The guilty parent!

The school summer holidays roll on & tumbleweed blows around my blog. I've been doing that 'being busy but seemingly achieving nothing' thang that parents know oh so well.

Ellie has begun to ask me for memories of the Brood as babies & toddlers, but I haven't yet dared to confess that so much time passed in a blur of nappies, feeds, washing machine loads, post-natal depression and then full blown bipolar, that my recollections are faulty & a little blurred around the edges. This feels me with guilt - it's as though the absence of memory represents a form of neglect! After all, wasn't it my intention to be a fabulous parent and to bring something fresh & vibrant to this child-rearing lark? I was going to do things differently - why I even had delusions of perfection! Well ha ha, the joke's on me - the grind got to me and I am instead a faulty, guilt-ridden parent. But they're loved, adored & cherished and I feel ever so certain that they know this even in their bones.

Of course the idea of being a perfect parent is a mirage - the only thing you can realistically hope for is to be, what John Cleese & Robin Skynner described in their excellent book, 'Families and How to Survive Them' 'a good enough parent'. So as this imperfect parent didn't manage to keep her baby books & photo albums in pristine, lucid order, the wannabe good-enough parent is going to trawl through her diaries, journals and notebooks in order to find the notes & scribbles she dashed off about her Brood.


A six month old Tom in diapers & dungarees - scribbles dashed off in between his cries and mine!

I thank Lord Dodo of Dodo Towers for his gift to the busy family of the splendid five column Dodo diary - without the help he's given us during these past years I wouldn't be able to rummage through old diaries and find the landmark dates that Ellie wants me to remember. Ah yes, Ellie's first steps. Wow, I actually remember that day!

A recipe for happiness? 5 journals + 2 vanity cases + 2 rolls of pens + 1 watercolour box = a distinct possibility!

I owe Ricë Freeman-Zachery a debt of gratitude for introducing me to the enchanting film above via her scintilating blog, Notes from the Voodoo Cafe. Ken Carbone has me itching to open up my pen & pencil rolls and work in one of the Moleskines which I keep by my bed in a vanity case from Cath Kidston. In another case, I've got all manner of journal goodies such as glue, papers, photo corners, ink pads, pens, masking tape, etc, etc.

I'm a portable gal, so why on earth do I have agoraphobia? Still, where there's life, there's hope which is something to hold on to. Oooh, I'm being positive :-)

A fill in!

,

Something for you to colour in :-) You can find some more here!

I've just scrawled an entry all over Facebook which properly belongs over here. Here's a copy:

" Time for ‘the art of curiosity’. I’ve taken a deep breath and looked at my blog & website for the first time in an eon. Oh boy, do I have a lot of work to do! But have I the energy & determination to do it?

Thanks to bipolar blips, I’ve never been able to truly run with the concept of ‘the art of curiosity,’ but after this last big bad wolf of a bout, I feel an odd sensation of renewal & recovery this time. What could possibly have caused this change? I put it down to the humble pencil. By using my creativity to help do battle with the dragon, I feel as if I put more of myself into the fight this time & I think this self-knowledge may be the source of my more positive viewpoint today. Even on the worst days, when waking was a scream of anguish at my still having to live in my brain & immobile body, this time I managed to drive marks onto a pad of paper which I kept by my bed. Marks which looked like a scrawl to everyone else, but which were actually helping to anchor me.

I couldn’t have functioned without medication and the people who cared for me, but my pads & subsequent journals of marks allowed me to remain in contact with myself. Rather then being adrift in mire, these marks, which became more lucid & fluid when I had moments of feeling human, which ultimately calmed into meditative drawings and notations of what was around me, charted my days & I was able to see that not every hour was a heartrending scream. They helped me to start comforting myself and this simple act of being kind to myself kick-started something in my brain.

But enough! This is no place to bore you. This should be in a blog: henceforth meanderings about this, that, life, art & all manner of curiosities will – with luck – be contained once more in ‘the art of curiosity blog’.

I thank you! "

New post...new life?

My computer went bang taking my life with it and as this coincided with a foul bipolar blip ( so much for medicated control!), I appear to have absented myself from life for a long, long time. Things have changed. I haven't made jewellery in an eon. Instead I draw, paint, make marks; trying to make art out of just looking. It's an absorbing way to live and a much better aid to recovery than just pills & therapy.

