inward. We are often the living definition of the “sandwich generation.” According to the Pew Research Center, just over 1 in every 8 Americans aged 40 to 60 is both raising a child and caring daily for a parent, in addition to between 7 to 10 million adults caring for their aging parents from a long distance. Add to that the normal everyday schedules that encompass family commitments, work, school, extracurriculars, maintaining a household…the list is endless, different for each of us, but the end result leaves us wishing there were a extra few hours in the day—maybe then we could find time for ourselves. We don’t realize that the extra time is already there. The trick is in finding it. We all spend time each day on tasks that don’t necessarily need to be done—updating social networking profiles,
verite.mag spring 2014 |59|