Rock On

I am making an effort to do more things with the family, the last four or so years have been such a whirlwind with my messy mental health that ‘family stuff’ has almost gone out the window.

About 6months prior to my last suicide attempt I was trying to work full time in a stressful job and rapid cycling between suicidal depression and full on mania. I made a point of individually taking each kid out of school for a day and spending time with them doing something fun, we called it their “Day Off”.

 

Two of the kids got depressed-me, I took one to the movies and the other to the zoo, but on the zoo trip it was raining, we were both cranky and I had no energy so it was a bit of a non-event.

The other two kids got manic me and we had a blast, one went to the beach, fishing, shopping and horse riding and the other got to the beach, shopping and go on a ‘tree top adventure’ which is where while attached to a harness you rock climb, abseil and scale a series of rope bridges and climby dangly things through the huge gum trees in a bushland park – it was awesome and slightly terrifying!  

I felt when I was organising these “days off” that I would probably be dead within the next year and I wanted to give the kids something fun to remember me by. Now I want to make time to have fun with them again but this time everyone together - hubby included! We have made a bucket list of sorts of all the things each person wants to do and we are going to do them as a family. 

We ticked off our first list item last weekend. Felix, my 10yr old, is really into Geology, gems and rocks and each year “Geoscience Australia” holds an open day where they display all manner of rocks and minerals, have talks, fun sciency demonstrations (that’s the technical term) and the kids can ‘pan for gems’. 

So we toddled off to the big smoke, it seemed like the whole city had turned out for the event and after finally finding a car park we went in and looked around, everyone enjoyed it, well almost everyone. My eldest son Benjamin preferred to complain about how boring it was and how he already does enough science stuff at school whilst shuffling the deck of cards I can’t pry out of his hands – the kids is obsessed with magic and has been for about 5 years, I don’t think it’s going away…

Afterwards we went out to a gorgeous bakery/ café and were reminded why we don’t tend to take the children out for meals – the food however was great and plentiful and they catered for my fussy eating and Felix who is gluten intolerant without any problem.

So that’s one tick off the family bucket list and hopefully over times fun memories can start to overshadow the ones of “Mum is a crackpot”. I guess I know I have already screwed them up to some degree but I want to try and even out the ratio a bit.

Do you spend much time with your family?

Does mental illness get in the way of family time?