Pickled Fish and Hot Cross Buns

Dear friends and fellow bloggers, Easter is a special time in South Africa, specifically in my hometown, Cape Town. Regardless of your religious beliefs, Easter is a long weekend where most get time off to spend with family. Preparations start early with the preparation of pickled fish. It is fish that is pickled in a sweet-sour pickling sauce with softned onion rings that are part of the sauce. Hot cross buns are served with the pickled fish – although a strange combination – it has become something I and particularly my husband loves. My mother said that the recipe emanated from the Cape Malay slaves who got time off over the long weekend. The fish was prepared and kept better like this during a time without fridges. My mother dilligently made pickled fish for as long as I can remember, and when anyone was hungry over the weekend, she’d point at the container and say dish.

This year, I made the pickled fish. I wasn’t anywhere near to being as seasoned a veteran as her in the chopping of onion rings, the balance of the pickling sauce, and whether to add the pickling sauce hot or not. I wished she was there for key questions, or to taste the sauce or fry the fish. When she would prepare it in the kitchen, I would sit and try and lift a fried piece of fish before it was lowered into the sauce. With her back turned my mother would say I know you are NOT taking another piece of fish. For my mother Easter was a time of family, food, prayer and renewal and each year, she played a big part in making it like this. I wondered if my pickled fish would be good enough and whether the quiet ache for her would eventually go away.

Over the week and weekend, my family has shared times when we ate my version of pickled fish. It wasn’t perfect, could have done with this and that, but it had the main ingredients which I think she also added. We spent time just being together and talking, laughing about the old days, and what she would have said. Me and our little family have endured so much, lost our Granny, but also gained a new way of being. It’s not easy, and with mental illness, I often pray for relief. This weekend however, I am quietly filled with the idea of hope and renewal, and what it could do for the pickled fish and hot cross bun industry. Have a lovely week.

Beautiful Rock Bottom

Dear Friends and Fellow Bloggers, I hope that you are as well as you can be. Recently someone important to me suggested that they needed to go to hospital. Psychiatric hospital. I kept quiet and didn’t know what to say. I’m not sure they knew or understand what they were asking for. My advice is always to consult a mental health team if you are unsure. I wondered though if they knew what that truly meant. On my trips to hospital, you are asked to sign your decision making ability away until you are deemed well. Cellphone use is limited, therapy enforced if available, and an assortment of medication that needs to be adjusted until it works. A prison for the psychiatrically ill.

The journey is also about the people who are in the hospital. I have found most fellow patients share freely their reason for admission. While I love making friends, vicarious traumatization is less entertaining. A hospital is also the place where you meet the bottom of your can. The beginning of and far journey into your can’t. You pray for days when you can feel better about being you and believe it. I have laid in bed and given myself reasons for why I deserved to just stay down and not get up and fight for someone that is actually important me. I patted my monsters on their back and agreed whole-heartedly that yes, I was far and very extremely depressed.

For me, there are two main options when you are here. You can dig deeper – always get help – or you can look up and determinedly look up as if you have no other choice. The amount of effort will be about the same. You can look up and find something that you can hold onto when you have a difficult time. Visualize success, dare to dream, write down that it can work. Because if we only dig deeper, it’s darker, it’s alone and not where people who are as awesome as you and I should be. It is difficult to make work and I often stumble on the way. I do this because I resolutely agree that I am important, worth it and the opposite to the stupid moods that can overtake me. This year is 20,20 4 Me.

Person with a puzzle

Dear Friends and Fellow Bloggers, I hope that you are as well as you can be. My husband has travelled to Paris for work. For us it is a fancy place and my children and I imagine that he is doing nothing other than consuming expensive french-baked goods by the minute. Before he left, I tried to hide my dismay, cried quietly before falling asleep in fear for the time he wouldn’t be around. For the very big part he plays in my and our routine that can’t be filled by anything else. He knows to wake me up on time, how I take my coffee to the precise measure and mostly offers calm and peace to a being beset by a storm.