So here I am, taking baby steps along the road to recovery. Time to move on. Time to live again.

Dipping a toe in the water!

This isn't a picture of a younger me - I was never cute. I was always too grimy to be cute.

BUT this is quite a sweetly appropriate photo as I'm dipping my toe in Blog Pond for the first time in eons. Look how shallow & safe the water is - it looks cool too! Water wings are handy if you're not sure what you're doing - I guess the bipolar equivalent is diazepam. Well it is for me ;-) I'm going to try paddling for a while until I can swim again.

What have I learnt about life recently? Grab what you can, when you can & whilst you're still able. I'm talking about opportunities. My experience of bipolar is that bad 'episodes' usually teach me something. This episode's homily could have taken the form of 'I wish I'd done such and such when I was younger", but instead it appears to be following the route of, 'whilst there is still breath in your body, try to grab what you can, when you can.' I somehow managed to get close to death a couple of times recently and I'm guessing that this is why Madame Bipolar is trying to proffer a whole life lesson.

As my son is still having problems with troubles, I've been teaching him a poem that I know off by heart. I know that you will know it too - I think everyone should have a copy of 'Still I Rise' by Maya Angelou lodged in their brains.

Ms Dangerfield is absent because...

1. Her brain is full of unwieldy thoughts.

2. Space monkeys sing jingles to her in the middle of the night.

3. She has decided to set herself free.

4. Her metaphysical house has blown down & she needs to reassemble it twig by twig.

No, I haven't lost the plot. I'm simply trying to learn how to live in a new way & part of this involves training myself to avoid being sidetracked by distractions.

Possibly this is something that many of us need to think about from time to time - what to do when our lives become simply too full of 'stuff'.

This stick person has peeled herself back to the bare bones as she is in need of restoration. It's a bit chilly at the moment :-)

Please Don't Shun a Child!

I'm not brimming with many lucid thoughts at the moment, but I'm borrowing a soap box. I particularly want to make a noise about parental prejudice.

I apologise for copying my own comment on 'The Bad Hair Day Code' on to here, but I'm struggling with coherence at the moment so this seems the best solution.

"Over here, not every doctor understands adult neurological conditions let alone those which become clear in childhood. I've learnt to stand my ground & argue with health professionals, but it does take a while to overcome that fear that

'Mother always says,
that doctor does know best'.

I know this childhood rhyme is droppings from a male ruminant, but I worry about parents who feel unable to fully question what is going on - then both parent AND child are bullied into situations which could prove unhelpful at best, destructive at worst.

I also have a lot to say about the prejudice that children encounter -we know that children bully children, but there is more. My son has been educated in main stream schools & the prejudice exhibited by some parents at his primary school was appalling!

On several occasions in the past, whilst waiting at the school gate, I heard other mothers discussing my son. He was at a small, affluent village school where the staff were WONDERFUL. Were it not for small children milling around, I would have tackled the mother who'd instructed her child not to play with Tom & told her just where to stick her SUV!"

Because it was a small school, it was relatively easy for parents to work out which child had been 'statemented', particularly given the high level of parent-helpers. Statistics about such things are published each year & passed to parents - when only one pupil is registered, the so called secrecy of a statistic destroyed.

The woman who so openly instructed her child what not to do, wasn't the only sad, silly, stupid & ill informed sheep in the flock to do this, which is why I'm on the side of the wolf!

By the way, Tom doesn't read my blog. I've never told him about this. I'm muddle headed & very ditsy at the moment, but rest assured, Tom knows nothing about this & never will.

May I make a plea? I'm truly not overly lucid at the moment, but I loathe discrimination in any form & when it's against a child it's beyond despicable - it's heinous. It's for these reasons that I feel compelled to write about this. BUT if you spot any inconsistencies, goofs, gaffs, blurs or garbage,it's because I'm Miss Ditzy at the moment so I hope you will forgive the errors I make whilst trying to convey my message.

The Bad Hair Day Code

I'm trying to climb back from a bipolar slump. I don't like to bore people with tales of what life is like if you're a bipolar babe - thankfully when one has spiralled down to the point of no return, one is usually too incapacitated to do anything other than pull the bedclothes ever tighter over one's head, so one couldn't write anything anyway! Sighs of relief all round :-) One can't keep people out of the loop completely though - my family & friends do need some explanation as to why I occasionally disappear from view.

