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This blog is about coping with the strains of chronic illness whilst bringing up two beautiful children; it's also about the stresses of bringing up two children on your own while suffering with a chronic ongoing health problem which is at times very severe.... you can look at it either way. It's about being a single mum; it's about raising awareness of Interstitial Cystitis; it's about helping me cope. Writing this blog is beginning to bring me back to who I really am, who I really always was, before the single motherhood took over full time, before the illness set in.... a writer. I've always written, from essays to stories to journalism. This is the first thing I've written in years. It's helping me regain my confidence. PLEASE DO LEAVE ME COMMENTS AFTER MY POSTS! I'd genuinely love to hear your views on my (sometimes controversial) opinions. Thank you for taking the time to read. It would be great if you could comment so I know that you've been here and what you think.

Wednesday 2 April 2014

Blue Eyed Boy turns 7

Seven years ago, I had just had my second and - though I didn't know it then - almost certainly my last child. My beautiful baby. His father had left me early in the pregnancy, only to return at the end (aren't men great?!). I had fought so hard to keep him, but I was overtaken with numbness when he was born, an emergency C-section again when I'd wanted so much to give birth naturally.

For about four hours after the delivery, I felt blank. This child was angry, screaming... I felt nothing. Is this post-natal depression, I wondered? Everything seemed empty and pointless and just blank.

But then I held him, and fed him, and looked into his deep blue eyes... I felt what a gentle yet sturdy, strong soul this boy is, and my fierce love which had been there all through the pregnancy returned with such force it made me sob.

Here was my boy.

And my beautiful girl, aged 4, visited us the next day, and held tight to her brother's hand (never, ever 'half' brother, there are no halves in our family unit, we are a triangle); there is a photo of that day, the three of us.

These children now are my anchor; they are the only thing that keep me rooted in this world. Without them, and with this disease, I would have drowned, or floated away on the waves. I would have dissolved. There would be no reason to carry on. The way these children need me, thrive around me, even when I am so ill I cannot leave the house or even my bed; the way it doesn't even enter their heads to be angry with me for being ill, which is the reaction of so many others (I find it bizarre, but that's how it is). My kids just accept how things are, and try to make the best of it.

Such stoicism.

Their faces this morning when they saw the surprise birthday present trampoline out of the window, and went out to bounce in their dressing gowns. Their ability to be happy just because. Their ability to live in the present tense. Their spirit.

The hardest thing about chronic illness is the way it limits your whole world, shrinks it to fit a tiny space where you once had the freedom to do as you chose. Everything you took for granted before the chronic pain took over becomes a luxury, a challenge, a torment.

Now, a trip to the park is a mammoth expedition, plotting where the toilets are, how much energy I will be able to muster up, whether we would be better off just watching another DVD. Gone are the days of spontaneity. This is heartbreaking.

And yet the fact that my children haven't given up on me means that there must be something worth holding onto, something precious still in this useless body.

Something that for two little people is called home.

Please let that be enough.