The Pain We Hide

How we never truly know someone.

Facing your mortality will change you. Forever.

While you survive, there's a death of who you thought you were.

Life keeps moving. There are dishes to wash, kids to feed, petrol to put in the car and work to get to. All the ordinaryness of life. We're all looking the same on the outside, while people see the mask we put on that day.

I was pregnant when I had a stroke. And somehow, despite all the terrible scenarios I'd rehearsed in my head, thinking that I didn't have much hope for this pregnancy despite all the fears and all the things I thought might go wrong, we both survived.

Holding this baby, completely besotted with him, The things I never thought I would get to experience, but here we were. Every little crinkle of his face. A random vein I couldn't stop looking at. Every wiggle of his toes. The baby scrunch lifting him out of the cot I couldn't believe we were there. Miraculous.

The stroke had come on so suddenly, and I was hyper aware that anything could happen at any moment and I didn't want another surprise, another shock. I held every moment.

None of this had been guaranteed. My world had shrunk to the size of a baby bottle and a bassinet.

Things I once thought mattered I didn't give a shit about anymore. Things I'd taken for granted suddenly felt miraculous.

A breath.

Seeing the sun rise on another day.

A warm breeze on my face.

Joy and fear were perfect companions in every room I went to. It was just us three.

Nobody else had lived inside the fears. Nobody else had stood where I stood or made peace with the things I had to make peace with. And while people could love me, support me and walk beside me, they couldn't walk inside it with me.

These roads were only mine to walk and that was the part no one saw, nor could I find the words or the strength to express it

When I looked in the mirror I was still there, but I wasn't the same. I didn't belong to that reflection anymore.

People say

"Oh yeah, I know Kelly."

Which version?

I first noticed it when my mother-in-law came to visit Alfie. She cried when she first saw him. There were cuddles and goo-goos and ga-gas and “oh my god, he's so beautiful” and all the softness that comes with bringing a new baby into the world.

I made us a cuppa one morning, and we sat down in the lounge. Just me and her. In my little bubble watching him have his bottle, just staring at him

She looked over and said, "You know, you can't control everyone, Kelly."

What the fuck did you just say?

She was looking straight at me, and I looked up and my eyes went straight through her. Silence.

And I held that stare until she looked away.

Rage. Pure rage filled my body that I couldn't feel anything. I felt calm. There's only a certain type of rage that makes you feel that way. Beyond violence, beyond yelling. Beyond words.

She saw control.

I remembered the blood.

It wasn’t the worst thing anyone had ever said to me. God no. If she had said that to me any other time I probably would've shrugged it off.

But why then? And why that? Of all the things she could have reached for, of all the words in the English language, why in that moment, during that time, after everything that had happened, why was control the thing she thought she was seeing?

Am I only the one who remembered that my brain bled at 15 weeks pregnant?

I was convinced by then that control is not something I had. Not over my body, not over my life, and especially not over anyone else.

While she was talking about control, I was trying to survive. While I thought I was showing fear, love and wonder, maybe she thought I was saying, "Back off."

I don't know.

Maybe you can have two different perspectives of the same thing sitting side by side having a cup of tea.

And it's stayed with me. Not the sentence itself, though I'm still pissed off about it. The feeling of someone that had so confidently arrived at a conclusion about me when I hadn't even figured myself out yet.

On the outside I was the same. Still making cups of tea and folding washing and asking whether anyone needed anything from the supermarket. Of course, how were people supposed to understand all the debris sitting underneath?

They're not. Doesn't make it less lonely.

Most nights I spoon Alfie after he falls asleep just to relive what it felt like to have him in my belly again.

I never cherished that time while he was growing inside me. I was too busy being afraid.

And sometimes, with his little body curled against mine, I wonder if I'm trying to borrow something back. Not because I wish time had stopped, but because I wasn't really there for it the first time.

Nobody knows those things.

Life leaves its fingerprints on us. Some obvious. Some invisible. And yet we still smile. Still act normal, whatever that means. Meanwhile, underneath, we're rebuilding ourselves with what little remains.

Relationships quietly lose their foundation in these times. I couldn't relate to people the way I once had, because I couldn't even relate to myself anymore.

Maybe it's simply to remember that people are unfinished. Beneath all the ordinary business of life, we quietly survive, grieve and rebuild in ways nobody else sees.

Which means we don't get to say,

"Oh yeah, I know you."

Maybe we just get the privilege of walking alongside one another, and loving each other enough to leave room for what we don't yet understand.

Because people are unfinished.

Perhaps that's the gift of being human. Not that we fully understand one another, but that we keep trying.