There was a man who also had a poorly wife and he described her illness as a puzzle that could not be solved. Those vexed by the next piece or completion are frustrated and make great show expressing this. Imagine how they feel he said, in the dangerous and urgent pursuit of a puzzle that can only temporarily be eased. Sigh. I am most afraid that he will realise that it’s better to not be with a person with a puzzle. The person whose mind can change on a whim, who forgets, rarely sleeps well and requires ongoing medical care. I wouldn’t want to because then you wouldn’t have a partner or wife, you’d have a patient.

I always try to be happy, I try to hope for the best. I pray, work hard, and try to do right by my family but there are many times when I really can’t and the addition of the puzzle is perplexing with soul-wrenching exhaustion. I want to get up and fight. I want to feel the might for it. I don’t want to feel the washing machine churning inside my being that reminds me of the several reasons why someone like me is a loud and large dead-end. I feel sad and right now alone. But I think I have to find some ways why a person with a puzzle like me is important, especially me, whether you are in Paris or not.

Broken Bank Account

Hello Friends and Fellow Bloggers – I hope that you are doing as well as you can be. Lately, I’ve had a much more demanding job. I manage 7 people, multiple meetings and long days. This kind of work has not been recommended for someone like me. My psychiatrist always has underlined that stress is the seed for a relapse that neither you nor I want to go through. A few years back I was barred from working fulltime and in a stressful position like this, and I stayed at home for as long as I could. The truth though is that even when you’ve been deemed broken with all the anticient benefits, I’ve found that my bank account hasn’t been that forgiving.

I am also sometimes the mother and grandmother to 4.5 children. Although they are older other than my grandson, each has their own needs which I sometimes find overwhelming. These are monetary and emotional, and well that personal broken bank account of mine underlines again, the extent to which there is a large deficit. I love my children and grandchild, they are the warmth of my heart but even I finds that too much after a long day, too many conversations and times where I have to pretend that I was never broken in the first place.

My mental health advice would be to find a different kind of role, to find new ways of looking after myself, and real ways to say I can’t anymore, I am spent. To mean it and to actually take care of myself which isn’t medicated sleep. To find a way to recharge before the unfortunate symptoms of relapse rear their ugly head. I haven’t really found long lasting ways to do that, and the relentless cycle of getting up, pretending to be fine, cracking the whip and then renewing by the next day has proved costly especially with my enjoyable habits of a newborn. I will never give up, I will always keep on trying but goodness knows a substantial injection would sure help this broken bank account.

Sanity Sought

Dear Friends and Fellow Bloggers, I hope that you are as well as you can be. Recently I decided that me and the world would be better off if I were sane, whilst being completely adherent to a handful of daily psychiatric medications. It made better sense to enter into the job market (which I and my family need) with a bit of sanity, mascara and lipgloss. I donned my dress of decorum, my brain of brilliance and even managed to paint my nails. Who knew what would be in store when my arrray of mental illnesses was and are neatly tucked away. The awkward anxiety, palpitating paranoia and deepening depression haven’t ever really been helpful since I’ve been a little girl, so why not give seemless sanity a go.

There’s a problem: at no point in my extended mental health journey (dotted with many, many interesting stops along the way) have I ever been told that your illness will cause you to do the COMPLETE opposite of what you intend. That sanity seeking is compromised when you will tell the truth even when you don’t want to about subjects/humour at inopportune times. That some days your tears are not controllable and that weeping emotions aren’t socially fun. The clumsy, confused, stammering and feeling as if you are a dithering idiot for which you will profusely apologise, your whole life because you changed meds/pj’s/emotions, mental illness keeps it real.

Most of all, no-one tells you about how people look at you and you look at them when you’ve lost your train of thought or spoken inappropriately and recovered, again. It’s darn hard keeping things straight when you are chemically charged just to make it through the day and also from experience, it doesn’t help telling them. I thought I could make it, I thought I honestly could pretend that I was ok and that my madness was only at the borderline level allowed by most. That I could colour in the lines, laugh on cue and fit into the normal few.

