My firstborn was about 18 months old when I cracked a filling. It wasn't really painful, but it was sensitive and annoying, so a few days later, I drove the two-and-a-half hours to my mom's neighborhood, where I'd made an appointment with my childhood dentist since I didn't have one in the town we'd moved to six months before. I also didn't have a general doctor and had only recently started researching ob-gyns because I was thinking about getting pregnant again. (Of course, I had found a pediatrician and a dentist for my daughter long before we unpacked a single box in our new home.)
I left my daughter with my mom and headed into the dentist, where the dental hygienist greeted me, looked at my records, and informed me it had been over two years since my last visit, just a few months before I got pregnant with my daughter. I had been so busy taking care of her, both in utero and in real life, that I had most definitely forgotten about myself.
Sound familiar? Among the moms in my life, it seems to be a recurring theme. We are all on top of our children's health, making them their weekly, monthly, then biyearly, then yearly well visits as they get older, running to the pediatrician any time they spike a fever or complain of an earache, taking them to the dentist every six months, and driving them to specialists to diagnose and fix any potential ailment. They are our charges, and it is our job to keep them well.
And in the process, we often completely forget about our own health. We might drag ourselves to urgent care when we realize that waiting out whatever we've come down with isn't working, and of course, we'll see our ob-gyn regularly in the years that we are trying to grow our families. But once we have them, those families take over our consciousness, and suddenly, it's been almost three years since you've been to a dentist.
If you are guilty of forgetting about your own health and wellness since you've become a mom, here are some simple steps to reprioritize yourself and why it's so important.