Tag: mental health

Being helpless

Being helpless

by petaobrien ♥ 1 Comment

So, Erica made friends with a bee today.

She decided that the best way to make friends with a bee was to stroke it and then to grab it so she could give it a cuddle. It did not go well. She was very angry with the bee, but mostly she was angry with me.

And it was really, really hard because I knew that, besides popping some lavender oil on the sting, (or where I thought the sting was because she wouldn’t let me see properly) there was nothing that I could do. I had to wait for the pain to pass and give her cuddles while she got through her hand really hurting. It wasn’t only the pain but also the confusion of not really knowing what was going on and not really connecting it to the bee. Mostly she just looked like she was thinking: “Mummy, why did you let this happen to me?!”

As I was sitting there cuddling a grumpy baby, it got me thinking. We’ve been having problems with Ethan at the moment. Well, that’s a terrible way of putting it. We’ve not been having problems with Ethan. Ethan’s lovely, Ethan’s fabulous. Ethan is a kind and caring and empathetic and loyal and hilarious little boy who loves his friends and loves his family and feels things very deeply (and who is occasionally a 9-year-old with a teenager’s attitude). Right now we are trying to help him deal with his anxiety. We’re not entirely sure what jumped it up a notch, but for the last 6 weeks there’s been a lot of anxiety, worry, and sadness about going into school.

Now, his school is fabulous. I would give almost anything to go back in time and be able to go to his school, spend time doing the things that he does, and be in such a caring environment. My brother often gets quite jealous that he is 28 now and can’t go back to school (he’s quite tall, I thnk they might notice). We’re incredibly lucky to be able to send Ethan to a private school, and this is one of the reasons we made the decision. The staff have the time and energy to be able to support Ethan, to give him the space and encouragement he needs, and we haven’t had to wrangle with CAMHS waiting lists.

But Ethan is incredibly worried that he will have a bad day and that school will be terrible. The school counsellor has told us that he meets the clinical level for separation anxiety and is borderline for social phobia. It seems his main issue is that he’ll miss me and Erica and he’s worried about bad things happening when he’s at school. Nothing catastrophic, but things going wrong, or him getting into trouble, or falling out with friends and them not wanting to play with him. There is no logical reason for any of this because he never gets in trouble, people always want to play with him, and he always has fun, but he’s worked this all up in his head.

The separation anxiety doesn’t come as a huge shock to me. I’ve always known that the experience of losing a parent would come back and rear its head at various times in his life. I know that some people looking on might think that he’s always been clingy, but when you stop and look at it from his perspective, one of the most important people in his life completely disappeared without warning when he was 2. If you were him, wouldn’t you hold on tightly to the one that was left?

I did ask him about the whole missing me thing, and rather amusingly he said: “Well I don’t know why but I think liking you has just kicked in a little bit more”. I wasn’t quite sure how to take that. Did he not like me before? Did he think I was terrible, and now he’s suddenly realised that I’m quite lovely and a pretty good mum?

Anyway, every morning I drive him to school. Sometimes in the car he’s very quiet, sometimes he’s listening to music, and sometimes he talks to me about how he’s worried. And we try and logically go through his worries, and we try and focus on the positives, and we do all the things that I know from my training and that his counsellor has suggested. And then we get to school and we sit in the car and he says: “I can’t do it, I cant’ get out”. And we talk about why it’s something we need to do (We don’t push the legal thing because then he got worried that Nick and I would be arrested). We talk about all the things that have been put in place by the school to make him feel safe and secure. And we try breaking it down. So the first step is we take our seatbelts off, and then step 2 is I open the door, then I walk round to his side of the car, I open his door, step 3 is swinging his legs over the side of the seat, step 4 is standing up, step 5 is picking up his bags, and step 6 is walking to the gate and saying “See you later” (we don’t do goodbye). Now, that took all of 15 seconds to tell you. Generally, it will take between half an hour and an hour for it to actually happen. Sometimes he does it just with me, sometimes we need a staff member to try and intervene. 

Honestly, having to sit there every morning and pretend to be so calm and collected, and so matter of fact. Having to be that safe space. Watching him fall apart to the extent that on Monday he had a panic attack in the school corridor, and this morning he wouldn’t let go of my waist even though 2 teachers tried to reason with him. To have to watch him do that every single morning is slowly breaking me. Because I can’t make it go away. 

It’s like that bee sting. I can’t stop the pain. I don’t have a quick fix. I can’t give him medicine, I can’t give him a solution. I can’t do anything other than sit there and be with him as he’s going through it. And as someone who likes to fix things, as you’ve probably realised by now, this is not my comfort zone, this is not my area of expertise. 

Well, that’s a lie, it is my area of expertise, and that is probably the only reason that I am able to stay calm and collected and not completely burst into tears and fall apart every morning. I think that, probably, I am compartmentalising and putting my work head on. Just like I did when Mark was sick, just like I did when he died, just like I did when I had to answer those questions over and over again when Ethan was small, and help him, and explain, and be that safe space. The problem is that I don’t know whether that’s the best thing to do anymore, but it is the only thing I’ve got right now.

