Being a mother can definitely be a very joyous experience, but it can also be difficult if you have to deal with fibromyalgia while simultaneously raising your children.
Is it possible for you to raise your kids while also trying to cope with your fibromyalgia? The answer is yes, and we’ll go over some of the ways that any mother with fibromyalgia will be able to balance her chronic pain with her responsibilities as a parent.
Energy
The most challenging aspect of being a mother and living with fibromyalgia is that you’ll find it difficult to get the energy to handle both. You should be able to keep informing your family of how you feel so that they don’t expect too much or too little from you on any particular day.
If you’re feeling more energized today, let them know and maybe you as a family can do something fun. If you’ve never felt in so much pain before, lay down on the couch.
Spending Time with Your Kids
You should take your kids out whenever you feel great. But should you take them out when you feel bad and are trying to get through another lousy day? A good way to cope with this is to run on errands only for essentials when you don’t feel well, and to take your children out to the park when you do feel well so that you’re good days aren’t spent on getting things such as groceries.
In the event that your kids are dying to go out when you aren’t feeling well, you may have to alternative things to do, such as giving them an art project, a toy or a game of some kind. There’s nothing wrong in pushing things off when you feel bad, but remember not to make any promises that you can’t keep to your kids.
Multi-Tasking
In our culture today, multi-tasking seems to have been accepted as a part of daily life. Mothers especially have to learn to multi-task. Unfortunately, the more you multitask, the slower things will get done and the less organized you will be. You’ll become significantly less stressed out if you take things one step at a time.
This means taking breaks when you need them and focusing on getting one task done. Once that task is done, you can move on to the next. Yes, this is a challenge especially if you’re trying to juggle around a bundle of different responsibilities, and it’s even more of a challenge if you have children to care for. You have to learn to live without multitasking. But is this possible?
If your kids are old enough, you can give them certain chores. Not only does this free up time for you to focus on one task at a time and get the stress out, it teaches your kids responsibilities. Right now, all you may be focusing on is raising your kids, getting them fed properly, and work at your job. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you must try to get as much of the stress out as possible.
Additional Tips
Here are some additional tips that you can go over for trying to balance your fibromyalgia symptoms with motherhood.
1- The first tip is to get plenty of exercise. Yes, it is true that people with fibromyalgia do find difficulty in getting sufficient exercise due to the pain, but exercising is still a great way to energize your body and get your muscles to heal themselves. A major reason why you are in so much pain is due to your muscles, so exercising stimulates them. You also don’t need to put a lot of time into exercising each day. Twenty to thirty minutes of exercise per day will drastically improve your strength.
2- You should also a void smoking. This is because nicotine is bad to the muscles by decreasing blood flow to them, which in turn lowers the amount of oxygen your muscles receive and increases the pain that you feel.
3- If you haven’t looked into fibronomics, you probably should now. Fibronomics is not only useful for mothers, it is for mothers to be as well. Fibronomics is manipulating your body in order to minimize the pain as much as possible and result in being able to complete tasks more efficiently. There’s so much information related to fibronomics that we can’t go into all of it now, but it’s still something worth looking into.
4- Remember to get as much rest as you can. Fatigue is a common symptom of fibromyalgia, so getting the sleep at night that you need can be tough. Nonetheless, being rested will reduce your chances of developing illness and stress, and thus allow you to cope with your fibromyalgia better while raising your children. Another way to get plenty of stress is to schedule some time each day to your personal hobbies, such as listening to music or reading a book.
5- The last thing we’ll go over is coping with fibromyalgia while in a pregnancy. Most pregnant patients with fibromyalgia report feeling more pain towards the pregnancy’s end. This is because each factor that can cause pain all join together at that time. It will be very difficult for a mother-to-be to be able to get comfortable at this point.
In order to get as comfortable as possible, you can participate in a physical therapy program that will provide heat and massages to your lower back. An alternative would be to get trigger point injections, but you should carefully review this with your fibromyalgia doctor to make sure that it will have no negative effect on your pregnancy.
While suffering from fibromyalgia while late in your pregnancy will be difficult, just know that you’ve almost reached the end. With help from treatments and physical therapy, hopefully you can get as comfortable as possible.
Further reading:
Fibromyalgia: What You Need to Know:
http://www.webmd.com/fibromyalgia/fibromyalgia-what-you-need-to-know-10/hot-topics
Supermom? Not Today: http://www.fibromyalgia-symptoms.org/fibro-and-parenting.html
Two Perspectives on Fibromyalgia and Motherhood – the Doctor and the Mother: http://www.prohealth.com/library/showarticle.cfm?libid=15240
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