Midnight Muse: Why “Me Time” Never Worked for Me

Jenn Locklear

2d (edited) • 🔥 Campfire + Wins

When I was a young mother, I heard other moms talk about me time the way Gollum talked about the ring.

Precious.

Rare.

Capable of saving everything.

It never worked like that for me.

I tried. I set aside time for prayer, reflection, meditation. Early on, it was possible—quiet moments folded gently into the day. But life sped up. Needs multiplied. Those moments became scheduled, then shorter, then negotiated.

What actually rests my brain isn’t indulgence.

It’s breath.

Silence.

Stillness.

And irony of ironies, I can usually find it—just not when I need it.

The house empties. No one needs anything. And a thoughtful neighbor fires up his saw and decides today is the day to become a craftsman for five straight hours.

So much for silence.

But that’s not even the real question.

The real question is this:

What about the in-between moments?

Why can’t we downshift for thirty seconds?

Why can’t we receive a small pocket of calm without stuffing it full—lists, what’s next, mental triage?

Or worse, numbing it out with the scroll, the game, the screen. The quiet dissociation we call a break.

And always—the guilt.

The never-enough.

The sense that rest must be paid for in advance.

That exhaustion is a kind of penance for not doing it just right.

We’ve heard the definitions before.

Guilt is when you break your own internal code.

Shame is when you break someone else’s.

So here’s the honest question no one asks:

Is this guilt even rational?

Have we not done our part?

The subconscious—our delusional cat-of-nine-tails—won’t help us answer.

The mirror won’t either.

It fogs over the moment we look.

And the truth we keep avoiding is this:

The responsibilities will never end.

We will be mothers forever now.

We don’t get to become someone who isn’t again.

These humans who came from us are not a daily task.

They are a life’s work.

And life’s work cannot be completed in a day.

So maybe the problem isn’t that me time doesn’t work.

Maybe it’s that we’ve been trying to rest inside a framework that assumes motherhood is temporary, guilt is deserved, and usefulness must never pause.

Maybe rest for mothers was never meant to look like escape.

Maybe it looks more like permission—brief, imperfect, and honest.

Five quiet minutes at a time.

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