Throbbing head pain, sensitivity to light and sound, and feeling like you might vomit (or actually vomiting) don’t tend to mix well with raising kids. If you’re a mom who suffers from chronic migraine attacks, research backs up what you already know: Parenting through repeated headaches often makes you feel like you’re falling short.
Take a break, and you feel guilty about missing out on time you could have spent with your children. “I’d constantly have to put myself to bed and not be as outgoing with them,” says Laura Hill, a Portland, Oregon-based mom of an 8- and 11-year-old. “I still feel guilty about it sometimes. Like, why can’t I just deal with it?”
On the other hand, keep on parenting when you feel like a zombie, and your symptoms can turn you into the worst version of yourself. “Even my kids’ voices would bother me. I would get irritated and yell at them,” says Ana Verdecia, MD, a professor of neurology in Ohio who has children 8, 10, and 15 years old.
As with so many parenting challenges, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for coping with headaches while still showing up for your kids. But hearing from others who have been there, done that, can help you feel less alone—and maybe give you some new strategies to try.
We reached out to four moms who struggle with chronic migraine (including a headache doc!) to ask how they manage to pull off parenting in spite of the pain. Here’s what they had to say.
Q: How Do You Explain Your Migraines To Your Children?
Every family is different, and how to approach the conversation depends on your kids’ age and maturity level. The parents we chatted with generally aimed to be straightforward in an age-appropriate way.
During the pandemic, Hill’s migraine attacks were coming every day while she was single-parenting and working from home. Her kids, then 4 and 7, were fighting nonstop. “I was really frustrated, because they were terrorizing each other and I was at the end of my rope from a sensory standpoint,” says Hill, whose splitting head pain comes with a blinding aura and facial numbness.
Since just asking them to be quiet wasn’t working, she tried to appeal to their self-interest. “I sat them down, showed them my four medications, and said, ‘This is what I have to take just to be what I am right now,’” she says. Then she explained how they’d benefit from being quieter. “If you can help me by keeping the noise down,” she told them, “I’ll feel better and we can do more things.” It took many conversations, but eventually the message got through. These days, when a migraine hits Hill, her kids have learned to be more sensitive to her need for quiet.
Older children can handle more information. Dr. Verdecia, who specializes in headache disorders, has explained to her 15- and 10-year-old that migraine is a brain disorder that cause certain symptoms. She’s told them how some lifestyle behaviors (like staying hydrated and eating regular meals) can help prevent migraine attacks, but that these tactics don’t work 100 percent of the time. Now when her head starts to throb, the rest of her family is understanding. “They’ll turn off the TV or the lights so I can get some relief,” she says.
Q: How Do You Handle A Young Child When A Migraine Attack Happens?
Having your partner or someone else take over while you get some peace and quiet is by far the best remedy. Norma Rhee, a Philadelphia-based mom to 3- and 6-year-old kids, has intense but relatively infrequent migraines. She says she has been lucky that her husband is usually around when she needs to cut out. “If I were alone with the kids, I don’t know what I would do,” she says. “The migraines wipe me out and I just have to sleep.”
Not everyone is so fortunate, and you can’t exactly line up a babysitter in advance for a migraine. The solution: Find a few emergency backups able to come to the rescue on short notice, like a retired neighbor or a parent you’ve gotten friendly with. “Call on the village to assist, for sure!” says Abbie Dillard, also from Philadelphia, who has a 7-year-old and an infant. Make sure to reach out to them as soon as you start to notice symptoms, to give them time to come over before your migraine knocks you off your feet.
Q: What’s Your Best Migraine-Management Strategy?
According to Dr. Verdecia, some combination of meds and lifestyle changes is usually your best bet, though figuring out an effective game plan can take some trial and error and help from a neurologist. For her, the right combo is onabotulinumtoxinA injections and feel-good habits like eating consistent meals, getting adequate sleep, and exercising regularly.
Hill relies on a combination of preventive oral medications (rimegepant, gabapentin, and methocarbamol), plus fast-acting migraine-abortive meds (diclofenac potassium, naratriptan, rizatriptan) when symptoms strike. Steering clear of triggers like repeated loud noises and eye strain helps, too. She wears prism glasses, which bend and redirect light to help her eyes focus, minimizing strain.
No treatment plan is foolproof, and the obvious strategy is often the most effective: All of the parents we spoke to agreed that lying down in a dark, quiet room is the best thing to do when a migraine strikes.
Q: Does Treatment Really Make A Difference In How You Parent?
Yes, 100 percent. When you find a medication that makes you have fewer, less intense migraine attacks, you can be more present with your family and miss out on less stuff, Dr. Verdecia says. You’ll probably have more positive interactions with your kids, too, since there are fewer instances where you’re on edge just because they’re doing normal kid things, like playing a loud game, asking for snacks every 15 minutes, or whining, Hill says.
The key is being consistent with your treatment plan. That means if you’re on a migraine-abortive med, you should take it the moment you start to feel symptoms to stop the headache in its tracks. “I try to be very aware when I get the slightest tinge,” Dillard says. “I have at least one rizatriptan pill in every outdoor item I have or could be using, just in case.”
Q: What’s The Most Surprising Thing You’ve Learned?
There’s no arguing that migraines suck. But if there’s one possible silver lining to being a parent with a debilitating chronic condition, it’s the fact that you have a built-in opportunity to demonstrate to your kids the importance of being sensitive to others’ needs. “It’s teaching my kids some empathy—they have to be aware that I’m a person, too,” Hill says.
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