Perhaps you will tell me that I should not want to fit in, and that sanity seeking are for those who have truly lost it and you’d probably be right. You will forgive me though for wanting to have an under the radar conversation. For having no-one nod or blink their eyes “sympathetically” for just one day. Not feeling like I want to implode, just one day. My inner anguish is sufficient, must it be branded on brain and body too? I try each day to fight back. To give more and be more. To not worry about the lack of sleep and be there for me and my family. Difference isn’t respected as we’ve seen the world over. I’m so tired of it inside and externally to me. I pray that this is not your experience and that you would never seek sanity. It is in my experience, largely over-rated.

Learning to say no

Dear Friends and Fellow Bloggers – I hope that you are as well as you can be. Thank you to those who read my blog and a few new followers. It inspires me to write. It has been a difficult time for me and my writing voice felt blocked. I’ve recently become a proud grandmother but have found complications that come with mental illlness with this little blessing. This includes a granny who battles with sleep, not being able to sit still and wanting to buy groceries and nappies ceiling high to protect us from impending doom that I neither have the funds or storage for. The doom probably isn’t real, but it feels and frigthens my body and being like it really is, often waking me up at night.

As someone with Bipolar Type 2, I experience hypo-mania whether I like it or not. I often explain it as being akin to being eyeore on red bull. It’s tearfully terrific and turns the volume up on the impending doom track I already hate listening to. To quiet it and increasing anxiety, I cook for three days, I plan menus and busy myself with putting a preventative plaster on any area of my life I can at great personal cost. I’m always busy, I’m always catching up and apologizing for my very existence. I know very little rest, although I consistently adhere to my meds and pray for a quiet and peace that mental illness has never allowed me to know.

That’s a lot and all it makes me feel like doing is sighing even more. Instead, I need to learn a small way of addressing how I feel. From experience, blood, sweat, and tears, I have learned that you have to find and fight to chart a way of looking after yourself no matter how many times you fail in trying. Perhaps it could be in learning to say no which isn’t as easy as it sounds. To find ways to say no to the impending doom, the cleaning each room or the cooking of the contents of the fridge. Learn to say no I can’t to things and areas of your life as loudly as you can that it’s too much I tell myself. Perhaps you could try to. I’m trying to succesfully learn how..

Glitchy Grandma

Dear Friends and fellow Bloggers – I hope that you are as well as you can be. Over the past few weeks our family came to learn that we were having a baby in a few days. To say I was shocked will have been and will always be an understatement. I looked at our eldest daughter and her swollen belly. We went from ward to ward and bench to bench to ensure that she and the baby were safe. My mind immediately cleared, and all I could see and think about was navigating through a public hospital, trying to stay warm in a really cold winter, and taking them home.

The hospital didn’t have water for over 6 days, intermittent service from much-needed doctors and several grounchy nurses. In the labour ward there are chairs where women are expected to sit in their third trimester for over 15 hours waiting for a bed and further treatment. Our daughter was one of them. After a few close calls which required much bench sitting and sleeping in a car in ice-cold parking lots, she finally went into labour. I went up to her and was not allowed to see them until she was ready to give birth.

I sat in the waiting room outside the ward and cried quietly. We’d confronted so much and I wondered if baby hadn’t also perhaps made a poor choice of grandma who does tend to glitch often. I always believe my mental illness when it proclaims that I am the worst version of myself which I’m mostly not. Mental illness unfortunately is seriously believable when you feel it inside and out. Finally, I was called into the labour room. My daughter looked at me and my tears flowed even more. When she was born my mother had been with me and the first person to hold her.

In what felt like so many loaded minutes, our beautiful grandson was born. I felt a warmness with her, with him, together in his first few moments in the world. Intertwined in the love we both felt for such a tiny little being. We cried as he exercised his little lungs for a blanket. I looked at him and her and thought to myself that if anything, they are living testimony of the good I have and can be. That new beginnings are possible even if you need to shed a tear. This is one happy glitchy grandma that will work through, about, and around her glitches for herself and hers, each and every day.

Humility

Dear Friends and Fellow Bloggers – I hope that you are as well as you can be. I read something a few days ago that said there was nothing better to teach than empty pockets and a broken heart. Although I mostly agree, I would include an important footnote that mental illness was probably the real number one and that the combination of the whole lot would probably be deeply instructive/lifelong. Whilst undergoing the teachable moment mental illness has become, there’s no insurance for your off kilter days and that leave days would probably end up not being sufficient depending on how you are and can be. In the centre of this mental illness instruction for me has turned out to be humility.

