What’s your favorite childhood memory? I was asked this recently at a conference I attended and I was totally stumped! Here I am 49 years old and I can’t remember one memory that I would consider a “favorite”.

It was my first time attending an in-person conference since 2019 and it was amazing to be in a room filled with over 300 women that had all come for the same reasons: connection, inspiration, support, self- care, and to learn something new.

So here I sat in a room full of other women I had never met before being asked to answer the question, “what is your favorite childhood memory?” After nervously searching my mind for an answer, I was able to access one memory that stands out as a positive experience for me. It was the memory of taking the train to Florida from Maine with my mom and my brother.

The way self-care is portrayed today is completely and utterly backward. First, self-care as a concept is almost exclusively aimed at women (generally wealthy white women who can afford the goods and services that get marketed to them as self-care). The not-so-subtle suggestion is that women need to be reminded to care for themselves because, after all, they are so busy taking care of everyone else. And the even less-subtle suggestion is that while we should be taking care of ourselves, that doesn’t absolve us from taking care of everyone else.