Anxiety & Grocery Shopping With Children

Today I am supposed to go grocery shopping, the kids are back at school tomorrow and ordinarily I would just do it then, however I need to buy Mr 14 some new clothes as he is growing like a weed and he needs to try them on, I have been putting it off all holidays.

As a mother of four children I have developed a relatively regular routine during the school term which helps the family function as well as keeping my bipolar fairly stable. I am forced out of bed rain, hail or depression to take the kids to school, I feed/clean the animals, exercise for 60 minutes which quietens my eating disorder voice, then I have to shower as I am too sweaty not to and tick off a ‘to do’ list of household chores while getting my social interaction through Twitter & blogs. 

Image stolen from here

School holidays throw me right out of whack, I tend to have trouble sleeping at night then fall asleep around 4am until 10am and often don’t get a chance to exercise until the evening. I have less opportunity to write, other children come and go from our house and I am expected to socialise in real life with real people often over meal times. The disruption in routine triggers mood swings and the lack of control flares eating disorder behaviours and somewhere in between I have to make time for grocery shopping. 

My husband has difficulty understanding why I have so much trouble taking the kids out of the house to go grocery shopping, they listen to him better than they listen to me, they don’t seem to beg him for things the way they beg me and while I know this is due to lack of consistency on my part simply the thought of the impending outing sends my anxiety skyrocketing. 

Grocery shopping is an anxiety trigger for me at the best of times, my eating disorder dramatically impacts the way I shop. This is better at the moment than it has been in the past as I now eat different meals to my family, generally the same three things week in week out, and that helps me feel calm enough to purchase pre-determined ‘safe’ foods for myself without having to stop and read the nutrition panels 100 times.  

Nowadays I shop on Mondays, I pre organise the week’s meals and have a shopping list that I stick to which is written out in the order that the aisles go. I can buy the food for my family without worrying too much about it as I know I am not going to be eating it anyway. I stack things in the trolley so they are easy to unpack onto the register, I still get anxious but I have my system and it works for me. 

When I throw taking children with me into the mix it complicates my routine, they of course want to help, which should be wonderful except that they run off in different directions getting things and throwing them into the trolley at random while I desperately try to organise the items into their ‘proper’ place. I know this is my problem not theirs, it’s a control thing.

Then the kids inevitably start asking for items not on the list, we are on a fairly tight budget since I haven’t been working and maths isn’t my strong point at the best of times, let alone when I am in a busy supermarket trying to rearrange a trolley and being asked 4 different questions from 4 different children.

I tend to say yes much more often than I should, this started when they were very young because I couldn’t stand them having tantrums in public because I felt so embarrassed and harshly judged. As they have grown the tantrums evolved into whiny incessant begging which turns my already anxious brain to complete mush, they have learned if they beg hard enough and stress me out enough they will eventually get what they want. 

My husband simply says ‘No’ once and they leave it alone, because they know he won’t change his mind. He doesn’t understand how I am intellectually aware of this hole I have dug for myself but my anxiety impacts my ability to put my foot down and start climbing out of it. Usually by the time we leave the supermarket my anxiety is through the roof and I am swearing blind that I will never take them out of the house again, I get angry and shouty and shaky.

So it’s 1pm and I have been putting this shopping trip off since around 9am but I’d better go soon or I’m going to run out of time as it takes over an hour just to get there. I woke up angry and stressed and this was followed by lots of things that could go wrong going wrong ie accidently dropped a glass, broke the dogs ceramic water bowl, spilt coffee all over me… I was kind of concerned that if I left the house I would probably be in a car accident or something. 

I feel much calmer after writing this though and Hubby has said that I can drop the younger kids off at his workshop and just take Mr 14 to get his clothes and the groceries so I’d better stop procrastinating and go. Wish me luck!

Do you take your children shopping with you?

If so, what coping techniques do you use?

My Sanctuary

I live with my husband and four children and although the house is a decent size it’s impossible to forget the fact that I share my home with five other people. But there is a tiny room, well its more of a nook actually, that I use as my study. This area is MY sanctuary, a special place for me to write and be alone with my thoughts. I have filled it with things that make me happy, little tokens of my life and soul that have special memories attached or simply put a smile on my face.

Here I have my desk, my computer, stationary stuffs, “Stanley” my indoor plant, a wooden cube my husband made one day when he was killing time that I just love for some reason, there are photos of family & friends on the wall, twinkling star shaped fairy lights, a little jar of marbles (in case I lose mine), a magic 8 ball (decisions aren’t my strong point), a wooden block with “Writers” written on it (haha), a couple of mindfulness adult colouring books (haven’t quite gotten around to using those yet, they were gifts and the extended psych ward stay of 2015 gave me enough colouring in time to kill that desire for a few years!) 

My old acoustic guitar is in here and while I can’t play to save myself it brings back happy memories of my youth and late winter nights singing by bonfires. I have storage tubs filled with (dusty) scrap booking stuff from a manic phase years ago, a box with little trinkets of happy memories such as the flashing eyeball from the ‘Dracula’s’ themed restaurant in Melbourne, the bracelet from the first Coldplay concert I went to in Sydney, shells from the beach, the hospital wrist bands from my kids when they were newborns, teeny tiny origami creatures the size of finger nails that my firstborn painstakingly folds, the aluminium love heart my hubby hand made for me from melted down soft drink cans (don't ask). 