We all develop different strategies of dealing with bipolar swings & mine are particularly irritating because I push people who are close to me away by being flippant & by denying that there's anything wrong. The crash comes & members of my close circle say gently that they did try to warn me - unfortunately I either didn't hear or I wasn't listening.

I'm also a difficult patient because I argue, joke & make light of things - I do my best to switch the focus away from me. I think I do this because I don't perceive myself as being a person - I am merely a thing with a series of human roles: wife, mother, daughter, listener, advocate, etc. Whatever was me was destroyed a long time ago. Please, please don't feel sorry for me - I only mention this for the purposes of illustration. I've never asked any fellow bipolar babe if they feel divorced from life in this way - it wouldn't surprise me if some of us feel that we can only participate in life from the sidelines. That's just the way it is for some of us.

Usually I refer to my bouts of depression as 'blips' & those that include suicide attempts as 'slumps'. I'm being dragged out of a slump this time & I'm fortunate that I'm being monitored via a daily visit from the wonderful health care team who are looking after me at present. Inspired by the hood-proof hair gel, I've now been allowed to add a new term to the monitoring lexicon - 'a bad hair day'. This covers days when one's concentration goes into hiding; when even the smallest things seem mountainous. The positive aspect is that one is at least trying to do something helpful because:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

Dorothy Parker

Sometimes it's essential to be frivolous. Being frivolous is not necessarily frivolous :-)

Downcast!

It had to happen. I do not dazzle. I do not have Margot Potter's wit, glamour, sex appeal & lustre - she's darn intelligent too & was born to write as well as sparkle. I'm not jealous because I love Margot - she works SO extraordinarily hard & when she's President, everyone in the States will surely sing with delight!! But she is a perminent fixture on Top Momma where as I reside under a stone at the bottom of Blog Land's gadren.

The reason for this despondency: I've been booted off Top Momma because I'm not popular :-(

Woe is me! Woe is me! Woe is me! Woe is me!

I was handed a copy of a new book today: 'The Dialectical Behaviour Therapy ( i.e. DBT )Skills Workbook' - looks good. BUT! The school holidays have begun. How am I going to find the time and peaceful lucid moments in which to work on this?

I mean no disrespect to people without children, but why do some of them assume that children play happily together & do not need tending & that processing laundry for two adults, two children & a Lula is a mind-numbing activity which shrivels your brain to the size of a walnut. Brothers & sisters hate each other at the top of their voices during the day, but glue together at bedtime & refuse to be parted. There's also the matter of trying to keep a household running in a building site. We've had one wall removed & another is partly built - please don't ask. Why did he marry me? What was it about me that attracted a man who would eventually fall in love with a mallet?

I squeeze in as much work as I can, but nevertheless, finding enough quality time for work is a problem.

I tend to work at night, even though it breaks my doctor's cardinal rule about a regular sleep pattern. If I work until four in the morning, I can take full advantage of a head that clears at about eleven at night. I can survive on short bouts of sleeps for quite a long length of time, but eventually I pay for it.

What a dull & dismal entry too - how bored you must feel! When you have such feelings or think you are approaching the end of a nappy soaked road, have a go at what I occasionally do. Try it for one minute & progress as required. Pick up or pluck someone ( or something) & pretend to waltz around the room with them. Do not attempt to do this in a supermarket though - the management will not comprehend.

When the brood are whining that I haven't done this or that or are in ' full-on whinge & whine mode', I announce that I'm a mere human being and therefore fallible. A short silence ensues during which, they try to work out what fallible means. Eventually they walk away muttering rather than whinging - I can cope with muttering - and then they start to murder one another again. The 'good enough' idea is a superb piece of advice which I gleaned from the excellent, helpful, and comforting book called ''Families & How to Survive them' by Robyn Skinner % John Cleese. The idea of being a 'good enough' parent is manna!. It's pointless trying to be a perfect parent with a perfect child - these parnerships do not exist. Why not experiment by aiming to be a 'good enough' parent for a while- it cures some of the wilder guilts that afflict a parent.

High Society!

