Motherhood, Illness & Time
Updated: Jul 25
There are certain fears that arrive quietly.
Not the fear of catastrophe all at once, but the slow, private fear of erosion. The fear that the life you are trying so carefully to build may narrow before you have fully lived it. The fear that your body may slowly redraw the borders of your world while you are still standing inside it, full of longing.
I do not think people understand how strange it is to live inside this kind of uncertainty. To be well enough to imagine a beautiful future, but unwell enough to know it may not unfold in the way you hoped.
It creates a particular kind of urgency.
A feeling that time has become louder than it used to be.
There was a period after my diagnosis where I became very practical. Almost clinically practical. I adjusted. I adapted. I learned new ways. New limitations. New caution. I changed my life in ways both visible and invisible.
I stopped imagining more children.
I stopped imagining a future at all.
I focused on the here and now.
I accepted limitations.
I reorganised days around energy, appointments, recovery, pacing, prevention, rest.
I became someone who measured life differently.
And although many of those changes were necessary, wise, even, there is grief inside compromise when it keeps accumulating. Grief inside repeatedly being the person who adapts. The person who yields. The person who says, “That dream is not realistic,” or “That version of life is not possible.”
People praise resilience without acknowledging how exhausting it is to continually surrender pieces of yourself.
The pain of longing, of quietly wanting more but not wanting to seem ungrateful for what you have only gets worse over time.
Its crushing. The idea that every beautiful, expansive, adventurous desire must somehow be negotiated down into something smaller. Safer. More manageable. More acceptable to everyone else.
Am I selfish for not wanting to compromise on anything else?
I have already compromised so much.
I want my next stage of life. And I dont want to wait.
I want beauty and movement and reinvention and possibility. I want to follow the part of myself that still feels awake. I want mornings in unfamiliar cities and conversations that make me feel clever again. I want to write from cafés and sit near oceans and build a life that feels emotionally honest before it is too late.
But underneath all of this wanting is something all too familiar.
Fear.
Fear that if I wait too long, my body may decide for me. Fear that there may be a window for this version of life, and that the window may be closing.
But tangled inside this fear of time running out is another fear entirely.
How this will affect my children.
Because motherhood complicates reinvention in ways almost impossible to explain.
I do not want my need for expansion to register as rejection.
I do not want the people I love most to feel abandoned while I try desperately to discover some unexplored part of myself.
My children are, and will always be my saviors.
At every uncertain point in my life, it has been them who steadied me.
Them who anchored me back into the world when grief or fear or exhaustion threatened to pull me too far away from myself. When everything else felt unstable, they were real.
Certain. Loving. A reason to keep showing up.
And more than that, being their mother has become the great evidence of my life. The thing I know with certainty I have done well.
I have doubted many things about myself over the years. I have questioned decisions and identities and ambitions and paths taken and not taken. I have worried endlessly about illness and purpose and whether I have contributed enough or become enough or fulfilled enough of my potential.
But being their mother has never felt uncertain. It has been the clearest thing in my life.
Even now, as they grow older and more independent, I still feel emotionally arranged around them, as though some invisible thread continues connecting us no matter how far adulthood stretches them outward into their own lives.
And perhaps that is why my longing for reinvention feels so emotionally complicated.
Because when I imagine my future, I imagine them in it. Always.
Not necessarily living inside the same walls or needing me in the same daily ways, but beside me somehow. Part of the atmosphere of my life. The people whose presence makes everything feel more meaningful.
Because they are the reason I survived the parts of my life that could have swallowed me whole.
And maybe that is the contradiction I am trying to hold: that my longing for a larger life exists alongside an equally powerful longing to remain deeply connected to the people who have made my life worth living in the first place.
Illness changes your relationship with time. Even mild illness. Even manageable illness. Even illness that other people insist is “not that bad.”
Because once you understand that bodies can change, you never entirely return to the innocence of assuming they won’t.
Sometimes I wonder if healthy people understand what illness does to your sense of urgency.
How it sharpens it.
How it strips away tolerance for wasting time.
How it makes certain compromises begin to feel unbearable after years of being "good" and sensible and accommodating.
Because when your body becomes uncertain, you stop assuming there will always be another decade to become yourself later.
Later stops feeling guaranteed.
Now begins to feel more urgent, more complex, more curated.
I don't want to waste any time.
But still, I am terrified.
Terrified of making the wrong choice.
Terrified of harming the people I love.
I do not have a clean conclusion to this.
Only the growing understanding that perhaps the answer is not choosing one life over another, but finding some brave, imperfect middle ground where love and longing are both allowed to exist.
Where I do not abandon myself to prove my love.
And where loving myself does not require abandoning everyone else.
Maybe that is the real work now.
Not becoming fearless.
But becoming honest.
Honest about the fact that illness has already taken things from me.
And honest about the fact that I do not want it to take everything.