Neighbours

About two years ago we were travelling the waterways with two very young children. My love of the gypsy life-style and exploring the beauty of rural England was arguing passionately against my cravings for adult company and a good night’s sleep. I had a critical inner monologue that berated me for being unhappy and I wrote a wish list to try to figure out what exactly was lacking in my life: Friends, neighbours, a community, a washing machine, more storage space… it goes on. 

But I notice that my first three wishes were for other people; human contact.

Now here we are, settling in on our residential mooring and enjoying the full benefit of neighbours. The couple on the boat next door introduced themselves on our first day, shared their homemade elderflower wine and offered to babysit sometime. Next-door-but-one is a lovely lady who grew up on a boat. She’s brought up two kids on a boat and took me and the girls on a countryside ramble; a short cut across the fields to show us the way to the farm shop. When our alternator belt snapped we couldn’t run the engine to charge the batteries. I was working at home and knew that before the end of the day I would run out of electric; no lap top, no fridge, no fun. Our boating neighbours recommended a handy boater moored just opposite who agreed to come and fit a new belt as soon as he’d finished his cup of tea. At the church playgroup the lady who delivers the parish newsletter assured me it would be no trouble for her to make a detour down the towpath on her deliveries, so that I can be kept updated with community events.

I did moan on this blog about the price of our new mooring, but did you know that neighbours, other people, human contact, are sometimes worth their weight in gold?

(The story of why and how we got a mooring: The Continuous CruisingControversy.)

What have I been up to?

That's a good question. I keep forgetting to write about my Real Life on the blog.

We are on the move again and have just moored up near a station yesterday which is leafy and lovely. Also good for The Doctor to commute to London. We've got a bike trailer last week which I've started to use to take the girls to nursery: "Faster mummy, faster!" It's great on the roads but hard going in the squelchy mud on the towpath.

I'm still learning to drive once a week, and am about to begin the dull activity of learning for my theory test. A while ago I made a Pinterest board I will pass my driving test. In the last week I have managed to do my years accounts, and start my tax return. I have finally come off the antidepressants which was really tough as I went through some depressing withdrawal symptoms, (depression, paranoia, despair, anger, teethgrinding, anxiety dreams, and disassociation) yaay! It's been 20 days since my last pill and I'm starting to feel happier.

I keep making notes to create my first e-course which is about making a wish, putting it out there in the universe and seeing what happens. At the weekend we went to a four year old's birthday party on a farm; took a trip to the boatyard, emptied the toilet tank and filled up the water tank. Our friends came for the boat journey and I drank lots of wine and our four kids ran up and down the boat having a great time!

So, I'm doing ok with focussing on my goals as all of the above helps me aim towards This Years Dreams.  I have worked towards; increasing brand awareness and sales for my clients using social media, passing my driving test, blogging, having fun with the kids, cleaned out the kitchen cupboards and spent time with friends.

What about you? Can you condense everything you've done this week into a few words?!

Crying on the Commuter Train

Alone and crying on the commuter train in the morning I considered calling the doctor, either for advice on Citalopram withdrawal, or an urgent prescription for more Citalopram. I stopped taking them because of the short term memory loss,  but I intended to cut down slowly as recommended online. (Everybody knows that busy mummies  should source all their pharmaceutical advice from online forums right?) But then we broke down and so actually we left the old boat in a bit of a hurry. I forgot to pack the pills. Short term memory loss wasn’t so bad; but being so short sighted is. Memory loss is better than my serotonin levels plummeting like a wilful lemming¹. For all the rolling stone inner criticism Mothers Little Helper was obviously quite quietly really helping me along. Now I cannot accept honest criticism from friends. I mull over last weekend’s drunken argument and take it all to heart. “Nobody likes me,” thought Mog” (the forgetful cat ²). The woman in the mirror is underweight and overtired. She believes a lot of things that make her lonely. At home, kisses from her eldest child softly break through the mist as her tears fall into The Doctor’s lap. Big Sister pauses, stands back and reflects on the result of her work so far. She asks,

“More?”
Mother smiles through the tears. The child nods thoughtfully.
“Yes, a few more,” prescribes the junior doctor.
The Boat-Wife resolves to call up the doctor and arrange to get her negative beliefs surgically removed. ³

1) My imaginary friend Stephen Fry has begged me to interject that the wilful lemming is fictional; indeed lemmings as a rule have as much self-preservation instincts as the next creature.

