In Progress

I haven’t posted anything in weeks. I haven’t written anything worth posting, or anything at all for that matter. I’ve been scared of what’s been happening in my head, scared to put it on paper and make it real, but letting it run wild up there did more harm than good. I should’ve expected that. I’ve been struggling at home, struggling with all of the stuff that needs doing, with keeping up. I’ve been feeling overwhelmed, consumed, like I’m drowning in it. There’s never enough time or motivation, it’s never all done, there’s always crap everywhere and it makes me jittery and anxious. It makes me feel like the walls are closing in and I need to get out. It’s the same feeling I had when we first got here, two and a half years ago when I was home with a toddler and a baby in a new town. So much has changed since then, they’ve grown, they’re at school/daycare most days and I’m at work. Being out of the house at work three days a week helped at first, it felt good to be working again and we appreciated our days at home to do something together or to choose to do nothing. I think that’s what he’s missed the most, the days spent at home pottering, but I can’t stay home every day so he can potter. When I did I felt like I had to do something else, something more than going for walks to the park and staring out the kitchen window or at my phone for hours. Now I do and now it is a struggle to balance it all.

Some days when there aren’t enough hours I think back to those beautiful days spent watching birds at the park while he rode his bike, resting on the couch while he napped. They were beautiful but every moment I was feeling like I couldn’t do it forever, like I needed to do something else. Other days I struggle to come home from work and be at the beck and call of two little people for the hours between getting home and putting them to bed. To give up every millimeter of space in my head to them and have their needs and wants and squabbling suffocate out all of my thoughts and fill the spaces where they had been sitting for the morning. The afternoons have been a struggle. There have been days when I have been short with them, lacked patience and compassion, put my headphones on and blocked them out. I’ve tried to distract myself, to cope, to escape and stay in my head, in that space where I can actually think, in that space where my ideas and thoughts have room to spread out. In order to give my thoughts that space though, I’ve been shutting the little people out, stopped listening to them and their constant questions knocking at my mind, stopped seeing them and the magic.

There has been more to it than the juggle of being a working mum though. Since my second son was born three and a half years ago I have struggled. Bouncing back and forth between “this is just him, he’s different, how can we be happy and accepting of that?” and “something is going on here that I and everyone else is missing”. We have done and continue to do many different things to support him and help him to be more settled. I have opened my mind and heart to things way outside the box, finding some extremely helpful and encouraging. We support his gut and immune system with supplements, we use homeopathics when he needs a little extra help, we use essential oils to support his sleep and emotions and I use them to help me to cope with his challenges. I have built up a small network of alternative practitioners who support us both and we monitor his diet to try to balance the things that upset his system with his quality of life. All of these things help and after three good months I had been feeling really optimistic. We could manage and we could even think about adding to our family. This was not running our lives any more, we had a handle on it, I was so relieved.

Then he went downhill again, for no apparent reason, and every ounce of optimisim I had built up went down that hill with him. It hit harder than it ever had before because it felt like we had nowhere left to go. The wonderful people who we had worked with had exhausted all avenues, they had nothing left to offer but encouragement to keep plodding along with what we were doing and ride out the storms when they presented. I wasn’t sure if I could do that. I wasn’t sure if I could drag him into daycare kicking and screaming because he was having an off day and go to work and get on with it. I also wasn’t sure if I could cope with him at home, off day after off day with no end in sight. He didn’t get better for weeks, he refused the supplements that could help get him back on track, his sleep got more and more disturbed then mine did too.  The sleep deprivation began to rear its ugly head again and I sunk slowly but surely back down into the “this is too hard” “why me/us” mentality I had fought off for so long.

