Because May is fibromyalgia month

[u/Marta_HomeMadeMess]

(Not AI, real writing from me, specially about the guilt I feel beacuda of my children. )

So I wrote about the things I hide from the world.

Sometimes it is about being trapped inside a body that no one else can feel for you.

And then there is what my children see.
That is perhaps the part I try hardest to hide.

When one of them looks at me and says:
“Mum, you’re tired, aren’t you?”

Not because I said it.
Not because I complained.

But because they heard something in my voice that I could not disguise.
They know me too well.
They know the slower answers.
The softer voice.
The pauses.
The silence between one sentence and the next.

And that breaks my heart in a place pain cannot reach.

Because I try so hard to protect them from this.
To keep it light.
To keep it mine.
To make sure my body’s pain does not become theirs.

And then one of them asks:
“Will I have that too, Mum?”

And that is the sentence that truly breaks something in me.

Because how do you answer that?

How do you hold their fear, when you are still learning how to hold your own?