Birthing pains

I started having migraines in Junior High School. The harbingers were these little swirlies in the middle of my vision, followed by holes in my vision where, for example, I wouldn’t be able to see a person’s right eye when I was looking at them. I could see their whole face if I looked away, but then the hole would be somewhere else. My mind would kind of stitch the face together, so it looked like the person I was looking at just was missing an eye—no hole or anything, just a face with one eye and a nose and then an ear. I’d need to make my way around by turning my head from side to side to get a full range of vision. It was pretty disconcerting, but that was the nice part. All I could do when these harbingers appeared was wait for what came next.

About ten minutes after that the pain would begin. It always started in the top left of my head, just above my eye. It was the kind of pain that would completely knock me out. Now, I have a high threshold of pain. I won’t go into how I know that, but I do, with confidence. But having a pain that shot through my brain, my mind, the seat of my being, was nearly impossible to take. I couldn’t think of something else to take my mind off the pain, because the pain was in the organ that I used to think. Thanks goodness it went away in high school, and didn’t come back for many years.

The migraines came back, of all times, on our honeymoon. A combination of planning and executing and paying for a wedding on our own finally caught up with me at its first opportunity. Also, I was launching a new line of comics under Clive Barker’s banner, and I was kind of leaving right before the launch, in order to be back in time for the launch, so that added a bit. We were in Aruba, which is a beautiful island and hot as anything in April, and oh, gosh, just the perfect place to get knocked out by a migraine. The first came two days in, and then about a half a week after that, and the next two days after that and the next the next day, and the next. Daily. Of course, by then I was back in New York at my job, and recognizing this was going to be a problem. Getting the migraines every day meant I could only get about a half a days work in. For many comic book editors, (Ralph Macchio, I hope you’re listening) that’s pretty average. But it wasn’t good for me—I had stuff to get done.

Anyway, that problem is long solved. I mean, I still have them about every six months, but I have a medication now that zonks me out and makes me a bit stupid, but saves me from the pain. The reason I’m writing about it now is as a segue to birthing pains. See, I’d describe the migraine as one of the the worst pains I’d ever felt, an excruciating twist and throb that would literally knock me out from its intensity. Years later, after the birth of Big T, that description made my wife think of labor. She’s never had a migraine and I’ve never given birth, so I don’t know how comparable they are, but my point is the way she put it. She could go through the intense pain of natural childbirth, and have a sort of reward of a healthy kid afterward. And she felt bad for me that I’d go through the migraine and have only the relief of not having it anymore, and the dull throbbing ache that would be left for about 12 hours in aftermath. I think I’m not explaining it right, because it was a sweet thing to say. It was sympathy, of a sort.

Obviously, this one is taking the long way ‘round, here.

My real point here is that I feel like I’ve been having some sort of birthing pains, lately. Not migraines, nor contractions, but clearly a feeling of disquiet that has been coming to a head, expressing itself in exhaustion, and met with a steadfast refusal to rest, because it’s not rest I’m in need of. I feel like my head is exploding with so many ideas that I can’t give any one of them effective focus. I feel like something fundamental is changing in my head, and I can’t exactly pinpoint what that change is, or what its effecting, besides everything. Something’s being born, and I think the anxious exhaustion is in anticipation of the pain. The exhaustion is the swirlie equivalent, harbinger of what’s coming. And all I can do now, is wait.