Here in little England, the High Society season is well under way. Wimbledon's on the horizon & thus far, we've had the Chelsea Flower Show, Ladies' Day at Ascot, the opening of the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition & now Glastonbury, the newcomer to the list, is well underway.

At this point I need to sing - I'm no Amy Winehouse so cover your ears & read the lyrics instead:

'Mud! Mud! Glorious mud!
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.
So, follow me, follow, down to the hollow,
And there let us wallow in glorious mud.'

Google Glastonbury to see how well the new drainage system is coping ;-)

Glastonbury is the only one on the list that my Step-Grandmama would not have attended. Were she still alive, we'd be more likely to find her in Burlington House, the home of the Royal Academy. Join her ghost, be curious & pay a visit to the Summer Exhibition.

Can I beat agrophobia before 19th August when the exhibition closes? Not at a chance, so I'll try to work towards next year instead. I've been saying this for blah, blah years now, but one mustn't give up hope. When you have bipolar, anything can happen!

A short postscript to yesterday's entry. I'm working on a another 'Melanie' bracelet which features a set in beautiful shades of chocolate, chestnut & cream. What a treat!

To tweak or not to tweak - that is the question!

By rights this postcard should be lingering in the art of curiosity's postcard competition blog but this particular pillow needs plumping up so I'm going to post it here instead.

This house is not Italian - Osbourne House is in England. This wannabe Mediterranean 'holiday home' belonged to Queen Victoria and can be found on the Isle of Wight.

This postcard has been in the make-up department. In fact the reason why I love it is because it's had a humdinger of a make-over. In the UK, we occasionally have blue skies, but electric blue?

The water in the pool is a beautiful colour, but either it's suffering from an overdose of Miracle Gro or it's been tweaked.

I love playing 'tweak the black & white photo' almost as much as I like Technicolor films & the fifties' colour palette. If I'm having a wobble and I can't face reading a 'Battle Book' ( there are times when concentrating on one sentence is a challenge), I've found that my form of colour therapy helps and in my particular case, the more saturated a colour is, the better I like it.

My colour exercise is a simple game. Open up your photo editing suite and tweak a photograph. On those deep dark days when you have no choice, but to stay in bed because the world has become a brick wall, try to fire up your lap top & play the tweak game. What colours lift you? Which palette of colours makes sense?

If you find yourself lost in this game for a minute or more, congratulations! You have experienced mindfulness & this is an invaluable tool when dealing with depression. Patches of mindfulness heal. Trust me. I know.

Some Battle Books & why I use them.

An Elegant Wrist

Recently I've been asked about manic depression, endogenous depression and, for want of a better expression, crisis recognition. I'm an expert in only one area - me - so I will relate a little of my own story as well as a tale of the moment in which I saw a glimmer of light above me, even though I was at the bottom of a deep, cold & blasted hole. How can one be buffeted by ice cold, stormy winds whilst curled up against the brick & unyielding wall of your own personal pit? I don't know, but that's how it feels sometimes.

Some of you may feel that I shouldn't broadcast what I'm about to say, but I prefer to discuss it in the hope that my one voice will join the many who are now requesting that depression loses its stigma. So many people have themselves experienced depression, debilitating anxiety and other illnesses which bring on the dark night of the soul, but these conditions are viewed by many as guilty secrets. It is my belief that employers must reassess their response to mental illness - such a step would ease the lives of a vast number of people. In my opinion, such a move might also help to bring about an earlier recovery and possibly one that might endow the sufferer with greater resilience too.

So here we go. What is me? Why is me? What is wrong with me?

If you had asked me a year ago to describe myself, I would have said, 'mother, wife, daughter' and that would have been it. I did not know myself or recognise anything within myself. In my mind I was simply a series of roles and not a unified person. For a reason that I won't bore you with, I felt that I - my spirit - the essential me - had mentally died when I was 25. What remained was just a shell - a body - a thing. The professionals who have cared for me over the years haven't just marked me down as lacking self-esteem - they're fighting self-alienation.

During & after a conversation with one of the members of my CP Team last November, something began to change. I think I'm now beginning to 'read' myself & to recognise and identify some of the things about myself which may be useful tools to help me through the rest of my life. If it becomes a rewarding journey, so much the better. I would be happy if I could just say goodbye to the tortured thinking; if it also enables me to make the rest of my life a worthwhile experience, then I shall be blessed.

