I fell in the shower today.

Not a cute little slip where you catch yourself and laugh it off. I was home with Channing and Royce. I had asked Channing to play with Royce so I could take a quick shower, a basic thing people are supposed to be able to do without needing a safety committee.

But Royce was having absolutely none of that.

He loudly demanded to be in the bathroom with me, so I gave up privacy in exchange for quiet.

That is basically motherhood in one sentence.

I stepped into the shower, went to sit down, and the shower chair slid backward, tipping out from under me. The tub felt like it had been greased with too much soap. There was no graceful recovery. No quick save.

I went down hard into the bottom of the tub.

My shoulder hit the wall. My back slammed into the stool. My body hit the slick floor, and the whole time the water kept pouring down on me like, Well, this is your life now.

The sting came immediately.

Not the slow kind of pain that creeps in later. The sharp, hot kind that tells you right away, Yeah, that hurt.

Then it settled in.

That is how pain works sometimes. It arrives loud, pulls up a chair, and decides to stay awhile.

The first thought I had, sitting there wet and hurt at the bottom of the tub, was: Are you fucking kidding me?

Then Royce threw his tiny finger skateboard into the tub.

It landed in the water between my legs. I picked it up and chucked it back out of the shower, irritated. Royce, naturally, thought this meant we had invented a new game. He cackled with delight, retrieved it, and threw it back in.

Apparently, while I was debating whether I needed emergency assistance, my toddler was at the county fair.

There I was, naked and injured in the bottom of the tub, trying to decide if this was a brother situation or a fire department situation, while a toddler turned it into finger skateboard carnival time.

I wish I could say I handled it with grace.

Mostly, I handled it with profanity.

The hard part was not only that I fell.

The hard part was realizing I might not be able to get back up.

My knees are already damaged by arthritis. Getting onto a hard surface on my knees is not a small thing for me. It hurts. It takes planning, leverage, and more strength than people realize.

I sat there in the tub, water pouring over me, trying to decide what would be more embarrassing: calling my brother or calling the fire department. For the record, I eventually decided the fire department might actually be less embarrassing, considering I was wet and naked.

But I still wanted to try getting myself up first.

The first two tries did not work.

So I sat there and washed and conditioned my hair.

Because what else was I supposed to do?

I was already in the shower.

That is the kind of absurdity chronic illness gives you. One minute you are trying to bathe. The next minute you are doing a risk assessment, parenting a toddler, calculating humiliation, and deep conditioning your hair from the floor of the bathtub.

Eventually, after a few failed attempts, I managed to get upright.

Once I found a stable place to sit and my body had a minute to register what happened, I realized my tailbone was probably bruised too.

You do not always know the full inventory of damage right away. At first, you only know the loudest pain: the shoulder, the back, the impact. Then the adrenaline starts to fade, and your body begins sending in reports from everywhere else.

Tailbone injured.

Neck and shoulder area angry.

Back not over it.

Pride bruised, but technically functional.

I was mad.

Mad because I know to be careful. Mad because I already have safety things. The chair. The non-slip mat. The awareness that my body is not easy. I am not pretending otherwise.

But somehow the mat was not in the shower, and the chair slipped anyway, and down I went.

I was mad because this keeps happening.

This was my fourth all-the-way-to-the-ground fall this year. I have fallen out of bed. I have fallen down the stairs. I have fallen because my knee simply decided not to work while I was walking.

And now I have fallen in the shower.

My dad is in his seventies and does not fall half as often as I do.

That is the part that catches in my chest.

Because I am only 45.

And I hate that I have to think this way already.

I hate making choices like, Can I get up, or do I need to call someone?

I hate that my arthritis and my weight both make moving harder.

I hate that I can know better, plan better, try harder, and still end up sitting in the tub with water pouring over me while my toddler throws a toy skateboard at me like we are hosting the saddest Olympics in the Midwest.

There is humor in it.

There has to be.

But there is grief in it too.

People hear, “I fell in the shower,” and they think about the fall. They picture the bruise. The soreness. Maybe the embarrassment.

They do not always understand the hidden cost.

