The decade that changed me, the month that brought it all back

Ten years ago, the migraines started. (It’s not lost on me that’s the year I also became a mum). 

Not the occasional, take-a-paracetamol, have-a-lie-down kind. The other kind. The kind that arrive uninvited on a Sunday morning and stay for three days, and then 10, and then a month, the kind that have their own geography - a specific landscape of pain and light and nausea that you eventually learn to navigate the way you'd learn a difficult new route. Carefully. Tentatively.  Never assuming you know what's around the corner. 

I've written about them before, lots. It’s actually why I started my instagram page in the first place (fun fact).  The way you mention something you've made your peace with: yes, chronic migraines, ten years, we move. What I haven't written about  until now is what it did to my sense of self - and why, lying on my sofa with a concussion this past few weeks, all of it came flooding back.

The Retreat

 With migraines, you feel faded - like bits of you have started to disappear. You are of course still there - still present in body, still technically attending the party or the school run or the meeting. But there's a version of you that retreats behind the pain, that watches everything from a slight remove, that is conserving energy carefully and just thinking ‘if I get through this I’ll be fine’. You get good at the performance of okayness. You know which activities you can manage and which will cost you. You build a life that is, in ways invisible to most people, carefully rationed. 

Concussion, I discovered, runs on the same brief. The same retreating. The same watching from behind glass. The same furious calculation of every expenditure of energy -  if I make the tea, will I have enough left to sit through homework? If I sit through homework, can I manage bath and bedtime?  It leaves you feeling less like a person and more like a phone on 8% battery, desperately trying to decide which app to keep running. Ten years in, I know that calculation like I know my own name - it’s just usually migraines doing the maths. This time, it was a French mountain.

The Shell-of-Yourself feeling

There is a specific feeling of loss that comes with long-term illness or injury that doesn't really get talked about  - possibly because it sounds dramatic and we've all been trained to be stoic about things that leave no visible mark. It is a kind of grief of not being yourself. Not in a crisis, not in a temporary way but in the sustained, grinding, Tuesday-afternoon way of simply not having access to the version of you that you prefer. The competent one. The energetic one. The one who does things and goes places and doesn't have to spend twenty minutes deciding whether they can manage to make a packed lunch or not.,  I have spent a lot of Tuesday afternoons grieving that woman and the concussion brought it back fresh. All the feelings from over a decade with migraines -  the identity loss, the before-and-after thinking, the strange guilt of being less than you feel you should be  -  arrived again, in concentrated form, and sat down next to me on the sofa like an old acquaintance I hadn't missed. 

Oh, I thought. You again. 

The Mum Tax 

Here's the part that I think will resonate, - and when I've talked to other Mums about this in coaching sessions, over coffees, in rambled voice notes - there has been a resounding sense of agreement, resonance and shared experience. 

 When you are ill as a mother, you do not get to simply be ill. You are ill and also managing everything else, or you are ill and watching someone else manage everything else and feeling guilty and frustrated about it. You are ill and still the person your children look for in the night. You are ill and still the holder of all the small information like what the tooth fairy’s name is (and how to forge their handwriting), who needs new name labels, which child is having a hard time with a friend at school, and when the next haircut is due. Because that information lives in you and doesn't go anywhere when you go horizontal. Chronic illness taught me this across ten years and then concussion reminded me in the space of a week. 

The thing is I don't think this is a complaint, exactly. It's more of an observation. Motherhood and illness are both experiences of self-dissolution: of the edges of you becoming permeable, of your needs becoming negotiable, of learning to function in conditions that are not ideal and may never be ideal again.  Some of us have been training for this longer than we realised. 

Why you might hard relate (even without injury) 

You don't need a concussion. You don't need chronic migraines. You don't even need a diagnosable anything. Motherhood, in its ordinary, unremarkable form, already asks you to be a slightly reduced version of yourself for years at a stretch. The sleep deprivation alone rewires your brain. The cognitive load of caring for small people while also trying to exist as a person is, when you write it out plainly, absurd. And we often don’t express it plainly very often, for fear of being labelled ‘a complainer’ or questioned on why we chose to have kids in the first place.

 So when a mum reads about brain fog, about losing words, about cancelling things and retreating and watching her own life from a slight distance - she recognises it. Not because she's ill. Because she's a mother. Because that gap between who you are and who you have the resources to be is one she's been navigating for years.

 I'm not saying motherhood is a brain injury. I'm saying the feelings have something in common, and that maybe that's why we don't always take them seriously in ourselves and in each other - because they've started to feel normal. So here's a little reminder today that what you feel is real, valid and worth a chat about. And I am very much here for that.