Circuit Breaker
Photo Courtesy: Lucy Beckley
BY LUCY BECKLEY
‘Mama, are you okay?’ my youngest called out, as I slumped over the toilet bowl retching. She appeared cautiously from behind the door. Eyes watery, teetering with tears that threaten to spill over. Not used to seeing me unwell or in such a state, her empathetic antennae went into overdrive, as I crouched and huddled in the downstairs cloakroom.
‘Mama,’ she repeated and then disappeared as I lurched forward with another wave of nausea. In the distance, I heard her calling out for her brother to come downstairs as I felt another swirl of bile rise up at the back of my throat.
‘Yes’ came my quiet and unconvincing reply as I moved my hair out off my clammy forehead. The pain in my head radiated and rippled as I moved, throbbing and pulsing across my temple as the electrical circuits in my brain misfired. Overhead, the lightbulb flickered and flashed leaving a vivid imprint of its outline across my vision. Not this week please, I thought, as I vomited into the toilet again. Not this week.
‘Mum, it’s okay. It’s going to be okay.’ My son appeared behind me.
Tall and slender, he hovered, stroking my back and looking to reassure me. An old soul, ‘one who’s been here before’ was what the midwives had said when he was born in Berlin almost a decade ago. My dear, beautiful early bird, who often rises with me in the inky blinky hours before his sister and Dad wake.
‘It’s ok.’ He said softly, prompting tears to appear in my eyes, as I tried and failed to keep it together. His soft gentle hand found a resting place between my shoulder blades as I continued to cough and gag. His light touch, a calming reassurance.
It was not the best start to the week: my to-do list was already bulging under the weight of expectation and my ambitions as to what I thought I could achieve and accomplish had as usual been set far too high. My brow was wrought with a constellation of worries: from the seemingly insurmountable pile of washing to the climate crisis, from untangling the Christmas lights to navigating some big life decisions. The invisible load and never-ending lists, from the banal to the big, hung over my head like an angry rain cloud threatening to burst at any moment. Even the bare Christmas tree that stood in the corner of our dining room, waiting to be adorned and start twinkling with the promise of festive joy, served as a cruel reminder of the things I had not yet done. As I continued to be sick, it certainly did not feel like the most wonderful time of the year.
My body couldn’t hold it all together and was making itself known in hiccupy gulps and retching as my stomach fizzed with nausea that sought to overpower me. I really should have seen it coming and paid attention to the warning signs that had appeared earlier that morning as my husband left to go away for work. The flash and flicker of an aura and blurry vision that signals the start of a migraine for me. Yet so often, I find myself lingering in the shadow and legacy of the generation before me who were conditioned to keep calm and carry on. Fix your face with a smile, smooth down your clothes and keep on, keeping on.
The mantras that I was brought up on ‘Work hard. Keep calm, carry on. Chin up.’ haunt me like spectres in the background, whispering in unkind voices that I am not working hard enough, that I am not good enough and that I should just carry on regardless.
But it is not just the generation before me, I am both culpable and gullible, so very often my own worst enemy and my own greatest saboteur. Since becoming a parent, I have been caught up in the 21st century Western myth of motherhood that I can do it all . . . . Conditioned to believe that I can be that side-hustling, girl-powered, Mum Boss who has her sh&* together.
But today I am none of those things, in fact my body has activated its circuit breaker.
A month of ignoring chronic illness (that has a habit of flaring up when life is at its fullest), a humiliating experience with a medical consultant who dismissed my pain and a mid-life wobble about my career has left my reserves of resilience at an all-time low.
I have been snappy and scatty, short and frosty to all those in my presence for the past few weeks. I haven’t been keeping calm when I’ve tried to carry on. So far removed from the moment, I have been caught in a cloud of worry, disconnected and detached from my own body and being.
Yet the body has an uncanny way of stopping you in your tracks and thrusting you into being in the moment and being forced to be vulnerable. As the surge of my migraine began to subside and I stopped vomiting, my daughter appeared, her serious look made me attempt to smile, ‘Mummy,’ she said firmly. ‘Your tummy is saying you need a rest.’
As she stood, calm and stern, I was once again reminded of the power that words from the mouth of babes have, how I learn continually from both my children. From her wise words to the lightness of touch of my son’s hand in between my shoulder blades. Their unencumbered and beautiful way of being is one that I have lost sight of on my quest to fulfill some warped version of the motherhood myth that I have been conditioned to believe. How I hope and wish that their beautiful and brilliant way of being is one that they can continue to embody.
Later that night, a storm rattled the house and we were all kept awake with the sound of the wind. My migraine had retreated into the shadows like a little lost spectre. The pain from before was now a mere whisper and I was coming through the other side of it. As my daughter joined me in bed, her hand reaching out and finding a place in the folds of my body.
The following morning, a blanket of mist surrounds the fields and house. I am bleary eyed but on the mend. As my daughter stirs, she smiles upon seeing me and murmurs, ‘See Mama, sometimes you just need a rest.’
And there in that moment is another lesson that I have learnt on my mothering journey, that in order to break the cycle you shouldn’t have to break a circuit, that sometimes all you need to do is take a breath and rest.
Lucy Beckley is a writer, wanderer and wonderer. She writes poetry, essays, fiction and non-fiction. Her writing explores the beauty and joy in the unseen and seemingly ordinary. Originally from London, she's lived and worked in the UK, Germany and Portugal and has recently moved back to the UK to the middle of the Cornish countryside. Her writing and poetry has appeared in a range of independent magazines and books. She is currently working on a novel and her first collection of poetry.