The Hard Thing

Motherhood is hard. We’re all saying it. Women once didn’t dare say out loud – but now we’re making up for lost time.

I tell anyone who’ll listen that I struggle with it. But, honestly, I’m sort of lying. I see how being a mother is impossibly difficult, having to swap all the things you once treasured – freedom, finished thoughts, silence, rest, spontaneity – for thankless servitude.

But I’ve been pretending that this is the reason I can meet the hollow stare of other mothers. There’s another hard thing that’s swallowed every other hard thing, and made night feeds with norovirus seem relatively easy.

Over the last few years, I’ve experienced a litany of physical symptoms. They appeared gradually, not long after E was born. I floated through the baby days in a dizziness that I assumed was par for the course, one of the many things women have to just endure at this phase of life.

After a few appointments and tests left things no clearer, I put it all down to being human, a tired one with a child and a menstrual cycle, prone to overwhelm and overthinking.

This led me to start wondering why every other new mother looked fine, how they could walk so fast, while pushing the pram, without needing to stop and put their head between their legs for a bit. I felt an invisible screen start to rise between me and everyone else as I lost the ability to imagine what it felt like to live in their bodies.

I’d enthusiastically complain to other parents about how hard it was and how tired I was, because I was too tired, and it was too hard, to explain the truth. I searched every interaction for clues that someone else felt the same way I felt. It became this big dark shadow I dragged around all the time, growing with every day it remained unspoken.

Somewhere along the way, the narrative I’d weaved around how I felt – that I was fine, really – started to bury itself under my skin and mutate. I started to beleive that the reasons I felt off were that I was just too weak to handle life, ungrateful, too obsessed with what’s wrong to enjoy what’s right. Everything around me seemed to reflect this, too.

Late-night Google searches convinced me it must be my childhood, my anxious tendencies, my inability to relax. I was twisting the knife, now, but it was okay, now, because I just needed to calm my nervous system. I had to breathe better and walk barefoot and backwards on the grass.

Then came the micromanagement. I needed the right supplements, more fluids, less fluids, more iron – extracting and adding until I felt normal again. I ended up in A&E, heading for a coma, from drinking too much water.

Then I fixated on my sleep, which E broke every couple of hours until he was four. At one point, I was so chronically sleep-deprived that a therapist said she couldn’t help me until my (E’s) sleep improved.

In summer last year, my health worsened, and I could no longer keep telling myself I was fine. My fear of there being something actually medically wrong was overtaken by a fear of never getting better. But after a flurry of (more) GP appointments and tests, things were no clearer. My GP called me a ‘medical mystery’ and said he couldn’t help me.

I placed myself on the precipice of a life of chronic illness, where I believed I belong, and started to grieve the vision of motherhood I’d expected to experience. But then I paused, with only one foot in. And here I remain, in the limbo between wellness and illness.

In those difficult months, I thought a lot about the release of accepting reality, instead of resisting it. But it’s not something I find any easier to embody. Without a diagnosis, I pretend to everyone else that I’m well. I resent that my health forces me to live differently, scared that my lifestyle is starting to feel like an extension of my personality, and not just a survival mechanism.

The screen between me and the rest of the world remains. I drift away when people start talking about the everyday things I struggle to do because of my health. I resent people who can wrap up their struggles with an ending.

Last week, I was in the GP’s office - in my continued bid for a diagnosis. He goes to check my blood pressure, wrapping that plastic cuff around my arm. I warn him I get nervous; ‘white coat syndrome’, we say simultaneously.

“Is it the feeling of it tightening around your arm, or do you worry that the results will be high, or low?” he asks.

I nod.

“Well”, he says, searching for a second. “It just is what it is.”