Uncontrollable nightmares. A fear of sleep. A fear of being awake. No real refuge in either. Daylight brings the exhaustion. Darkness brings the reliving. Some days it feels as though my own body is the place I am least safe.

So I do what I always do. I throw myself into the kids.

I keep moving. I keep answering. I keep showing up. I do things with them while my chest is tight and my breathing is shallow and my mind is somewhere between now and then. I keep going until I cannot anymore. Then I go to bed early, only to meet the part of the day I fear most. Because bed is not rest to me. It is not peace. It is the end of one battle and the beginning of another.

Sleep does not come kindly. My brain will not switch off, as though it knows exactly what waits for me if it does. Vivid dreams. Violent memories. My body dragged back into moments it should never have known, when all it should be doing is recovering enough to face another day.

I live for my kids. I simply do not have the energy to live for me. Every ounce of what I have, I pour into them. Every drop. It leaves the pot empty for myself, but to me that has always felt like the right choice. Because to have children is to hold a responsibility so enormous and so sacred that it should never be handled carelessly. Their needs matter. Their feelings matter. Their questions matter. And boy can they talk.

They come to me as if I am a walking encyclopaedia, as if I hold the answers to everything. Their minds are curious and hungry and alive. They want to know, to talk, to be reassured, to be heard. And I give it. I give it all. Even when I am tired enough to disappear. Even when my own mind is screaming. Even when every part of me is running on empty.

Perhaps I parent too much at times. Perhaps I hold myself to impossible standards. But the thought of not being that mam, even for a second, terrifies me. The thought of them ever feeling what I felt, of ever doubting they are safe, loved, heard, protected, is unbearable to me.

Because I know exactly what it is to be a child and not have those things.

I know what it is to grow up without softness. To live in a house where love was not something that wrapped around you, but something withheld, twisted, weaponised. I know what it is to be small and afraid and to learn, far too early, that home is not always where safety lives.

So I made myself a promise somewhere along the way. My children would never have to earn warmth from me. They would never have to question whether they could come to me. They would never have to shrink themselves to survive my moods. They would never have to carry fear into bed at night because of me. I would become the parent I was never offered.

And I have.

But there is a cost to being everything for everyone when nobody ever taught you how to be anything for yourself.

I give my all to them because they deserve it. I give myself nothing because somewhere deep down, some wounded part of me still believes I deserve that too.

Yesterday was a hard day and it has bled into the early hours of today. That is the humiliating thing about complex PTSD. You can have a good day. A real one. Twenty four hours where the light feels possible again. And then suddenly it is gone, swallowed whole, as though it never belonged to you in the first place.

On Tuesday I took two of my sons for a pub lunch. We laughed, played games, chatted. It was good, proper good. The kind of ordinary time that means everything. I told them how much I loved them, how amazing they are as people. I listened to them. Gave them space. Let them be seen. And while all of that was happening, while I was being the mam I so desperately want to be, I was also fighting an intense flashback rising in me like floodwater.

I looked up and saw a light. An old fashioned light. I had seen one like it before, years ago. It hung in my parents dining room. The second my eyes landed on it, my body remembered before my mind had time to catch up.

And just like that I was no longer sat at lunch with my boys. I was back there.

Back in a room where my mam would burn me with her iron when she was feeling sadistic or angry. Back in a room where she would push me against her oak dresser. She loved heavy wooden furniture, the real solid kind, not the flimsy stuff. Furniture that bruised when your body met it. Furniture that held its place while I lost mine. Back in a room where she once made me sit for five hours while she told me how useless I was because my A level results had not been what they wanted. For five hours I listened to the same poison poured over me. That I was useless. A disgrace. A failure. A shameful daughter, she wished she didn’t have.

I had not done brilliantly, no. But I had still passed. I could still go to university. It should have been enough. But those years at home were some of the hardest of my life. Abused almost daily by my dad. Abused several times a day by my mam. Every minute I spent at school was spent trying to work out how to run away, with very little hope of ever managing it. I did not know the world. I had been kept within my parents four walls for eighteen years, only ever allowed out for school. Running away was terrifying because I had nobody and knew nothing. I was naive in the way only imprisoned children are naive.

The flashback did not loosen its grip. Words flew through my head. Images scorched behind my eyes. I drank faster to try to gain some kind of control, or perhaps to outrun what had already caught me. All the while I kept giving my children the opposite of what I had. Safety. Warmth. Attention. Regulation. Love that does not have to be earned. I will put on the brave face every single time if it means they get to feel secure. Even if I am falling apart inside, they will know steadiness. Even if it costs me dearly, they will know they are safe with me.

That is the thing people do not always see. Survival does not always look like falling apart. Sometimes it looks like making the dinners, answering the questions, planning the days out, listening to every story, soothing every worry, all while your own body is screaming beneath the surface.

Sometimes survival looks like becoming the exact parent you once needed, while grieving the fact nobody ever became that for you.

And that grief is its own kind of exhaustion.

So I ask again, how do you cope when the pain lives

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