Posted on by sharonrossblog

26. 10th May 2017 – The kindness of strangers

  1. 10th May 2017 – The kindness of strangers

About a month or so I was standing at a bus stop outside Tesco and started chatting to an old lady ‘I need to go to the council offices,’ she said.  ‘Is it far?’ ‘No, I said – you could walk’.  But, my directions were a bit vague and I sounded uncertain and then she said ‘I think I’ll wait. I’ve only just lost my licence because I find walking difficult but it is a pain getting the bus everywhere.’  I told her that I also couldn’t drive and it was something that you just got used to. I said that the reason why I couldn’t drive was because I had epilepsy.  She sounded startled because she said that ‘I looked normal’. And I thought it was good that she now knew that people with epilepsy just looked normal.  ‘I do get very confused a lot’, I said, ‘That’s why I don’t drive.  It would be dangerous for me to drive’.

And as we got talking she told me a little about herself.  Every morning, she said, she got up and went and had breakfast at the local bistro because it was important for her to go and talk to someone every day.  And, although I felt slightly sorry that she had to do this just to get company, I also felt kind of proud of her, because she had found a strategy to deal with her loneliness that worked for her.  Just as she had learnt something about epilepsy, I had learnt something about the courage it takes to be old and deal with life on a day to day basis. I suggested that she looked up the University of the Third Age, because my grandmother-in-law had loved it and they had lots of interesting activities and she seemed to like that idea.  The bus came and I told her that the bus was going to the council offices.  But as we sat down, I realised that although it was the right bus for me, it wasn’t the right bus for her – the bus was going in the opposite direction for her.  I apologised profusely and felt awful.  And she said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s OK,’ and off she got at the next stop.  And do, you know I think it was OK.  I don’t think she would have been angry at me for making her go on the bus in the wrong direction.  Although she was a stranger, I knew that she had come to be a friend and that she could just accept that I had meant no harm.

Last week there was an alarming post on a Facebook support group I am on ‘ Please can someone speak to me, I’m feeling really down’. Up went one response ‘I’m here for you hun, if you want to talk’ and another ‘What’s up?’ and I pipped in ,‘Are you OK?’ But there was no response.  Only silence.  People started to get a bit panicky – ‘We are getting worried about you,’ said not one but a few people.   All in all there were about 17 responses to this post in 24 hours until finally a response came ‘ Sorry, for all the worry, I’m OK.  I had turned off my phone and was feeling really tired.’

We are taught and we teach our children to be so wary of strangers that we forget that humanity would not survive without the kindness of strangers.  Whether it’s giving a reassuring smile to someone walking down the street to who looks like they are having a hard time; giving directions to someone who is lost; picking up a scarf on the pavement and putting it on the wall so that the owner might find it or putting money in a charity box so that someone else can be helped, but you don’t know where – all these things can make a huge difference to someone’s life.   A lot can be achieved by the kindness of strangers and we should proudly acknowledge that when we give and receive it so that we become more aware that humanity is much better than we are otherwise told to believe.

 

 

 

In other news

I have started some new meds but I am still on the waiting list for the ketogenic diet. The medication says to call your doctor if you come out in a rash – and I am now awaiting a callback from my doctor because that is exactly what has happened to me.  It doesn’t look good. This week I also went to a neuropsychologist to get assessed as part of my neurorehabilitation programme.  Last week I also went to the neuropsychologist to be assessed.  Next week I will also go to get assessed.  I don’t not fit in a box, the neuropsychologist told me so altogether it will take three weeks for me to be assessed. She is trying to understand if my problems are more psychological or neurological and on the basis of her conclusions she will ‘prescribe’ be appropriate treatment.

Posted on by sharonrossblog

13. 11th September 2016 – Parenting theories

Over the break I have carried out some extensive research into parenting theories and have come up with my top three which I would like to share with you.  The aim of this process is to discover which theory would be most useful for me to use at the moment, whilst I am going through this difficult time (NB If you decide to plagiarise this blog for an academic essay in psychology or sociology you will almost certainly fail).

Theory one – children are resilient.  Many people are telling me this one at the moment, whilst secretly being grateful that their children have a relatively ‘normal’ life. However having observed the resiliency theory in real life with my own children – there does seem to be a lot of truth to this. Children have no previous experience to fall back on so they just get up and get on with it because it all seems normal.  My children have accepted that when mum sees a bruise on their leg, she might ask them where they got it from – even though she saw them fall over and attended to the incident last week.  It is normal for them.  They cope and they just get on with the various odd things that happen around them.  Still resilience theory doesn’t really resonate with me. It seems to suggest that it’s ok to make things bad for your children because they are resilient so it doesn’t really matter anyway.

Theory two – a classical psychological interpretation – This theory states that parents screw up their children and then the children spend the rest of their lives trying to undo the damage.  This theory was propagated by Freud, Jung, Piaget, Vygotsky and the like who believed that in these formative years a child’s cognitive and emotional development is established for the rest of their life. Oh dear, I think.  This is not good.  I thought children were supposed to be resilient and what I did didn’t really matter.  It looks like my children will spend years in therapy.

As a sub-theory to this theory is the one that says – if a mother is happy then a child is happy.  For my second pregnancy I was depressed almost throughout.  And if being depressed wasn’t bad enough the whole time I was thinking ‘My unborn child is picking up all my vibes and is going to be depressed their whole life.  How can I un-depress myself?   I am a crap mum before I have even started – what chance is there for my child?’ (I later miscarried, but that’s beside the point). And what about the one in ten mums who suffer from post-natal depression – surely all of their kids aren’t screwed up?  But there must be some truth in Freud et al’s theory – my children are not oblivious to my strange behaviour and my eldest can remember when I was chronically depressed.  There must be an impact – it must shape how they make sense of the world – but does it all have to be negative and does that impact have to last a lifetime.  What happens if some miracle happens and I get better – will my kids still be screwed up because there were some difficult years?

And then there is theory three – All a parent can do is try their best.  This is the theory I am going with for now.  I always thought it was a pretty odd theory – how do I know if I am trying my best? (Does an athlete only try their hardest when they score a personal best?).  However, I have come to understand that I am trying my best.  For me making a dinner for three kids is hard work (lots of decision making, planning, use of memory etc) – sometimes the kids have had the same meal more than once a week, often they don’t get veg and the kids only generally get a drink if they ask for one.  But I know 100% I am trying my best.  And if the kids end up in therapy in years to come, I will know that I tried my hardest for them and that life if complex and even though I tried my best it doesn’t always mean that my kids will have the future that I want for them – ie good mental health, a strong sense of self, to be a mensch (a good person who helps others) after all what else is important?

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Exciting News:  My poor suffering husband (and Boris Johnson) were right – if desperate write to your MP.  My MP Oliver Dowden wrote, on his House of Commons embossed-letter-headed paper to the specialist doctor that I want to see and told him I was feeling a bit desperate and the very busy doctor has now mysteriously found space is his diary for me in two weeks time (I would like a pad of Mr Dowden’s paper.).  The natrupathic medicine is not making a difference but this week I am going to add Lithium to see if that has an impact.