Raising a family has its challenges but never more so than when you are battling your own physical and mental health disabilities. Our blogger, and iVillage.co.uk Community Leader, Anna Hancock, shares her experiences of being a single mum with a mind and body that don’t work as well as they should in her blog, which is sometimes funny, sometimes poignant and always thought-provoking.
When you see me in the morning
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Let’s face it, Monday mornings are testing in any household. Kids to be breakfasted, washed, dressed and bags packed, then the hassles of the school run. If you saw me at the school gate on a Monday morning you might think that my morning had been pretty similar to your own, the only hint that something might be different is that while I hold my toddler’s wrist strap in one hand, in the other I am holding a walking stick.
Not all disabilities are visible. All over the country people with hidden physical disabilities or those struggling with their mental health face a daily battle just to get out of the house that most would never suspect goes on behind closed doors. So when you see me in the morning, you wouldn’t have any idea of the things I have overcome to be standing at the school gate with a cheery smile.
My day starts half an hour before I need to get up with my alarm going off. I need to set it early because every morning when I wake my hands are numb. As I rouse into consciousness, they burn and fizz as they change from alien sausage appendages into something more useful. While I wait for my hands, I slowly move my back, a few millimetres at a time, as he slightest movement first thing is agony but I know that I have to get it moving so it doesn’t seize up completely. I am also very drowsy from the medication I have to take at night and just waking is a real battle.
While I am trying to restore normality to various body parts the anxiety sets in. Often the agoraphobia hits me with its best attempts in the minutes before I get out of bed. It tells me how nice and safe and secure it is under the duvet and how the outside world is beset with unknown dangers. I bargain with it daily, try to persuade it with my unconvincing arguments that all will be fine. Eventually I – and it – roll carefully and reluctantly out of bed.
With consciousness comes the OCD. My head fills with all the things I could maybe do wrong this morning: what if I spill hot tea on the children because I am still drowsy, or maybe I didn’t turn everything off last night and there is a fire spluttering to life downstairs ready to trap us, what if I get distracted in the car and cause an accident? To try to still these thoughts I automatically start the routines that make me feel a bit more secure.
I get dressed in a certain order, a slow process because of limited movement and pain, I can’t take my painkillers until I have eaten so this is the hardest time of day. Sometimes my seven-year-old daughter helps me fasten shoes. Then I open the blind in my bedroom, carefully counting as I wind the cord around the towel rail exactly seven times. Sometimes I don’t trust myself that I have counted correctly so I have to start again.
Having won the bedroom battles it’s time to venture downstairs. Stairs are not my friend at any time of day but our relationship is at its worst in the mornings. It’s either a slow bottom shuffle or a step-by-step careful descent clinging on to the banister.
And then it’s into the usual morning chaos of any family - getting the kids to eat their breakfast, searching for lost socks, packing lunches and school books and turning into the kind of nagging, stressed-out parent you always promised yourself you wouldn’t be! All the while the OCD fills my head with worries and intrusive thoughts, the agoraphobia tries to persuade me to stay in the safety of the house.
There’s just one last obstacle to beat. If I have been so busy listening to my thoughts that I forget to shut the stair gate my three-year-old decides at the crucial moment to run upstairs and refuse to come down. This is a problem because I can’t make it upstairs until the painkillers have kicked in so instead I stand at the bottom trying to negotiate with a toddler who thinks this is the funniest game in the world! How I hate signing the late book at school with the feeble excuse that ‘my toddler went upstairs just as we were about to leave’!!
But, give or take the odd battle with the car seat straps, we make it to school. And when someone asks me how I am, I invariably reply 'I’m good thanks, how are you?'.
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