A year ago a woman called me because she wanted a massage. She had found my number in a clinic where I used to work. When I visited Flora, I discovered that she had been trying to get pregnant for three years and was about to give IVF a go for the first time. She was anxious but hopeful. “I just want to do something nice for myself as I’ve heard IVF can make you feel crap,” she said.

Flora is now six months pregnant and I still give her regular treatments at her home, which I really enjoy. I know the areas she wants me to concentrate on (right shoulder, lower back, calf muscles) and when the treatment is over, I pull the curtains closed and leave the room without saying goodbye, so she can sleep. When you handle somebody’s body regularly, you get to know their likes and dislikes quickly. I have seen Flora from pre-conception to the third trimester and it gladdens me to see how things sometimes work to plan, and people do get lucky.

When I used to give massages every day in a clinic, I functioned like a knackered old machine. The children were young and R was in the throes of alcoholism and self-denial. After a day of running my hands over other people’s tense muscles, I would go home to unload the dishwasher, put the children to bed and start an argument. It felt like I was looking after everyone else but not doing anything for myself. I knew things had to change when, in a particularly irksome mood, I almost threw myself on to the massage table in front of a new client and said, “My back’s in agony. Do you think you could give it a quick rub?”

I had forgotten what my teacher at my college said: “If you treat lots of people, make sure you treat yourself.” It was a slightly twee message, but I see what she meant. In college, over the course of the year, I loved swapping treatments every week with other students. Because I experienced good and bad massages, I was more able to think about how I wanted to treat others. But when I qualified I stopped having massages because it seemed a bit of a faff and a waste of a good hour: expensive and frivolous. Alas, as I have since learned, depriving oneself if it’s not totally necessary nearly always backfires. I should have been less self-abnegating: playing the martyr was no fun for anyone.

Learning self-care doesn’t have to be about massage, scented candles and “me time”. It can be about anything that makes you feel good. It just has to feel like relaxation, and not hard grind. You can marry the two, of course, if you get the balance right.

Now I am so much better at practising self-care: I feel like I’m looking after myself enough so that I don’t begrudge looking after others. When R relapses, I know how to make myself feel better, even if it takes me a while to do that thing. I can still feel shit about the situation, but I realise that doing something for myself can be approached with the same sense of duty as checking that the children have brushed their teeth at night.

There are so many ways to do things that feel good, and not all of them are time-consuming or expensive. Stop and think about it. What do you sometimes do for others that you wish you could have done for yourself? Of course, the first thing that springs to my mind is masturbation, but there are plenty of options.

A bath, for example, is almost free. But if you – like my hot-blooded friend who says baths make her feel like she’s a lobster being boiled in a pot – prefer showers, go for it. But make it luxurious by extending it a few minutes. Just do whatever makes you feel better, and try to do it as regularly as possible.

I got lucky myself. We moved house during my self-pitying, all-hard-work-and-no-joy period. My new neighbour turned out to be a reflexologist with a son who played well with my youngest child. It was a marriage made in heaven, as we gave each other massages whenever a free hour coincided. Our sons played beside us, occasionally pawing our oiled-up skin with chocolatey hands, and disturbing the silence with grating CBeebies theme tunes. But it was, and still is, a small price to pay for the luxury of a free massage.