motherhood, mental health & making things

it's taken me a week to get this posted.. because well - motherhood and mental health

It’s school holidays here. I have spent most of today reminding myself that it’s Tuesday. That means it’s only officially the second day of holidays. Weekends don’t seem to count. Though, of course they do. In the thing of them adding to the days. Four days in a row is a whole lot more than simply two days of holidays.

I got out of bed late this morning. One of the perks of the school holidays, I guess. But it meant I didn’t take my meds on time. And any of you who take medication know that you’re meant to take it at a similar time each day. I take anti-seizure tablets and just started hrt last week. These are things that really are meant to be timed.

I can actually feel the effects of not taking the anti-seizure meds. I wake up and feel woozy. I wake up and feel out of it. I climb out of bed and feel like I need to climb back in. I stand up and feel as if I might fall down again. I guess this means I should really take my meds at the right time tomorrow morning. But it doesn’t mean that I will.

I don’t know if other people who are (unofficially) epileptics (ie I have seizures, but have never been told that I actually have epilepsy) feel like it affects everything else in their brain and life. I know that since I had my first seizure four years ago my brain changed. Sam says that he thinks that’s when my hair started to get a bit curly. So, there’s that. It makes sense when there’s a whole earthquake inside my head for things to shift, morph, change.

The tectonic plates moving about. My gp describes it as shockwaves moving out. The meds minimise that, but there is still a scarring on my brain. My brain changed after that first seizure. Like I jumped from one train track to another. I’m not sure if it’s going parallel or probably off on some wonky tangent. And run far away now, into the forest, the desert, the depths of the ocean. The midnight sky. Somewhere that I wasn’t before. The unfamiliar terrain of a mentally unwell person. Perhaps? Or just a moaning melodramatic person, maybe?

Everywhere I look, people I talk to are working through their own mental health things. Problems, issues… things.

(I mostly talk to people online, because I am stuck at home. In some sort of beautiful prison. My gaoler is my meds, my head, my brain - which means I can’t drive. Which means I am reliant on my husband. He is not my gaoler; he is the one who helps free me. But, while he arrives in shining armour on a white horse, he’s just as often off actually buying the food to feed everyone, or taking the other non-driving people to places. Or at the chemist, filling those prescriptions).

And so, I am no different in any of that. At all. No different at all. To all the other people.

I wonder if motherhood means I have to hold more stuff together. Keep my brain from leaking out of my body, the fluids squeezed back in, to pretend to be a well-put-together mother. Or if perhaps motherhood is part of the reason that it all keeps falling apart. Which one is it that drags the other? Do they both pull each other along, play games together to tease me.

I try hard to keep using my process as a maker, an artist, a creative to keep some semblance of things in place. Try hard to use making as a way to quell the anxiety, the overwhelm, the way that I can’t breath somedays. To take up my stitching, my fabric and thread and hope against all odds that somewhere it will bring me to a place where the other things slip away.

You know - do you know? - that feeling of depression when you can’t bare to look around the house as it’s a mess. There’s too much to do. The washing up is glaring at you. The pile of clean laundry is mocking you. The cushions on the couch keep jumping out of the place; even though you’re sure that was the easy thing to keep on top of. The worse things are the harder they are to fix.

And yet, the worse things are the worse they make me feel. That disgusting endless cycle. Clean the house and I’ll feel better because it really does look better. But I need to feel better in order to actually get up the energy to clean the house. The lethargic round about of … is it ennui about life? Or is it depression? Or is it simply laziness?

The worse I feel, the less I want to do any good and proper mothering. Who cares about making dinner. And if he whinges about what I make, and spends the whole time I’m eating my meal butting his head against my body like a wild animal, do I have energy to even ask him to stop. When he climbs into bed at night, do I have energy to take him back to him bed. Or do I slide over and let him spend the night flung over the top of us, taking up all the space. And making me even hotter during those hot flushes that I have.

The cycle of not enough energy to get up and exercise, when really the thing that I know will get me out of the ‘not-enough-energy’ is simply picking myself up and doing the exercise. They say I only need to start. Just one foot in front of the other. Just 10 minutes of yoga. Or a short walk perhaps. I tell my daughter this. I yell at her to get out of bed. And she knows she should. And yet, she’s too tired to drag herself out. And we all know that tonight she won’t sleep because she spent all day in bed. And we all know that the same will happen with me.

And I know that once I put away that pile of clothes I’ll feel better. And I know that it will take me less time to put the clothes away than it’s taken me to find a pair of undies each day, by sorting through it. And having to find the small child’s clothes as well. When I feel like telling him to just leave me alone.

Yet I have to pull out the small part of the decent mother in me, in order to find some warm clothes for him. As the evenings become cooler. And yet, if I pulled out that small piece of energy I would put his clothes away, so that he could find his own warm pants.

Have you had that feeling in the night. When you’re warm and snuggled in bed. When you need a wee. And you lie there, hoping you might last until the morning before your bladder bursts. But you know you won’t. And you drag out the inevitable, because who wants to pull themselves from the warm cosiness at 3am. But eventually you have to. Because there’s no option. And then after, you climb back into bed. You push your now-cold toes against the warm ones of your bed partner. And you snuggle back down until the morning. When you have to decide if you’ll get up at the right time to take your meds, feed breakfast to your child, put away the clean dishes. Wash the tea towels. Will you make something today. A cake. Some stitching or sewing or mending.

Or … if you’ll lie in bed all day. Ignoring it all. Letting your head fall apart because you didn’t take those meds on time.

Motherhood, mental health & making.