2) Mog the Forgetful Cat – by Judith Kerr

3) If the pills hadn’t stolen her short term memory she might have remembered to just listen to her own 20 minute self-hypnosis download.

Not Perfect

3rd January 2011

“The statistics say that roughly 20 per cent of women suffer from some form of depression in the year after giving birth, but the true incidence is probably far higher, for postnatal depression is often missed or misdiagnosed since it can be provoked or compounded by unavoidable aspects of motherhood such as exhaustion, poor health and changes in marital relations. Women are often reluctant or simply too tired to consult doctors. Sometimes they do not know that they are depressed until they emerge from the fog and look back on those grey days.

Postnatal depression is not something that happens to a small group of unfortunate women at the very end of the spectrum who cannot cope. It is a sliding scale, starting with the ‘baby blues’ affecting 80 per cent of women, and ending with majority of women sit somewhere on this scale, and the extent to which a woman suffers depends on her individual psychology, her ability to tolerate stress and the amount of emotional support she enjoys.”

(Kate Figes, Life After Birth).

“Motherhood, for me, was a sort of compound fenced off from the rest of the world. I was forever plotting my escape from it. “ (Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work, On Becoming a Mother)

In her introduction to Buddhism for Mothers, Sarah Napthali writes “Books about the inner lives of mothers tend to be depressing reports portraying us as victims suffering a lifestyle that nobody warned us about.”

What about when depression goes beyond the postnatal period? Perhaps you’re not depressed but you just have a feeling that you are somehow failing to live up to your own, or other people’s expectations? The website Netmums wants to lift the expectation of being a ‘perfect parent’ from our shoulders by starting the Real Parenting Revolution. Accept that you are ‘Good Enough’. The campaign urges us to be honest with other parents about the challenges we are facing, and be more accepting of each other’s different parenting choices.

For me, sharing the challenges and difficulties with other new mums over coffee helped me through post-natal depression. As a new mother I was confused by conflicting childcare manuals, doubted my own intuition and lost self confidence. I’ve had to learn to have more realistic expectations of myself.

The Real Parenting Revolution says get R.E.A.L

R Relax and trust yourself

E Enjoy being a parent

A Accept each other’s choices

L Look out for each other

I’m also interested by Linda Jones’s question, ‘Does depression contribute to a messy living environment (through not having the get up and go to get up and clean) or does a messy living environment add to depression?’ Find out soon when her article appears in One in Four magazine.

The Silence of Snow

November

We are experiencing the earliest cold snap for nearly twenty years. The canal has frozen already, and that usually happens in January. When the canal is frozen the boat doesn’t rock when you walk about. Usually there is a very subtle rocking of the boat as it bobs on the water. After the big freeze came the magic of the snow. It drifted silently down among us turning London mysteriously Dickension. Cars became carriages and the silence made the streets timeless. Little Timothy Cratchit noiselessly slipped off into an alley way, supported on a single crutch. Under the arched bricks of the Victorian canal bridge, icicles hang suspended, glistening, dripping into the cut, beautiful and grimy all at once. My daughter asked what they are and I explained.
“Disgusting!” she giggled.
I’m enjoying my children now. I take one day at a time. There is no monologue, no mental ‘To Do’ list, no incessant internal criticism and no Rolling Stones: just a beautiful silence as the snow softly falls.
“God bless us, every one!” hisses the ghost of Tiny Tim.