When you are ill, the best way for someone to help you is to practice humility and let them in. To tell the truth about how you have and are feeling despite how difficult it may feel to do that. I have felt soft, and hardened at the same time by the tarnishing effect mental illness has, especially when I really needed support and it made it confusing to be humble. How could I concede when fighting back was what I had learned and was told to do? You need to ask for help and not everybody knows how to do that. To keep on doing that. Asking for help requires an intimate honesty so that a way out can at least begin to be understood.

There is also a different kind of humility you will confront with mental illness. I have forgotten days, I have done things I didn’t mean to, and I’ve experienced symptoms actively and enacted them on those I love the most. It’s hard. The humility in understanding what the areas are that you struggle with so that you can try to remember to work on them for you. Then there is the most difficult one, which was the most challenging: the realization that you have changed and are becoming a different person with different abilities and sometimes disabilities. I am still stuggling to do that. To understand this partially broken me despite an extended period of diagnosis. It is humbling and ongoing as I’m sure you have experienced and know. I am trying to practice humility.

Waving the White Flag

Dear Friends and Fellow Bloggers – I hope you are as well as possible. My recent blog and writing have been somewhat fraught – a small demonstration of what I have been feeling and experiencing. It has been a lot to go through. Going through. But I stopped and experienced something important for the first time today. I waved a white flag and conceded defeat. I allowed myself to let go – where I am usually the smallest detail stickler and instead said that’s ok, let’s go the other way. It was uplifting. Freeing. A white flag that allowed me to win in so many ways.

In my recent experience, I responded with aggression, being defensive, and resisting anything I could in an attempt to try to control the unwieldy cycle my life had become. I thought hanging onto the completely unnecessary was necessary to take control of the helm. Then today. Then that one taste of you and me don’t have to do that or tolerate it or feel it. I don’t know about you but I epxerience enough everyday, I need not add dealing with difficult people or situations I couldn’t control with a stringest fist. No. I can wave a white flag and save myself significant energy and emotion that I too don’t really have that much of.

I have learned that letting go and figuring out what is the most important to hang onto, is more important. Let’s be honest – there’s just so much one person can deal with. So much one person can process and understand and I’m not going to use unrealistic standards to judge me. Ok, maybe I’ve started just by saying that. I do now that me is worth more, deserves to be beaten less, and can walk away from conflict and situations that don’t promote my wellness. Maybe you too.

Instant Grandma

Dear Friends and Fellow Bloggers – I hope that you are as well as you can be. On Friday last week, my husband and I found out that we are definitely going to be grandparents in August, this year. Shock. People asked me how did I not know and well my answer is that we don’t as a practice, undertake body frisking/shake downs of our children/adults each day. What went through my mind was who would want a crazy grandma like me? Here I am dealing with trying to stay well and promote my mental health but here we are, baby on the way, pretty soon at that. I am also wondering if the big guy up there has a wicked sense of humour having me be star in an ever exciting, plot twisting, reality tv show.

Don’t be mistaken, I am excited for my daughter and I pray for the health and well-being of her and the baby. I was just and am just so far from being ready for this. I finally believed that I was going to lead my own life with our youngest being 16. I believed I would finally find a way of charting and living through this rollercoaster of a mental illness and find peace somehow. This seems a little less possible with a newborn and a mother that does not yet know how to look after a baby. You can tell me that she can learn, but that’s just not how we roll in my family. I’m not sure what to do and how to respond.

Perhaps it is not my responsibility and she and her partner need to look after the baby but I know that they can’t. I know they don’t have the faintest clue what it takes to raise a baby, to go through a series of late nights, let alone the finances it takes to raise a little being that is pretty expensive to look after. I’m confused, happy, and committed but sad for me. I had thought that me and my mental illness would finally have a chance to live in peace. To sit in the sun and not have responsibility for other beings that need two hourly feeds. So today I am seriously happy and sad and not so sure what to do. I hope you have an awesome day.