The CP guy I spoke to is really cool. He's down to earth, funny & full of common sense. He noticeably thought about what I said before asking further questions & he wasn't offended by my black sense of humour - in fact I think he enjoyed it. Sometimes he said that I flummoxed him. For instance, I asked him what was wrong with suicide - you can ask a vet to end your dog's suffering, but when a person wants to do the same for themselves, our society responds by declaring that they have lost their reason & sanity. He thought for a very long time before he smiled at me & said, 'You know, I don't know how to answer that one.'

He came to see me last November & I don't know why & I don't know how, but our conversation rapidly went 'off script' and we talked about a host of other things before he turned our discussion around to ask what I had wanted to do with my life before I hit an early & evil crisis that was unconnected with my troubled childhood. He listened to my answer. I had wanted to be an investigative journalist. It's my belief that most politicians don't themselves identify injustice - they're informed, but not insightful - whereas a writer can reveal & publicise an issue that needs to be addressed & confronted. This was the voice that I wanted to acquire - I didn't want power, but I did want to be a voice. Cool Guy asked why I wasn't doing this now. It took me a long time to confront the answer. I've lost my courage in myself. I have made it easy to hide from myself because I have appropriated blame & conferred it on to people & events that happened when I was younger. In other words, I am not using my early experiences to inform myself. Instead I am reinforcing the damage. By doing this, I avoid 'owning' my reaction to what has happened - instead I am caught up in the vortex of blame. But, as Cool Guy pointed out, this desire to hide & this lack of courage did not arise as a result of my childhood. I had actually emerged from my childhood with an ambition ( which is itself a measure of self-esteem) to write & report on what I had the courage to feel was wrong in the world. This could well have been a positive conduit. Suddenly I felt gripped - I felt that girl alive inside me. My childhood wasn't holding me back. I was not eternally cursed. Before my crisis, bad things had been stored inside me, but they had not overwhelmed me. They were not the trigger that caused my crisis though they did account for the unbearable flood that followed. Having been overwhelmed, I then became fearful & have remained so ever since. Cool Guy's suggestion was a simple one. 'Start with the girl', he said. 'Try to do what that girl would have done if she'd had the support that you have now when she met her crisis.'

That moment of feeling the vitality of the girl disappeared almost as quickly as it had appeared, but I recognised the taste of her freedom - she has reappeared on my horizon. I want to catch up with her. I can't go back & fulfil my earlier ambition, but once again, I WANT to do something of possible significance. I have to be careful though - I must tread carefully around bipolar. This is where the tool of creativity comes in. It's a mindful experience & it heals. I cannot change my thought processes without a lengthy period of careful work, but creativity is my balm & it also begins to feel like my future. If I don't manage to heal myself, I hope I will at least learn a method via which I can express my ideas & imagination. Either way, I hope to learn to be at peace with myself.

I need to scale the cliff faces of my DBT & CGT workbooks, but in these early stages, I am supplementing these tomes with my own researched list of 'Battle Books'. I should warn you that it's quite a long list and it's orientated to developing the life changing skills of mindfulness. It's been vetted by professionals so there's no quackery here.

The works of Nathaniel Branden

'Talking of Love on the Edge of a Precipice' by Boris Cyrulnik

'Fearless Creating: A Step by Step Guide to Starting & Completing Your Work of Art' by Eric Maisel

'Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils & Rewards of Artmaking' by David Bayles & Ted Orland

'The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person's Path Through Depression' by Eric Maisel

'Visual Journaling: Going Deeper Than Words' by Barbara Ganim & Susan Fox

The fun ones are:

'How to Make a Journal of Your Life' by Danny Price

'Visual Chronicles' by Linda Woods & Karen Dinino *

'Twyla Tharp's 'The Creative Habit; Learn It & Use it for Life'

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain' by Betty Edwards - this book ostensibly teaches you about drawing but in my opinion, it's also a powerful course in mindfulness which is a key skill for people who suffer from stress, anxiety & depression.

'The Creative Licence: Giving Yourself the Licence to be The Artist You Really Are' by Danny Gregory. The latter's 'Everyday Matters' is a wonderful book too.

* To read more about Linda & Karen, head towards the 'Sisters on Sojourn' blog.

So there we are. A list of Battle Books that I thoroughly recommend.