HAPPY MAY!!

Happy first of May!! Today I finally have proper access to the internet again! 

After three long weeks of only a sporadic ability to tweet, I can once again feed my digital addiction. 

Life just keeps on giving me lemons, time to make Lemonade

My darling husband used up our data load limit in the first week of April (you tube has a lot to answer for!) and as we are rural and confined to satellite internet rules and regulations, we were unable to purchase anymore for the remainder of the month.

 

#CliveTheGuineaPig

Sadly, on our property we only get mobile phone service from half way up our driveway, so if I wanted to tweet or check emails I had to either trudge through the icy winds to the little mound where we seem to magically get 3 bars of reception or leave home entirely; and due to the school holidays, I didn’t get out much! 

Well, things have settled down here somewhat since I last posted nearly a month ago. My meds are working their magic and I have been brought down to a nice mildly hypomanic state rather than a rapidly losing control manic one.

Part of me is however waiting for the other shoe to drop, mania always eventually gives way to depression and for me, May is a month loaded with a history of depressive and suicidal episodes.    

I feel good right now and I really, really don’t want to fall back down that hole.

While I was away….

Easter came and went, my parents came up to visit and we had a huge fully cooked brunch and then did the annual “Easter Hunt Extravaganza” which is where I write a bunch of rhyming riddle clues and the kids go on a treasure hunt around the farm finding more clues until it leads them to the “Bounty” which is a giant Easter basket full of chocolate.

Mr 11, who is ever enterprising and not overly fond of chocolate, saved his stash and then slowly sold off parts of it to his siblings who had run out of their own by day two. Of course he saved approximately 50 mini eggs to take to school and sell on the playground at highly inflated prices, that kid is going places – hopefully jail isn’t one of them. 

My father in law was cutting something on the saw at work (he’s a joiner) and accidently cut the back part of his middle finger off! After waiting three days (!) for surgery, they stitched and skin grafted it and things looked great for about two weeks, unfortunately the skin graft didn’t take and things got infected, now he is playing the waiting game with daily dressing changes for another week to see if they can possibly operate again and save the top of the finger!

As if to compete with my father in law, my mother in law had a routine mammogram, they found an 'anomaly' and this led to urgent ultrasounds, core biopsies and fine needle lymph node biopsies and three excruciating days waiting to find out the test results. 

#CliveTheGuineaPig and I

I went with her to the results appointment and we were relieved to find out that what she had was actually a benign condition called a “radial scar” – they look like cancers on mammograms and apparently cancers can loiter around their edges. The lymph nodes were also given the all clear and were most likely just a little bit swollen due to a mild unrelated infection. 

There are five new fighting fish in my life, their names are Giovanni, De Vinci, Vivaldi, Monet and Picasso. These were rejects from the pet shop – ones that had come in with issues and were unsellable (clamped fins, fin rot or generally unhappy). They have been being treated according to their symptoms and are all doing really well. Except perhaps Monet, he has a habit of lying under his plastic plant playing dead, but when you poke him he quickly jumps up and acts lively for about 5 minutes before “resting” again.

"Picasso"

I survived the school holidays without becoming depressed or blowing our life savings on manic whims. Our life savings are looking fairly ordinary at the moment, so my money spending was confined to lists of ‘things to buy soon’ – of which there are many.

"DeVinci"

After that one little slip up during my “Crazy Week” I have not yet gambled again! Although I obviously am un able to take children into gaming lounges so the holidays and being relatively broke probably helped with that more than my will power actually has.

"Giovanni"

I caught up with one of my best friends from high school, she lives in New Zealand now and came home for the Easter break to visit. I love catching up with her, even though we only see each other every few years we can launch straight into deep and meaningful conversations within minutes and it's like we were never apart.

"Vivaldi"

Unfortunately, I also fell of the self-harm wagon, it had been a really long time too. This was before my meds had kicked in properly, I was very manic and Bel (the name I give the part of me that fuels my eating disorder) was in my ear frequently and loudly with regards to preserving my recent weight loss and harsh judgements from the fear of re gaining it. 

