Upon life sucking as a mother, and it’s not why you think…

What’s on my mind at the moment? Glitter.
Why?

Yes, Rebecca, why, when I can hear the anguished cries of my beloved daughter in the next room with my husband calming her, would glitter be on my mind?

Bear with me friends as I give you this longish, but I think, rather interesting, backstory…

You see, this month alone I’ve had 4 separate stays in the hospital due to a bulging disc in my back and the complications that have come about from bits and pieces related to this chronic condition I must suffer for life with.

Surely not! I hear you cry! Modern technology! Modern medicine! Modern stuff, anything… Nope. Doesn’t work that way.

Just last week I was told by this State’s most super, of all super doctors who are super at this orthopaedic kind of thing, that I’ll always have ‘episodes’ where my back goes ‘out’. I’ll always need super strong drugs and super awesome doctors to help me during said ‘episodes’ and even super rehab people to build me up again and, of course, rely on my super trusty bloody walking stick AT THE AGE OF 42.

Each and every time this happens – you know, probably a few times a year if I’m unlucky…

As I type this my husband is still comforting our daughter who it seems is probably teething again. And what’s on my mind? My daughter? Nope – that is too painful to think about so I’m doing my best to move over to glitter at the moment. Because I love it. It’s pretty. It makes me happy.

Why? Because if I don’t I think I may just go mad…
Honestly it would be so easy to just let go and stop fighting to keep it together, because life is really rather awful for me, and our family, in many ways at the moment.

You see, Edie my daughter, who will be one in a few days won’t come near me if she has a choice. If she’s given to me she struggles to get away and if she’s got to stay with me for a few minutes she’ll scream the house down before she realises she’s stuck and better make the most of an unfortunate situation.

As a mother, who frankly went through something akin to hell to carry her to a safe gestational state to leave my body, I die a little inside each time she turns away…

Why has this happened and why on earth to me? A mother who a few short weeks ago was the centre of my daughters world?

Well my friends it seems that everything comes at a cost! Some more severe than others…

You see all of the ‘wonderful’, pain relieving medicines I’ve been given to get me moving, need additional medicines to cancel out the rather bad side effects of the ‘wonderful’ medicines; but in addition to the ‘wonderful’ drugs and their additional ‘wonderful’ helpers I still need to take daily doses of ‘restricted’ medicines that give me relief from what is called ‘breakthrough’ pain.

This, on it’s own – besides being a confusing and extraordinarily large amount of pills – isn’t actually that bad…

Well it wasn’t all that bad until I came home from my first hospital stay of 5 days; where, by the way, I found myself a Grandma – hooray (I’ll save that story for another post!).

I’ve never been away from Edie for that long before, and Mr Jones brought her and Dexter in to visit me daily. But when I got home she was not particularly thrilled to be around me, which I took as just her being a little snippity at my ‘holiday’ away from her, the centre of my universe!

Nope. The little narc knew I was on ‘drugs’! She could sense it! It seems that she knew I was on some pretty strong stuff and as a primal protective behaviour decided I wasn’t up to the job of Mama and so Daddy better gear up pretty quickly because he had become her number choice of parent! Fair call… In fact, I felt pretty proud that she had such strong instincts that could protect her.

But, 4 weeks and another 3 hospital stays down the track, I now need to keep something pretty positive in my mind before I go to bed these days… Hence the glitter. It makes me happy – don’t judge.

You see friends, the fabulous and, I’m sure, personally delightful, team of medicos at the hospitals I’ve recently been the guest of, in their collective wisdom actually decided to put me, a patient who is on daily medication for anxiety/depression, onto these ‘wonderful’ medications whose collective side-effects include –

“trouble sleeping; feeling anxious, nervousness, unusual thoughts or dreams or feeling deep sadness; abnormal thinking or changes in mood; unusual changes in mood or behaviour; signs of new or increased irritability or agitation; signs of depression”

Well, God Bless ’em because within 2 weeks on the meds guess who was up at the ED for a midnight visit suffering from some ‘unusual thoughts’: my iPad was controlling my mind (actually this could be closer to reality than I’d thought…); some ‘abnormal thinking’: none of it was Steve Jobs fault and he was NOT to be blamed, especially by Mr Jones; and some ‘unusual changes in behaviour’: I spent a good deal of my trip to the hospital making the exact noise Edie does, a clicking/blurting thing… She’s not yet one. I’m 42. Clearly this wasn’t an awesome change in behaviour…

Don’t fear, I’m not done here, there’s so much more to tell you and the answer to why being a mama is killing me at the moment, and yep, it’s definitely NOT why you’ll think it is…

So darlings, keep a sharp eye out for my next post which includes more of the charming, and I’m sure amusing, adventures of ‘Becky the useless and rather disliked by her progeny Mama’…

Love you all more than ever (the drugs make me say stuff I only think!)
Mrs Jones x