Put Yourself on the List

It took a mid-year review to realize something obvious.

I wasn’t on my own calendar.

That sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud because I’m exceptionally good at calendars. I remember birthdays, deadlines, appointments, workshops, flights, articles to write, people to call, and the million invisible details that keep a life running smoothly. I colour-code. I make lists. I plan ahead. I know where everyone is supposed to be and when.

Somewhere along the way, I forgot to schedule the person responsible for all of it.

Not because I didn’t believe in self-care. I’ve spent years investing in my health. I see an osteopath. I have acupuncture. I book massage therapy, facial release, and lymphatic drainage. I walk to Scubby’s Point whenever my body allows it. I wander the labyrinth in my backyard when I need to hear myself think. I have a sauna steps from my back door. I own a red-light therapy mat. A rebounder waits patiently for me to climb on.

I have the tools.

What I don’t always have is the motivation that chronic pain quietly steals.

My right hip wakes me in the middle of the night. Sleep becomes fractured. Mornings become heavier. The very things that help me feel better somehow become the hardest things to begin. Anyone who lives with persistent pain knows this strange contradiction: the medicine isn’t hidden. It’s simply difficult to reach when your body is exhausted.

Then a friend sent me a mid-year reflection exercise.

One of the questions asked what I was most proud of in the first half of 2026.

The answer came easily.

In just two and a half months, I trusted myself in ways I never had before — the writing life rebuilt, the Playground filling with women making glorious, imperfect messes together, the podcast waking from its long nap.

For a season, I felt like a freight train.

Powerful.

Focused.

Unstoppable.

Then came the next question.

What has drained you?

That one took a little longer.

Not because I didn’t know the answer.

Because I wasn’t sure I wanted to admit it.

The momentum was exhilarating, but it came at a cost. I was carrying too much in my head. Plans multiplied faster than systems. I would design something brilliant, forget where I’d put it, and spend an afternoon recreating work I’d already done. I wasn’t just physically tired. I was mentally carrying the invisible weight so many women know by heart — the endless responsibility of remembering.

Earlier this year, Danielle LaPorte asked me what I needed, and I answered without thinking: “I need a wife.” If you’ve been reading a while, you know that story — I gave it a whole essay in June, and I stand by every word of it.

I already have wonderful people who help me with my home. I have a cleaner. I have a property guy. I have someone who can fix almost anything that breaks. I have a chef (as a result of that meeting). What I was missing wasn’t physical help.

What I really wanted was relief from the mental load. I wanted someone to remember with me.

Someone to carry a few of the invisible tabs permanently open in my brain.

That conversation changed something.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I stopped asking how much more I could accomplish.

I started asking a different question instead.

What kind of life am I trying to sustain?

The answer, it turns out, isn’t a better system. I’ve built beautiful systems. They multiply exactly as fast as the plans do.

The answer is tending.

And here’s the truth underneath all those appointments: I tend myself. I book the osteopath, remember the massage, drive myself there and drive myself home. Even my rest is something I administer. Women are taught to become caretakers first and foremost — and when the house finally empties, we simply take ourselves on as the last client.

So yes — put yourself on the list. That part I’ve learned. Putting yourself on the list is less about indulgence and more about stewardship.

But there’s a harder lesson underneath it, and I might as well say it plainly: being on my own list was never the summit. The summit is letting someone else do the tending.

Earlier this year, when my body was closing its hard physical chapter, my children took turns tending me.

And, not for the first time. They’ve all taken turns, girls and boys, tending their Mama. Years ago, Chloé standing with me in the shower after my breast reduction, squeezing blood out of my boobs. Cole at the hospital during a gallstone episode, while I was afraid I’d pass out. Caden helping me pick Bill up when he crashed onto the floor. And Claire, as I recovered from a hysterectomy, and was overwhelmed with my lack of self. I literally sat on a chair at the front of my home, looked outside and couldn’t read a book or binge a show. Every time, their kindness was a salve, a joy, a proof of what genuinely good people do.

And the first meal Nicole cooked in my kitchen, I sat at my own table like a guest.

There were prepared chia puddings in the fridge, a soup for heating later, and a lovely plated salad. Fresh arugula, chunks of fish, pepitas, some light cheese, and a blissful lemon dressing. All I did was approve the menu, and from there she did all the work, the purchase, prep, and presentation. It was delightful!

The shame had a voice, before it burned off. It said: This is your job. How can you not do this? Why will you not do this? You want “enough” and you deserve nothing.

It sounded reasonable. It always does.

It burned off the way fog does — not because I argued with it, but because the tending kept arriving and the world didn’t end. Dinner appeared. The calendar held. I was still me. Not diminished — tended.

So put yourself on the list. Colour-code yourself; it’s my love language too. And then practise the harder art: when someone offers to hold the pen — the meal, the errand, the remembering — say yes.

Let the list, once in a while, include hands that aren’t yours.

* Relevance. Ritual. Rebellion. *

Journal prompt: Open your calendar for the week ahead and look for your own name. If it isn’t there, write it in — a real appointment, kept like a client’s. Then the braver question: what’s one thing you could let someone else carry, and who would you trust to carry it?

Thanks for being here. If something in this landed, tap the heart or pass it along to a woman who keeps everyone’s calendar but her own.