So I’m just going to have to continue to sit there and be with him while we all go through it together.

Feeding the Blighters

Feeding the Blighters

by petaobrien ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

We are about 4 weeks into this whole weaning thing now.

I am enjoying watching Erica explore new tastes and textures, and it’s a relief to be able to feed someone more of a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, compared to Ethan’s apple, broccoli, carrot, sweetcorn rotation.

I had forgotten the sheer relentlessness of food at this point. Preparing something interesting, varied and easy to pick up/gum to death, then picking up the things she throws on the floor over and over again, and then cleaning her up, and then washing the chair/mat/floor as needed. And by that point it may as well be time to breastfeed her and put her down for a nap. When you factor in also preparing food for an 8 year old and two adults at the moment I feel like my entire life takes place in the kitchen. It’s a good job I like my kitchen.

Ethan is finding it a bit tough – for a boy who will happily eat his own bogies, he is remarkably squeamish about watching his sister mangle a piece of watermelon…. Which is slightly baffling.

Nick is getting the hang of it all. He did forget a bib the other night. And in a dinner that began with watermelon and escalated to pasta and tomato sauce it wasn’t brilliant timing….

I’m having trouble with the waste.

I’ve done this Baby Led Weaning thing before – it worked really well with Ethan in terms of motor skills and a varied diet (although that just goes to show that pre-schoolers will be pre-schoolers – he’d eat avocadoes and green beans and peaches and cauliflower, anything, until he was about 3. Since then he’d happily be on a cheese and beans only diet.). It also suited my lack of patience for blending and pureeing and portioning food. Getting to the point of them eating what we eat as quickly as possible was the goal.

So I know what I’m doing, now that I’m in the swing of things and can remember how the first time went. I am fully on board with the twee “Food’s for fun until they’re 1” thing, the need to explore a gag reflex and steadily develop fine motor skills. I don’t mind the “oh gosh I seem to have pushed this piece of carrot a bit far back in my throat” noises, or the messy vests/leggings/hair as we move onto squishier fare. I don’t have a problem with spending time making her something only to have it rejected – I’ve had enough practice with the 8 year old: “WHAT is this green stuff in my rice, Mummy? I can’t eat it, it tastes spicy!” I’m not precious about my food with kids – adults however are a totally different matter. If you’ve come over for dinner and rejected my Pad Grapow chicken then I will be swearing under my breath as I make the coffee…FYI.

But I had forgotten how hard I find throwing it all away at the end of a meal. She’s obviously eating some of it – I’ve changed the nappies and…well, I’m not going to talk about watermelons anymore….. But at the end of each meal there is a sizable pile of mushed pear, squashed pancake, and pulverized raspberry pieces. Her gums may be effective, but they are only gums, and she’s still only really swallowing some of it by accident, I think!

I grew up food bank poor (before there were actually food banks but you get the idea). We were children whose packed lunches revealed a rainbow of supermarket reduced stickers, who hid trip letters at the bottoms of our bags so that our parents didn’t have to worry about not being able to afford them, who blackberry picked not because it was a lovely wholesome thing to do, but because scurvy wasn’t cool. I have been a poor student, eating pasta, frozen peas and grated cheese and scraping together the train fare to get back home for the weekend, and there were times after Mark died when I was seriously concerned how the next set of standing orders were going to be dealt with. Widows are not always rich, you know: there are bills to pay and funerals to fund and the running costs of a house which used to need two wages to consider while also putting off going back to full time work so you can be there for your children.

I like a full fridge and a full fruit bowl – that’s my thing (if the wine rack is populated, I’m also happy, but that’s not quite as compulsory!). I get nervous the day before the online shop arrives and we’re running low on most things. I am well aware that I am much more comfortable than I was in my childhood, but poverty does things to your brain that are not easy to shake off. The idea of throwing away a decent chunk of food (yes, even food that has been squished by baby fists) makes me very uncomfortable. Every time I go to the bin at the end of an Erica-feeding session I find myself thinking about another way of doing this that would result in less waste. It is the only reason I would be tempted to throw myself on the conveyor belt of baby puree. But having talked to friends, I’m pretty sure half of that ends up on the floor as well – it’s just harder to pick up afterwards.

Every bit of this new baby journey only serves to remind me that I am a mish mash of issues. Some are old, some are new, some are borrowed, don’t think I have any blue ones (I digress). Some of my issues I have spent a lot of time working on. This doesn’t mean they are gone, it just means that I can recognise them when they rear their head, acknowledge them, and decide not to let them influence my actions today. Some of them I have yet to delve into – because they are too hard, or because I am too busy  – and these can blindside me. Perhaps once I’ve wandered out of the baby trenches again I will have time to do some more work on me. I suspect that some of them will never be addressed. After all – how boring would life be if we all got over our issues? This mish mash makes me who I am, for better or worse (which I think is probably why that sort of thing gets included in wedding vows). The most I can do is notice when they stop me doing things that are good for me and mine.

Erica is currently holding a green bean in one fist and an oatcake in the other, and she looks pretty happy with her life…

So I guess we need a compost bin. Or perhaps the chicken needs to start getting used to squashed watermelon and cheese sticks….