Jagger Little Pill

I’ve now been living with Mick for about two weeks. My mouth is dry and I grind my teeth a little bit but I feel more chilled out. His disembodied voice drifts around the boat, “It’s all so different today, I hear every mother say.”


The doctor did some blood tests for diabetes and other things and found everything normal except my sex hormones are really low, which explains the lack of sex drive. She said this is caused by only recently stopping breast feeding, and also by the weight loss. I am such a narrow Boat-Wife. She is concerned that I’ve lost about a stone, which she said is almost fifteen percent of my body weight. I have also seen a mental health worker at the GP practice to help me with stress. Some people don’t agree with the pills and counselling approach to life’s difficulties, but everybody has their own way, and The Doctor’s is wine and TV and mine is this. Since I’ve been on the little white pills I feel normal again for the first time in months and months. My self-critical inner monologue is taking a break from telling me that I’m under achieving as a wife and mother. I’ve been less tetchy with the children and I think I‘ve been nicer to The Doctor too.

Tank Girl’s helpline for boatwomen

Friday 6th August

Sometimes I feel depressed, lonely, isolated, and anxious. Mothering books and internet chat forums reassure me that this is normal and nothing to do with being a boater. Sometimes I forget that I can always phone a friend. I phoned Tank Girl, who runs her own body piercing shop and has a three year old daughter: A Mumpreneur in the extreme. It turns out that I only needed to talk to someone and within minutes I feel much better and I’m laughing. She asked me when I last had a conversation with someone in real life (not on the phone) and I admitted it must be a few days, if you don’t include staff at the village shop.
“I like your blog,” she says. “But how on earth do you find the time to write it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s an addiction I guess. Sometimes I just can’t stop writing. I take a notebook and a biro with me and stop and lean on the pushchair when I need to write something down. Or sometimes you might just find me perched on a lock gate, writing something.” As I go about my business I sometimes stuff a notepad into the hood of the pushchair and keep a pen behind my ear.
“I suppose it’s like me and exercise,” says Tank Girl.
“Yeah,” I agree. “I never know how you find the time to do all that running and spinning and stuff.”
“I just love it! I’m mad I s’pose!” She laughs.


Treat yourself to a bit of Tank Girls’s funky jewellery at http://www.fluxpiercing.co.uk/

Secret House Wish

Thursday 15th July

Big Sister asks for water to play in the bathroom sink. I organise it and she writhes on the floor in a screaming tantrum because she actually wants to play with water in a bucket on the back deck. She asks me to take her for a wee, I ask can she do it herself as I’m eating my lunch? (I’m starving and shaky, I might be having a ‘sugar crash’.) Big sister throws a tantrum again and wees on the floor. I calmly deal with this, clean and change her, and now she wants to sit on her toy box. I move the toy box away from the wee puddle and secure the lid so that it’s ready to sit on. A third tantrum ensues because there is something about this arrangement that she doesn’t like. I lose my rag and scream at her. I begin to seriously consider The Doctor’s offer of looking after the kids – he would love to do it, and I could go out to work.

Changing a nappy in the bedroom I hear the wind blow something off the roof, and I watch from the window as a blue plastic water container floats off down the river. I put the baby in a safe place and put my eldest daughter in front of the computer, watching a film. I run down the towpath with a broom to retrieve the container, then check on the children by peering in the window. The boat is moored at an extremely jaunty angle (forty-five degrees) and swaying in the wind, thudding against the concrete towpath, doing the hull no good at all. So, the ropes need tightening. Struggling against the wind and awkwardly placed bollards this is like re-mooring up on a very windy day and takes me the entire duration of the Baby Einstein DVD. One to add to the list of odd jobs that boat-mums do that house-mums don’t. In a wider sense, it’s all part of my eternal rhetorical question – would I secretly rather live in a house?

I had a lot of negative ‘glass half empty’ thoughts today, but I am very tired. I must remember that lack of sleep is a cause of depression in itself. Maybe my brain just goes into anxiety circles because it’s not functioning on full power. The fact is, I am tired, but things are good. That’s how it is.