Quill Ink

I took a couple of months away from writing.

Not because I had run out of opinions. Let’s not get ridiculous.

I stepped away because my body and brain had apparently called a private meeting, voted me out of management, and neglected to leave instructions for whoever was taking over.

I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t get motivated. I couldn’t reliably remember why I had walked into a room. I would open my laptop to write, stare at the screen, reread the same sentence seventeen times, and then decide I should probably check the laundry.

Once I reached the laundry room, I had no idea why I was there.

Some people call that multitasking.

I call it touring the house without a guide.

For months, I felt terrible – not only physically, but about myself. I had ideas, responsibilities, and things I genuinely wanted to do. Unfortunately, wanting to do something and being able to convince my brain and body to participate had become two entirely separate matters.

That may not sound like a big deal until it happens to you.

When you can’t create, contribute to daily life, or finish tasks that once seemed ordinary, it slowly begins to eat away at your self-esteem. Every unfinished project feels like evidence. Every forgotten obligation becomes another item in the case against you.

See? You’re lazy.

See? You’re unreliable.

See? Everyone else can manage life. Why can’t you?

That little voice is remarkably confident for someone who has absolutely no medical training.

Eventually, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, and my ADHD medication stopped working, which helped explain why my concentration had gone missing and why my body felt as though I had been beaten overnight with a sack of canned goods.

The brain fog had become atrocious. Words I had used my entire life disappeared just when I needed them. I would stop midsentence because the name of a perfectly ordinary object had escaped me.

“You know, the thing. On the counter. You use it for the other thing.”

Apparently, charades is now my primary language.

Fibromyalgia brought its own collection of party favors: widespread pain, exhaustion, poor sleep, and the exciting daily mystery of discovering which body part had decided to just stop working.

One morning, I couldn’t get out of bed because everything hurt. The bottoms of my feet hurt when I stood, and the pain traveled upward until even my shoulders joined the uprising. I hadn’t exercised. I hadn’t run a marathon. I hadn’t even done anything ambitious like reorganize a closet.

I had simply existed apparently too aggressively.

Sleeping had once again become a luxury, the same luxury mothers are always promised will eventually return.

You’ll sleep when the baby sleeps through the night.

You’ll sleep when the toddler stops crawling into your bed.

You’ll sleep when the new driver gets home before curfew.

You’ll sleep when the college kid calls to confirm that they are still alive.

You’ll sleep when the children move out.

That last one is particularly misleading. Once the children move out, your body may decide it finally has time to present an itemized list of every ache, injury, worry, and ignored symptom it has been saving for the past 30 years.

My body kept meticulously excellent records.

For three decades, I was Mom.

Not the decorative kind who stood in the kitchen wearing a clean apron while cheerful children politely requested homemade cookies. I was the working model: driving, organizing, worrying, reminding, feeding, scheduling, refereeing, cleaning, listening, locating missing objects, and asking why my good guest towels were stained with blood (at least that’s what it looked like).

Motherhood was exhausting, stressful, joyful, ridiculous, and loud. My emotions were all over the place because my children’s emotions were, too. There was always someone who needed something, and even when they didn’t need me, I remained on call in case they suddenly did.

There was no time to stop and analyze how I felt. If I was tired, it was because I was a mother. If I couldn’t concentrate, it was because twelve things were happening at once. If my body hurt, it was because I was carrying groceries, laundry baskets, sports equipment, emotional baggage, and occasionally the entire family’s will to live.

Then the children grew up.

They moved out, built lives of their own, and took the noise with them.

After 30 years of being Mom every day, it just stopped.

Of course, I am still their mother. That position comes with lifetime tenure and no retirement benefits. But the daily job, the rides, practices, school schedules, curfews, meals, emergencies, and constant background hum of someone needing me was suddenly gone.

The house became quiet.

At first, quiet sounded like freedom. Then it started sounding a little too much like an unanswered question.

Who was I when no one needed a ride?

What was I supposed to do when there was no crisis to solve?

How did I measure my contribution when the people I had spent decades caring for were now perfectly capable of feeding themselves?

When the constant motion ended, the struggles I had blamed on parental stress didn’t disappear. They became louder. The exhaustion remained. The inability to focus worsened. The pain spread. Without the demands of motherhood pushing me forward, I could no longer outrun what was happening.

And because I didn’t yet understand it, I blamed myself.

I thought I had lost my drive. I thought I lacked discipline. I thought perhaps I had become one of those people who says, “I really need to get back to writing,” before watching six episodes of a television show she doesn’t even like.

But I wasn’t lazy.

I wasn’t weak.

I wasn’t failing at retirement from active motherhood.

I was struggling with conditions I didn’t know I had.

The past two months did not cure me. There was no inspirational montage in which I drank more water, practiced yoga at sunrise, and emerged wearing bamboo flip-flops and white linen with a renewed appreciation for herbal tea.

I still have difficult days. I still lose words. I still make plans my body later vetoes without explanation. There are mornings when simply getting dressed feels like an achievement worthy of a small parade.

But the time away gave me something I desperately needed: answers.

Answers gave me a place to begin.

I now have the beginnings of a treatment plan. I am learning how to work with my brain instead of insulting it into submission. I am learning that rest is not something I have to earn by collapsing. I am learning that my value cannot be measured by how much I accomplish before dinner.

These conditions are not life-threatening, but they can be debilitating. And when I don’t feel well, my family sees the struggle. They worry. They adjust. They hurt because I hurt. Pretending I am fine does not protect them; it only makes all of us participate in a very poorly written performance.

So, I am trying something different.

I am paying attention.

I am allowing myself to slow down without treating it as a character defect. I am accepting that life after active motherhood requires more than finding hobbies and turning our office into a craft room (or my bat cave as my son calls it). It means meeting the person who remains after everyone else has grown up.

I’m still figuring out who she is.

She is tired. She is occasionally confused. She owns several notebooks containing brilliant ideas she cannot decipher. She is distracted and tells the same stories over and over again. Her driving is apparently less “defensive driving” and more “everyone else should defend themselves.”

But she is still funny.

She still has stories to tell.

And, most importantly, she is writing again.