The Mask Beneath the Smile

Chronic Pain, Parenting, and the Stories We Carry

There is a particular kind of grief that comes with living inside a body you cannot fully trust.

A body you do not seem to recognize anymore.

This grief?

It rarely looks dramatic from the outside.

But inside?

It is intense.

Most of us become exceptionally good performers.

We learn to smile through migraines as if lightning bolts aren’t preparing to split our skulls in two.

To nod politely while our lower backs pulse and throb, sending waves of pain upward again and again.

To distract ourselves while pretending we don’t feel the invisible fingers pinching and squeezing at our shoulders. No one sees that weight we all carry.

Blinking away the pressure as the vice slowly tightens around our heads and behind our eyes.

Only to keep moving through exhaustion so deep it feels cellular.

Visceral even.

Laughing through.

These tears tolerated easier than those of the pain and anguish.

We are quietly calculating inside—determining how much energy remains before the inevitable crash, when the last droplet finally hits the ground.

We push through until we have exhausted every reserve.

Denying ourselves the very self-regulation we so often encourage in others

Nervous system overwhelm.

We have no choice but to succumb.

Snapping.

Breaking.

Unable to think clearly.

How we know we should.

It’s all just too much.

Frustrated we’ve now let this intensity spill over.

The volcano erupting, consuming everything in its path.

Some days, chronic pain feels less like pain and more like carrying an invisible weight.

It’s stitched directly into my nervous system.

Not always physical pain.

As pain comes in many forms for us feelers.

Doesn’t it?

Emotional pain…

Mental exhaustion…

Grief…

Worry…

The heaviness of carrying too much for too long.

This heaviness?

 No one else fully sees it.

And perhaps that is the hardest part.

Not merely the scoliosis.

The muscle tension.

The autoimmune-like flares.

Or the hormonal storms of perimenopause.

Or long-COVID symptoms resurrecting once stress, sugar, lack of sleep, and overexertion enter our world.

Not even the surgeries meant to “fix” things, leaving you standing afterward wondering why you somehow feel worse.

Answers left in the wind.

With a body whispering alarms nobody else can hear.

Nope.

I’d say…

The hardest part is often the masking.

That painted face I spoke about once before.

The stage performance.

The ability to become so practiced at functioning that people stop realizing…

They are desensitized to your complaints.

So instead, you keep quiet.

Suffer in silence.

Hold it in.

And maybe, that is why I understand so many of the children I work with.

And the parents who walk this same path.

I feel it in my children, my pets, my partner.

I see it all:

This masking.

This containment.

The emotional holding together all day long.

A child keeping it together at school only to unravel safely at home.

A child whose nervous system spends the entire day performing regulation before collapsing into overwhelm the moment safety presents itself.

And yet we say, “Excellent job.”

Bobby sits still and listens so well…

Meanwhile, Bobby?

He is peeling at the skin around his nails.

Ripping until it bleeds, just so he can…

So he can sit there quietly and still, just like the “good boy” they say he is.

And the truth is—we adults do it too.

We people-please.

We overachieve.

We mask.

I know I certainly do.

The guilt and generational stories I work so hard to rewrite for my own children?

They often begin with recognizing them within myself first.

Reflecting.

Growing.

Remembering.

I was raised by hardworking, overextended European immigrants who sacrificed immensely…

The older I get, the more compassion I have for what they carried.

And yet, what is interesting is that I understood much of it, even as a child.

They explained.

They reflected.

They encouraged me to see things from their perspective.

To empathize.

And I did.

Perhaps that is part of why I became who I am.

A helper.

A feeler.

An observer.

Someone forever trying to understand the hearts and stories of others.

Yet I am also beginning to recognize that understanding someone’s pain does not prevent us from carrying pieces of it ourselves.

We do.

We absorb it.

Children are remarkably perceptive.

They ingest more than we realize.

Not only our words, but our nervous systems.

Our stress.

Our worries.

Our ways of coping.

Our ways of surviving.

And perhaps that is where so much of my reflection lives now.

Never blaming.

Because truly, it just is.

Life happens.

Experiences happen.

Loss happens.

Stress happens.

Pain happens.

People do the best they can with the tools, awareness, support, and understanding they have available at the time.

And the older I get, the less interested I become in assigning fault and the more interested I become in understanding.

Understanding my grandparents...

Understanding my father, my mother—

Understanding myself and now,

My children.

Because the truth is, we are all carrying stories that began long before we arrived.

Stories woven through family systems, nervous systems, experiences, genetics, culture, expectations, and survival.

Some are beautiful.

Some are painful.

Most are both.

And maybe healing is not about erasing those stories.

Maybe, healing is simply becoming aware enough to decide which chapters continue and which chapters end with us.

Not through force.

Not through shame.

Not through perfection.

But through awareness.

Through compassion.

Through practice.

