You packed a bag. You didn't pack your village.

You packed a bag. You didn't pack your village. You packed the essentials. Passports, medications, the children's loveys/comforters, the stuff you simply cannot replace. If you are anything like me, you made decisions in hours that you'd normally take months over. You got on a plane while crossing your fingers— or you decided to stay — and either way, you did it while keeping it together for everyone around you. And then you landed and realised your brain was so fried while packing everything for everyone else in the house that when it came to packing your own...well, let's just say I'm glad my husband brought a few hoodies and lots of socks with him!

Nobody is talking about how hard this version of life actually is. I'm going to.

Whether you're currently sitting in your mum's spare room in Surrey, unpacking a suitcase in a rental you found on Air BnB at 11pm, still in your Dubai villa wondering what the right call is, or settled somewhere else entirely — I want you to know something: the particular kind of exhaustion you're carrying right now is real. It has a name. And it is NOT weakness.

One thing I want to say above all else: Do not feel guilty about your feelings. Whatever they are. Yes, we do not have it as awful (or anywhere near) as some that live in actual war zones. Mothers in Gaza. Mothers in Sudan, Mothers in Yemen. Mothers all over the world who just keep putting one foot in front of the other, regardless of the missiles flying overhead. Regardless of the war crimes happening in their country. Because the world is an unkind place, full of hatred, misogyny and greed. It's also full of beauty, and kindness, and care. You just sometimes have to look a little harder for it in amongst the gutters. But how you feel is how YOU feel. It's valid. Every day I worked in the NICU, I would see a mother feeling guilt. Guilt because her term, jaundiced baby 'wasn't as ill' as the baby that was next to them, born at 23 weeks gestation, on a ventilator. And every time I would say 'that doesn't matter, your feelings are your feelings. Life hasn't gone as it was supposed to, you're allowed to feel whatever you need to feel'.

Society pours enough guilt on mothers. Mum guilt is real. Don't allow yourself to add to it.

‍If you're pregnant in Dubai or the UAE right now

Pregnancy was already a lot. Growing a human while also holding down your expat life, navigating Dubai's private hospital system (which, as I never stop saying, operates very differently to anything you'll have experienced before), attending antenatal appointments, sorting your maternity leave (what little of it you get), making sure you have the right consultant and the right hospital, possibly the right Doula or midwife— it is a full-time job on top of your actual full-time job.

And then the world got even more complicated.

The background noise of regional instability is a specific kind of stress that sits in the body. You don't stop being anxious just because you decided to leave the UAE, or because you decided to stay.

Over a week out of Dubai, and I'm still automatically thinking if every plane overhead is a 'jumbo jet' (commercial) or a 'jet jet' (military).

You lie awake running through scenarios. You feel guilty for worrying when other people have it worse. You try to 'stay calm for the baby' and then feel guilty about that too, because nobody can sustain calm indefinitely.

If you've left Dubai and you're now pregnant in the UK, South Africa, Australia, or wherever you've landed — you've also just swapped one healthcare system for another, mid-pregnancy, which is its own particular flavour of stressful. Your maternity notes are in a different format, if you even have them. Your new GP doesn't know you, or you haven't been able to get registered yet. Your 20-week scan report is in Arabic. Nobody here knows what Mediclinic or King's is.

You are allowed to find this genuinely hard. You don't need to preface it with 'I know we're lucky.'

If you have a newborn right now

The fourth trimester is relentless at the best of times. It asks everything of you: your sleep, your body, your sense of self, your relationship, your confidence. That's under planned circumstances.

If you're doing it while displaced (because that's what you are)— whether you've just arrived somewhere unfamiliar, whether you're in temporary accommodation, whether your partner has gone back to the UAE and the conflict, and you're doing the nights solo for now — I genuinely don't have adequate words for how hard that is.

Your Dubai network is on the wrong side of a time zone. The mums from your antenatal group are in WhatsApp threads you're still in but can't quite be present for. The community you'd built over three years in Dubai exists, but it's thousands of miles away from the baby currently not sleeping. It reminds me a little of Covid times if I'm honest, where WhatsApp was my saviour on those overnight feeds and there was literally no support for new mums.

