My turn last.

I got my turn last. To feel it. After the younger two were through and hubby was well enough to take over, my oldest son went to bed before dinner feeling unwell and then it was me. Exactly a week after our isolation began with hubby’s positive test.

I experienced it, this thing we have feared and worried over for two years, as a three day long migraine. A painful but familiar vice around my head and an avalanche of emotion weaving itself around and through it. Because obviously, I experienced this thing like all things, by feel.

I have felt the way this virus felt to me, many times. The feeling in my head and the underlying emotions that bubbled up with that. I’ve felt worse than I felt the past few days and some of the times when I’ve felt worse came up to meet me as I lay in stillness and darkness with my pain.

A time when I had an excruciating migraine and breastfed a baby all night long, because nobody else could do it. A time when I sat with the same pounding head, a toddler in my lap and two other children fending for themselves out in the house. A realisation dawning on me, that nobody was coming and I had nobody to call. A time I remember, fuzzy from childhood, of my Mum lying in bed, the doctor coming to our house and my aunty taking care of us. Having no idea what was going on.

Migraines are still somewhat mysterious to the medical world. Not well understood, difficult to treat, something that we work to manage. Through an exploration of various views and models of health I’ve made my own sense of my migraines. Migraines for me are a collapse, a shutdown, the result of a tank that has run out of fumes.

My experience of this virus brought me these things from the past. To look at, to hold, to heal. Feelings of abandonment of self, of feeling alone and unsupported, of having no choice but to keep going long past empty to make sure the people I love were taken care of.

The feeling of sitting on the floor that night, with nobody coming and nobody I could call…and realising that meant I had to start looking after me first. Looking after me by acknowledging and speaking what is hard rather than burying it.

Life, motherhood, being a woman has always been hard for me. My tank empties quickly, I am overwhelmed by the world often. At times I feel sadness around how hard it has been, wonder how it might have been different, fall into the trap of looking to others for how I could do and be better. The reality is, I tried that for years, tried doing life how it seemed to work for others around me. Pretending that the hard just wasn’t there. That only made the hard stuff grow, get louder, take over inside of me. Until it blew up.

Every hard part I have acknowledged and expressed has created space for beauty. Life, motherhood, being a woman has been and continues to be both hard and beautiful for me. It gets to be hard AND beautiful now that I allow the hard parts the acknowledgment, expression and space they need.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” it always is and I think that it’s meant to be.

Three days sitting with the sadness of it. The grief of what could have been. The past two years and also the past ten. Tears expressed sadness steadily in quiet moments. Three days sitting with the frustration of it too. The frustration expressed itself, as it tends to, after I cleaned the bathrooms in the middle of it because nobody else would do it. Then something started to build when that frustration was ignored. Then there was fury.

Fury at a world where it’s a meme, a funny joke that cleaning the bathrooms is still my job when I am sick and everyone else is well. A joke that nobody is coming and there is nobody I can call. Migraines are and have always been a quiet fury for me. For the sadness and frustration that is not spoken, not expressed, not acknowledged or heard. My experience of this virus was a quiet fury too. A quiet fury in my head, layered with memories of times in my life when that same fury has reared its head before.

And now I wonder how much of this virus, this whole pandemic has been a quiet fury spreading throughout the world. A collapse, a shutdown in a world and a people who have been running on fumes for far too long. Nobody is coming, with anything more than a lockdown and a needle. There is nobody to call who will listen to what we need and come to take care of it for us.

We need to look after ourselves first. We need to know our bodies, our minds, our spirits and their needs for ourselves. We each need to know how to look after our health and to teach our children to look after theirs.

I experienced this virus as a reminder of feeling abandoned, unsupported and alone- allowing those feelings to be, staying with them let the sadness, the regret and the rumination dissipate. What was left was the fury. The fury that now brings me back to my why, my purpose, my reason for being and writing and working here.

Nobody is coming to give our children something better than what we have all experienced over the past two years. Fear, suppression and band-aid solutions.

When we can acknowledge the sadness, frustration and fury of that- then we start taking care of it ourselves.