I shared my struggles with friends who had their own, we piled our misery on top of each other’s, feeling relieved that we were not alone but also feeding each other’s negativity. I stopped seeing the magic and only saw the work and the thanklessness, the demands and the unfairness. I was drowning it in and the only way I knew to cope was to block it out. I tried to forget it all as much as I could. I reached out to a couple of people hoping for a new lead, I received no reply from two and the third turned out to have an agenda of her own. I felt beaten and like we couldn’t live like this forever. Half of me felt like I was making it all up in my head, dramatizing things, turning having a ‘senstitive child’ into more than it really was. The other half of me was screaming out from the way my gut was telling me “there’s more to it” “there’s something here you need to find, something you can do to help your child if you just find it.” My gut has always told me this. At times it has been drowned out by other peoples practicality and sensibility, other times I’ve ignored it because I’ve run out of the energy needed to keep looking and asking and searching. I’ve wanted so badly for it to be nothing so that I could stop and it could get easier…but it never has.

So during this latest downward spiral, toward the end of the three weeks we spent at rock bottom, something spoke to me. I read an article that suggested that tongue-tie in newborns could be linked to a genetic defect called MTHFR. I had read bits and pieces about this and it had been on my radar for a while but I hadn’t felt the urge to pursue it until I read this article. Both my boys had been born with minor tongue-tie, maybe it was a coincidence but maybe it was the lead I had given up on. Somehow I found something inside me that I didn’t think was there, I found the will to keep going, it lit back up inside me and I started searching again. I went to my GP and was met with “there’s no scientific evidence that even exists”, but that didn’t stop me. I went to my naturopaths, one in person and one on the phone, they were both interested but knew little about it. They each looked into testing and found that I would need to get to a bigger town or city to have it done. We planned to do it in the next school holidays and while we waited the three of us found and shared as much information as we could. It only made me more sure that it could be the answer I had convinced myself I would never find. Then one day out of nowhere I got a text saying we didn’t have to wait, there was a kit in the mail, all I had to do was get his blood collected and post it over east to a lab. We would have results even before we were originally planning to do the test. The kit came in the mail and I was manic, making calls, researching online the best way to get the blood test done, quadruple checking the labeling so the lab wouldn’t send it back, checking on its progress across the country and finally waiting for the phone call with the result.

I answered the phone and held my breath, she said “he’s clear” and my heart dropped down into my heels. It felt wrong to be upset that my son’s test results were normal but I was. I had so much hope in these results being my answer, the underlying issue that would explain the sleep, behavioural and food intolerance issues that had become my daily battle. She emailed me the results for my records and later that night I opened them to see for myself and saw something different. He was clear for one of the gene mutations but he actually had the other one. My heart soared and again it felt wrong to have that reaction but I was so incredibly relieved. The brick wall that had been pushing against my nose for months suddenly crumbled and revealed a new and exciting path. Finally I had something concrete in my hand, something that I could work with to try to improve things. Maybe now there is more we can do, I thought, maybe now we wont have to restrict his diet (and in turn his nutrition forever), maybe there’s something else, something better.

I don’t expect it to be smooth sailing. I know it’s the beginning of a whole new journey but at least I’ve found the starting point. I’ve taken his results to a GP, hoping to give western medicine another shot (after being repeatedly disappointed by it in this process) and also found a wonderful naturopath who specializes in methylation disorders. I have to say that western medicine has a lot of catching up to do but I’m hopeful that eventually they’ll complement each other in a way that gives us the best possible outcomes and the simple fact that I can be hopeful again is a big plus. At the moment we are plodding along having good days and bad days while we wait for our new supplement regime to start having an effect. I say ‘we’ and ‘our’ because it turns out this gene mutation probably came from me and I will probably benefit from the same supplements. Its ironic really that its all my fault in a totally different way than I’ve always thought. What is also ironic is that while all of this testing and researching and ‘new path finding’ was happening, while our other plans were put on the backburner, something amazing was happening all on its own. My clothes were getting tight, my eyelids were becoming constantly heavy and the new member of our family whom we had been waiting on for months and months started to grow inside me. Life and the universe work in such mysterious ways, there’s magic hiding in even the worst days and times and I’m slowly starting to see it again in amongst the morning sickness and overwhelming exhaustion.