With the possible exception of the computer, these are all things with the combined street value of $2.99 but they things that are priceless to me. They make me happy to look at, they make me feel something on those days when depression and numbness take over and my memory can’t stretch past the last few hours. 

I also keep in here memories from the darker parts of my life, journal entries written from dark lonely nights in the hospital fueled by fear and psychosis, poems of sadness and depression as well as the suicide letters I had written for my loved ones. While those memories can be painful they are also a part of my history and can be important reminders of just how far I have come.

My sanctuary is an exhibition of the world I have experienced, it has darkness and light, fear and hilarity, stillness and hurry. It is a reminder of a life well lived but often forgotten, a place to reflect, absorb and a place to simply be.  

On Forgetting To Remember

How do you know if you’ve forgotten something?

This is a great question posed by the wonderful podcaster Jamoalki over on the Depressed Not Dead blog  click here to read his post!

My memory is generally pretty awful, it can be handy as I am one of those people that can watch the same movie three times and still not remember that I have watched it and frustrating because I have a habit of forgetting appointments or double booking dates. “Thursday the 6th? That sounds great” No, it doesn’t sound great, it sounds familiar because I have already got three things lined up for that date but I won’t remember until the morning of when I will inevitably end up disappointing somebody!

I think I have blogged about memory issues before but I can’t remember if it was here or not (and also can’t be bothered checking right now!) In my non-professional medical opinion, depression itself is DEFINITELY a huge factor. Every single person I have ever met with depression has some sort of memory deficit as a bonus prize. Perhaps it’s to do with our pre occupation with the existing thoughts endlessly circling our brains that there is no room left for us to make any new memories  – I am certain there has been much research in this area and I think my psychiatrist explained it to me once but I don't recall what she said and if I try and research it now I will just get distracted by the internet and forget what I was doing here in the first place, so please feel free to google it!  

Medications can also cause memory problems, I find Lithium completely kills any ability I have to retain new information, even reading a fiction novel is useless because I can read through three chapters and suddenly realise I haven’t retained a single thing. I stopped using Lithium for this reason, I couldn't do my job anymore as it involved continuous learning and I just felt completely stupid all the time.

Hypomania seems to improve all aspects of my brain function, memory included – it’s like somebody has cleaned a window and everything suddenly makes perfect sense, I will even remember things long forgotten from childhood but as soon as it escalates to mania I don’t retain a thing and once back to my baseline or a depressive phase my memory becomes very fuzzy again. 

I somehow managed to write a memoir despite all this, but I think it was purely because I wrote it over a 6 week period while hypomanic and as I have kept journals and various blogs for so long I could refer to things I’d written long ago and the events and the emotions that went along with them came flooding back to me. I don't remember half of them off the top of my head right now, however  when I read back over my words its like "Oh that's right, that did happen!" 

What saddens me most is how much of my children’s lives I have forgotten, first words, birth weights, milestones in general. I came across some old video footage of when my youngest was about 1 & ½ she hadn’t been walking long, my three boys seemed so young, they were all singing and jumping around the living room like nutters having an absolute blast. It was beautiful to watch but sad at the same time because although I could hear my voice talking to them as I was recording the video, I have absolutely no recollection of that time in their lives and the footage didn’t jog my memory, it’s like it had all happened to someone else.

I know that I disassociate sometimes- all be it mildly, usually it’s as though I am watching myself from a distance but I will lose time occasionally, people tell me about phone conversations that I don’t recall. I wonder if this patchiness in my memory is also related to that feeling of being distanced from everything, time spent in mood episodes seems to be lost to the wind with just the writings from those events reminders that they ever happened at all.   

Watching my Dad being very much aware that his once infallible memory is slowly but unstoppably deteriorating saddens me deeply. I can relate to the pain of not remembering things that you know were once so important to you, words or names on the tip of your tongue but not quite within reach. The main reason I am so terrified at the thought of ever having ECT treatments that have been recommended to me in the past is the fear of losing even more of my memories, I would rather die knowing who I was than live a life I don’t remember.

So Jamoalki asked, how do you know if you’ve forgotten something?

Well I guess the answer is you don’t know, ignorance can be bliss sometimes or if its super important then someone will eventually let you know, the mechanic will call asking why you haven’t brought the car in yet (yesterday) or the school will ring you to come and pick up your children (ok, that’s only happened once…) 

Routine is essential for me, if my morning routine is thrown out my memory goes along with it, school notes don’t get signed, chickens don’t get fed, dishwashers don’t get turned on and my whole day is turned upside down! Post it notes on the steering wheel can be handy too – just watch the Aussie summer sun with those as the glue from the back will leave sticky residue all over it!

I find writing to do lists helpful, I put them on my phone so that I have them with me at all times great for stuff like ‘remember to bring in the washing before it freezes to the washing line’, ‘clean the guinea pig’ or ‘pay the electricity bill’. When I have a blog post idea I have to write it down (again on my phone) or it’s gone forever, then I can go back to them when I have time later. Sometimes I will find 4 or 5 long forgotten half started posts in my “notes”!

Do you have memory issues? If so, how do they affect you and what do you do to combat them?