The fall took a few seconds.

The recovery may take days.

Tonight my tailbone feels bruised. Something between my shoulder and neck hurts badly. My body has that deep ache that tells me tomorrow will probably be worse. It feels a little like the day after a car accident, when the adrenaline wears off and the pain has had time to settle into every place that got hit.

And my cheeks are rosy and flushed, almost like windburn.

For me, that is usually a warning sign.

A flare is probably coming.

If it does, tomorrow may not be a normal day. It may be a Tylenol, gummies, bed, water, audiobooks, extra sleep kind of day. It may be a “help the kids by texting from upstairs” kind of day. It may be a “school is harder, errands are impossible, and please nobody need anything complicated from me” kind of day.

Sometimes a flare triggers a migraine, and then the whole world shrinks down to a dark room and survival.

That is the hidden cost of simple things.

A shower, a flight of stairs, a bad night of sleep, a family outing that went a little too long, a day where I tried to fit in one too many errands.

These are ordinary things.

Until they are not.

They come with a cost. And when you live with chronic illness, those costs add up fast.

One shower can cost more than a bruise.

It can cost a work shift.

It can cost a homeschool day.

It can cost the energy I was saving for art.

It can cost progress on the printables I am trying to make.

It can cost a weekend of building Midwest Mimi.

It can cost patience, capacity, and momentum.

One or two simple things can add up to more than my energy budget allows.

And the hard part is that my mind does not run on the same budget as my body.

My mind still wants to go.

It wants to write. It wants to make art. It wants to learn how to clean up my drawings in Procreate so I can turn them into coloring pages and printables. It wants to build Midwest Mimi. It wants to dream about Sunny Day Farm. It wants to plan, create, edit, post, learn, grow, and keep moving toward the life I am trying to build.

This weekend, I was hoping to figure out more of the art process.

I also needed to work a side job for my brother.

Now I will probably be in bed.

And I know rest matters. I know pushing through can make everything worse. I know my body needs what it needs.

But knowing that does not make it easy.

Because on my worst flare days, I cannot do much more than survive. And when those days drag on, my mind starts pacing inside my body like it is trapped behind a locked door.

That is the part people miss.

I am not lazy.

I am not unmotivated.

I am painfully full of things I want to do.

I have essays in my head. Art I want to finish. Books I want to write. A family business I am trying to build. A dream of accessible nature, cabins, fairy doors, and paths that people like me can enjoy without paying for it for a week afterward.

I have a whole life I am writing toward.

But I am writing toward it from inside a body that can be derailed by a shower.

That is humbling in a way I do not always want to be humbled.

I would love to be one of those people who decides to do something and then just does it. A person who wakes up, makes a plan, and follows the plan without first checking whether their body has filed a complaint.

But that is not the body I live in.

My body has terms and conditions.

They are lengthy.

They change without notice.

And apparently, sometimes they include surprise bathtub floor meetings.

So I am learning to build differently.

Not smaller.

Differently.

I am learning to build in the margins. From bed. Between flares. After falls. With ice packs and heating pads and audiobooks. With voice notes when typing hurts. With ideas scribbled down before they disappear. With help from my family. With grace I do not always feel like giving myself.

And with grit, because apparently I have an unreasonable amount of that.

I am writing this because I know I am not the only one living with this kind of hidden math.

There are so many people trying to build dreams inside bodies that do not always cooperate.

People writing from bed. Parenting through pain. Making art in tiny windows. Working slower than they want to. Resting more than they planned to. Starting over after ordinary things knock them down.

If that is you, I want you to know your slower pace does not mean your dream is smaller.

And if you love someone who lives this way, support the dream.

Do not just judge the speed.

Do not assume the slow pace means they are not trying.

Do not mistake rest for lack of ambition.

Some of us are carrying more than a dream.

We are carrying pain.

We are carrying flare days.

We are carrying bodies that can turn a shower into a recovery plan.

But we are still here.

Still dreaming.

Still making.

Still building.

With grace.

And grit.

Because the fall may cost me a few days.

It does not get to take the whole dream.