This is the bit people don't think about when they imagine 'going home.' Home doesn't automatically mean support. Or at least not the type of support you need at this postnatal stage you're in. Expat mums need a very different kind of postpartum support than most 'home' health services offer. Certainly a very different kind of postnatal support than the NHS offers. Because your expectations are based on your experiences, not your entitlement.

If your children are older

We talk so much about babies in moments like this that we forget about the toddlers and the school-age children who are picking up on every bit of tension, every hushed phone call, every loaded pause in conversation. They don't have the language for what they're feeling, so they do what children do — they express it in behaviour. In big emotions. In clinginess. In sleep disruption. We're currently going through this with our own child, and it's hard. Hard for everyone. In questions you don't quite know how to answer.

"Are we going back to Dubai?"

"Why did we leave?"

"Is it safe?"

"When will things go back to normal?"

These questions deserve honest, age-appropriate answers. And they arrive when you're already running on empty. That is not a reflection of your parenting. It's just what this season looks like.

For those of you who stayed

Staying was a decision too, whether you had choices in the decision, or whether one of the big factors (employment, family, to name but two) forced the decision. And it came with its own weight — the uncertainty of not knowing if you made the right call, the low-level vigilance that never quite switches off, the cognitive dissonance of Dubai continuing to function perfectly well while the region holds its breath. Our nervous systems were not built for this.

Anxiety during pregnancy is not trivial. Anxiety in the postnatal period has clinical consequences. Chronic background stress affects milk supply, affects sleep, affects your capacity to be the parent you want to be. That is not a criticism of you or your choices— it's physiology. And knowing it means you can do something about it.

You are not fragile. But you are not superhuman, either.

One of the things I've noticed across 20-plus years of working with families is that the Dubai mum has been trained — by circumstance, by culture, by the general pace of expat life — to cope. To adapt. To just get on with it. This is, genuinely, a remarkable quality. It's admired, it's feared, it's wanted by some, but dismissed by others. Women are often not kind to each other, usually because they can't compute how another person's mind works and deals with what's in front of them.

It's an amazing ability to have. Until it isn't.

Because 'just getting on with it' can tip over into not asking for help when you actually need it. Into convincing yourself you're fine when you're not quite. Into Googling symptoms at 3am instead of talking to someone qualified to give you a real answer. Putting things away into neat little boxes, telling ourselves we'll unpack them later. But later never comes. Because life happens instead.

When I think back to Covid, and the saying 'we're all in the same storm, but we're not in the same ship'. All the feelings surrounding covid and lockdowns were very similiar to the ones most of us are having now. I am a person who needs to have a plan. Uncertainties are not for me, I like logistics and solutions. So, just like covid, I'm creating our plan B (just in case, I also must remember to update my husband on this plan B!), and I'm squirreling everything away in Pandora's box in my mind to deal with at some point.

But I suspect I won't (deal with it later), then I'll read something in a few years time and it will take my breath away, just like the book 'The Year We Muddled Through' does about those Covid days. It's a beautiful childrens' book. If you haven't read it, you should. Sadly, our copy is in Dubai... along with everything else we own.

There is a way through however you're feeling. Whether it's physical aches and pains, or your brain whirring at a million miles an hour. Wherever you are. But you don't have to find it alone, lean on everyone around you for support. Sometimes our inner child needs a little hug too... there's an old Scottish saying "what's for ye won't go past ye". And I am firmly a believer in that saying, it's never sent me the wrong way yet.

In my next blog, I'm going to talk about the specific support gap that Dubai families run into when they leave — and why the answer isn't always as simple as 'just book in with your GP.' I needed to get these thoughts out first, before I overwhelmed anyone with the logistics and practicalities of this new life we find ourselves in, whether it's temporary, or permanent. Because who honestly knows at this point.

Lisa Adair is a DHA-licensed IBCLC lactation consultant, paediatric and NICU nurse, and infant sleep specialist with over 20 years of experience working with families in Dubai and internationally. She is the founder of Lullabies (lullabies.ae), a baby and child wellness practice.

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