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?

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