Again and again—over and over.

Working with parents, children and teens has taught me something I am still learning myself.

Expression does not always come in words.

Some of us become talkers.

Out-loud processors.

People who need to think by speaking.

Others carry things quietly.

And children?

Children often communicate through behaviour long before they possess the language to explain what is happening inside them.

As parents, this can be incredibly difficult.

Especially when we have seen signs of maturity.

When they have demonstrated understanding before.

When we find ourselves wondering:

“You know this already. What is wrong with you?”

But understanding is not the same thing as regulation.

Knowing is not the same thing as doing.

I know this because adults struggle with the exact same thing.

How many times have I understood something logically while still finding myself emotionally overwhelmed?

How many times have I known exactly what would help me and still struggled to implement it in the moment?

Children are no different.

They are simply expressing it more honestly.

Their behaviours are often their words before the words arrive.

Their tears.

Their anger.

Their avoidance.

Their defiance.

Their clinginess.

Their withdrawal.

These are often messages, not character flaws.

Expressions, not manipulations.

Nervous systems speaking the only language they know how to speak in that moment.

Though, we simply cannot walk them through these moments the way we wish we could all the time.

We are human.

And so, couldn’t we now say the same rings true for us adults too?

Perhaps beneath our frustration, perfectionism, people-pleasing, emotional shutdown, or need for control lies the very same thing:

A nervous system trying to be heard.

Which leads us to the overspill:

When Pain Steals Our Patience

It is such guilt that many parents carry.

Not guilt intentionally done wrong.

But a guilt of not always being who they want to be.

A guilt that arrives after the sharp tone.

After the sigh.

After snapping over something small.

After realizing our reactions were never really about the spilled milk, the forgotten toy, the sibling argument, or the tenth request to get down the stairs.

The guilt that whispers:

“They deserve a better version of me than this.”

What many people do not understand is that chronic pain is not simply pain.

Pain is exhaustion.

Pain is concentration.

Pain is carrying a conversation while simultaneously trying to ignore the migraine behind your eyes, the ache in your back, the hormone surge that has your nervous system humming like a live wire, and the fatigue that feels woven into your bones.

Pain consumes bandwidth.

And patience requires bandwidth.

The problem is not that parents living with pain love their children any less.

It is that they are often trying to parent from a body that is already fighting a battle before the morning chaos ensues.

What has humbled me most is realizing that many of the behaviours I once judged in myself were not signs of failure.

They were signs of depletion.

There is a difference.

A nervous system that has been in pain for weeks, months, or years is not operating from the same baseline as one that is rested or regulated.

Yet many of us continue holding ourselves to impossible standards.

Expecting ourselves to remain endlessly patient while running on empty.

Expecting ourselves to pour from cups we have not had time to refill.

And still, we show up.

We apologize.

We repair.

We try again.

Perhaps that is part of changing the story.

Not becoming perfect.

Not by never losing our patience

But allowing our children to witness what it looks like when a human being struggles, takes responsibility, receives support, and continues to grow.

Because healing is not perfection.

Healing is awareness.

Healing is repair.

Healing is choosing differently the next time.

Chronic pain has become one of my greatest teachers in this regard.

Not because I wanted the lesson.

Not because I am grateful for the suffering.

But because pain has a way of stripping away illusion.

It forces reflection.

It demands attention.

It asks questions we often spend years avoiding.

What am I carrying?

What was never mine to carry?

What do I need to release?

What do I need to grieve?

What do I need to accept?

When the body slows, the mind often gets louder.

Old stories emerge.

Old wounds surface.

Old patterns reveal themselves.

And while I would never wish chronic pain upon anyone, I have come to recognize that it has softened me in ways comfort never could.

It has deepened my empathy.

Expanded my patience for human struggle.

And helped me understand the invisible battles people fight every single day.

Because once you have spent enough time living inside a body that hurts, you stop assuming that what you see on the surface tells the whole story.

You begin to look deeper.

You become curious.

You listen differently.

And perhaps that is what I try to bring to both my work and my parenting.

The understanding that behaviour is communication.

That suffering is often hidden.

That healing is rarely linear.

And that every person we encounter is likely carrying something we cannot see.

Because we truly never know what someone’s body is holding behind the smile they learned to perfect long ago.

Like ducks gliding across a still pond, we often only see the calm surface.

Beneath the murky waters, however, tired legs paddle frantically—working hard just to stay afloat.

A little mindfulness can go a long way.

It reminds us to pause.

To soften our assumptions.

To approach one another—and ourselves—with greater compassion.

Because sometimes the strongest people we know are simply doing their best to keep paddling.

And perhaps that is enough.

To keep showing up.

To keep learning.

To keep repairing.

To keep growing.

Or, as Dory would say,

“Just keep swimming… Just keep swimming…”

With Love,

Mel Watts