One night at about three in the morning I ended up eating a stack of left over Easter chocolate then overwhelmed by what I had done and overcome by Bel’s fury I turned to old habits. Self-harm for me tends to be punishment rather than release. I was doubly punished though because the chocolate I gorged wasn’t gluten free and so as well as fresh scars, I also ended up with a killer migraine and on the toilet for half the next day.

"Monet"

 I took Mr 14 into the city with five of his friends so they could see a movie and look around the shops. Luckily I was still pretty manic so we had the music pumping the whole way there, that was a LOUD car ride! While I was waiting for them I met up with my parents for lunch and then went for a walk around the lake near the shopping centre. The lighting was AMAZING and I took a stack of photos.

So that’s some of what has been happening at my place, I kept writing for sanity even though I couldn’t publish anything, I wrote a couple of half posts I need to tweak, a ton of poetry and some random rap lyrics – I will probably share these at some point in the near future (maybe not the rap song…) Oh and I was even witness to a *murder!

*Of Crows

I hope all you guys are all doing well, now that the kids are back at school and I am back online I will endeavour to find some time to catch up on blog posts and pod casts! 

Peace, Kate xoxo

Once upon a time

Time. They say it heals all wounds and they say it flies, yet wounds will continue to heal so very slowly as life flashes past with lightning speed. Another year has passed, yet another year that I thought I would never experience but I blinked and there it went. And I am still here.

I am still here to stare meaninglessly out my study window wondering what I would have missed if I had of successfully ended my life back in 2015. What would be different now, would my family still be living in our rusty old farm house overlooking a flooded dam surrounded by gum trees and squawking sulphur crested cockatoos? Or would my death have seen them move back into the city, closer to schools and support networks surrounded by busyness and distractions to keep them from wondering what could have been.

The reality of the last 18 months is nothing eventful has happened, no major events. Nothing much has happened that I would have missed out on if I was not here. I still haven’t been able to honestly utter the words “I am glad I am alive to see that”. There have been many things that were enjoyable, fun even but nothing I feel I couldn’t have lived without. 

My biggest accomplishment over that time has been writing my memoir, which will probably remain unpublished and yet gave me an inner strength I never knew I had. My story has been told, and if it is read one day that will be a bonus. 

Rain is trickling down my window and I glance at the photos I have pegged to string running the length of my tiny study wall. Photos of happy times, of weddings and Christmas’s and babies and pets. Pictures depicting fun and laughter, hope and promise – moments captured in time that remind me there are good days too.

Photos are so often dishonest portraits of a life lived, posed for and propped. After all we seldom photograph the bad times, who wants to re live the sorrow or the fear? These darker times are left to fade in our memories, some experiences fading faster than others.

I become very photo happy when I am manic, evidenced by my hard drives full of images of trees, rocks and tiny mushrooms. I try to endlessly capture the intense beauty seeping from the sheer complexity of everything around me in hope I will revisit these images with the same enthusiasm when the world around me once more fades to shades of grey.  

My children had their last day of school for the year today, they will return in February as grade 3, 6,8 and 9 students. They have grown so fast. I look up at my photo wall and I am drawn to an image of me aged 17 holding my newborn son, I look so young – I suppose I was. I had already experienced so much ‘growing up’ at that age that becoming a ‘teenage mother’ was just another inevitable step in my path of manic consequence. 

 I remember looking at him feeling this overwhelming sense of responsibility. I was responsible for the well-being of a real live all be it tiny human, it wasn’t a goldfish – there were serious consequences if I forgot to feed it or clean it or heaven forbid accidently kill it. This was real. Judgements flew around me, many from total strangers “babies having babies!” disgusted looks and shaking heads. 

Depression followed naturally, but it was no stranger to me so I got through it again, time passed, highs flew, lows lingered, marriage, babies, illness, experiences filtered through the in betweens, all these compartments bonding together and creating a wholeness, a story, my story.

Like it or not our stories are made up of time, how much ‘life’ we fit into the time we have, the manic desire for more and the depressives desire for less. 

But the hands of the clock will continue to move with every minute long after our time has passed, we can just hope that as those hands tick forward our stories will be told by others as memories and lessons, passed on through the generations of that fleeting moment we spent here, once upon a time.