ABOUT PARENTING WITH MIGRAINE
For Moms Living With Migraine
Parenting With Migraine is for moms navigating motherhood while living with migraine, and all the unpredictability, limitations, and extra mental load that can come with it.
Maybe you’re making lunches while your head is pounding, sitting through practice when it’s hard to even hold your head up, or canceling plans you were really looking forward to. Maybe you wonder if your kids are missing out. Or you have the fear you don’t always want to say out loud: What if my kids inherit this too?
I get it because I am that mom too.
Hi, I’m Marina
I’ve lived with migraine for more than 30 years. For a long time, it was something I learned to manage while going through college, law school, building a career as an attorney, getting married, and eventually starting a family.
Pregnancy changed everything.
What had been episodic migraine gradually became chronic, and eventually I was having migraine attacks every day while caring for a baby and a toddler. There was no lying down in a dark, quiet room until I felt better. My kids still needed to eat, be changed, entertained, comforted, and somehow make it through the day with a mom who was in constant pain.
I remember looking at the clock in the morning and already wishing it were bedtime. Then bedtime would come, and I would dread falling asleep because I knew I was going to wake up in pain and do the whole thing again.
Things finally started to change
Eventually, I found headache specialists who understood migraine and helped me explore different treatment options. I learned about medication overuse headache and began to break the cycle.
It took trial and error, time, and a combination of treatments, but slowly I started to feel like I had a little more control over migraine.
Around the same time, I found the migraine community online. For the first time, I saw people openly talking about chronic migraine and realized I wasn’t the only one living this way. But there was still something I couldn’t find enough of: people talking honestly about what it was like to parent with migraine.
Building Parenting With Migraine
That’s when Parenting With Migraine began. I wanted to create the kind of resource I had been looking for myself: trustworthy migraine information, practical resources for everyday life, and honest conversations about what it really looks like to parent with migraine.
What started as a place to share my own experience also helped lead my career in a completely different direction. Today, in addition to running Parenting With Migraine, I work as Social Media Director for a migraine nonprofit.
Parenting With Migraine became the place I wish I’d had back then, and honestly, the place I still need now.
“I loved my babies more than anything, and I loved being their mom. I just didn’t know how I was supposed to do it while living with that much pain every day.” - Marina
A LITTLE ABOUT ME