86. Have someone tell me that I inspire them.

Very strangely, this happened twice on one day, and both on the same day that my mum and sister had spent the morning telling me how useless I was....

I have a very unusual problem. During the night, I suffer from night terrors which quite a few children suffer from, but very few adults. It means that often I half wake up and during this period of half waking and half sleeping, the room is real, but the person standing over me menacingly is not. I usually scream and then fall asleep and forget about it. This means I don’t sleep well, but the real problem is for my poor husband who gets woken up, sees me in distress and also doesn’t get a full night’s sleep.

Unfortunately, this occurs more when I am stressed as I am a bottler of problems. There’s no-one I can speak to about the things that bother me, so my worries tend to manifest themselves at night.

When I had a night terror while my sister was staying with me this weekend, she went absolutely mad at me the next morning, saying she hadn’t had any sleep and that if this carried on, I would make a terrible mother (I am four months pregnant).

Although she implied I’d done it deliberately, I absolutely can’t help it. She yelled at me a bit about how selfish I was. I told her that her shouting wasn’t really helping with the problem, to which she sarcastically said: “OH, it’s MY fault, I am soooo sorry – what can I do for YOU?” before slamming a door in my face.

Now, I mention this so there’s a bit of context to how upset I was, so I went for a swim, and then I thought I’d go for a walk and happened upon an open day at a local monastery. While I was there, a woman came up to me and said she recognised me from when I used to work at the local paper. She then made the connection between myself and my husband and much to my surprise, told me how impressed she was with our hard work and commitment to the community (this would be my husband, not me), but then went onto say that she used to enjoy my newspaper articles and remembered one interview in particular - when I met the wonderful Ken Hom!!

Later on the same day, after I had manoeuvred my now-giant head out of the door, I caught up with my friend who tried to buy me a coffee which is one of the things on my BANNED list for the baby! She guessed immediately and told me that I was a lovely person who would make a wonderful mum which made me cry as it almost cancelled out the heavy doubts that my sister had put into my head.

Thank you to the lovely women who believe in me. Even if it’s not true, your timing could not have been better.

xxx