Mrs Helicopter Writes

I really struggled today. I didn’t seem to be able to achieve anything I wanted to. I thought today would be really straight forward. Nope. My brain chose chaos. Let us take stock and see what in the “escalation of nonsense” enfolded… Original Plan for Wednesday 8th May 2024 Run with Joni on scooter to school Run home (via another 2km) Shower Cycle to work Meet A (colleague 1), set up work on my laptop whilst I do file sorting Meet B (colleague 2) to have lunch, chat work stuff & catch up Come home Chill Cook dinner TV & bedtime nonsense The end If only life was so simple. The plan changed whilst Joni was eating breakfast. I got it into my head that I wanted to re-join the gym I was a member of last year. I’ve been having too many wine nights and I think I could go to gym classes in the evening instead. Alleviate the wine guilt and improve fitness. Win win. This sets up a stupid chain of events which I retrospectively recognise as being caused by IMPULSIVENESS. I remember a cl...

 I REALLY hope you sung that to the tune of “Celebration” but if you’re not above the age of 40, then perhaps you didn’t, and this sentence is meaningless. Also, right off the top, this is not really going to be about devastation because I actually just wanted to rhyme procrastination but not with celebration because, duh. I am so sick of procrastination. I don’t think I realised how much it’s affected my life until maybe the last 4-5 years. For me it means wanting to DO the thing but being unable to do the thing and so doing other things to take away the guilt from not doing the thing. So more specifically, I want to create something. I don’t even know what I want to create, which doesn’t help, does it? But I know that creating something fills a void in me that nothing else can. It’s the only thing that makes me proud, other than my kids. (Gus would call me cringe for saying that and to be honest, I feel it too). I’ve always been creative. I mean, not that I think of mysel...

 I am so angry. I am raging. I can barely concentrate. But I have to because I have to work. And I have to parent. So I have to do everything I can to mask this anger because it is not the fault of anyone else but me. My rage. My fury. But I have to control it. I want to bark at my daughter who doesn’t want to wear her new shoes to school BECAUSE OF COURSE SHE DOESN’T. She doesn’t want to clean her teeth or in fact, do anything else I ask her to do because I have dared to ask her to do it. It took us all day, from the minute she woke up, to get her to shower yesterday. She finally did so at 7pm. But I don’t bark. She knows I am angry. She can sense it. She can see it whilst I storm around the kitchen. WHERE ARE MY KEYS?   I keep telling her it’s not her fault and that I am not angry at her but I know she feels a bit scared. This is fucking awful. I don’t want her to be scared. But I don’t know how else to reassure her when I have to be in her company. I have to walk her ...

If you're someone who struggles to sleep *flings hand up* then you are possibly obsessed, like me, with how other people sleep. How do people sleep? How can anyone EVER sleep?!  You may be one of those super lucky people who can sleep on a chicken’s lip! You put your head on the pillow and poof! You're asleep! You absolute lucky dabber. My relationship with sleep has always been weird. Apparently, I slept well as a baby. I was a very early riser, but I needed my bed early. I remember in Junior school my bedtime was always earlier than my friends. Boo! No Adrian Mole for me! But if I got overtired, I would get really nauseous and often actually vom. (Bad times for my vom-averse mother!)  As an adult I've had lots of bouts of bad sleep especially during stressful periods. I remember visiting a lavender farm in Oz and left convinced that the "sleep balm" I'd bought held the key to the secrets of sleep! It didn't. My pregnancies were tricky, and sleep was ...

Ah shite. I’ve become THAT mum. The mum of a teen who wants to scream JUST YOU WAIT! I mean, I say I WANT to scream because I know I shouldn’t. But I did, accidentally, to a colleague the other day. She was talking about her niece battling a newly emerged three-anger from a very docile 2 yr old. And it just came out by mistake. I was mid-way through half term, half working, half battling bored kids. Stressed, thinking about all the things I need to do and haven’t done.   So, I blurted it. “Ugh, she should wait til they’re teens! Constant but incomprehensible anger, unmitigated selfishness and they NEVER go to bed”. My colleague, bless her, defended her niece. As well she should. “Well, she’s finding it pretty tough”. I felt awful. Of course, she is! Having a small, unreasonable being who doesn’t know if they want peas/chips/yogurt even when they have it in their hands, is exhausting. The tantrums leave you wrecked, you’ve likely been awake super early, no daytime naps to ha...

Have you been seeing a lot of posts about adult ADHD and how it presents in women? How it presents so differently to boys and can be masked so much that many women are only now just discovering they have it? Dopamine Chasing on a swing, or am I??? According to my newsfeed of Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, almost every adult woman I know is seeking or has got an ADHD diagnosis. How could it be that prevalent and so badly missed by medical science? *Hollow laugh* I mean, we know the answer to that don’t we. #womensproblems However, it’s very possible you can’t relate at all to what I am writing. You’ve not seen many, if any posts about adult ADHD and you definitely don’t relate to the characteristics that can nod to a diagnosis. The wonder of the algorithm! One of the things about ADHD is that people diagnosed have lower levels of dopamine, the reward-pleasure chemical in your brain. And one way of seeking dopamine hits is social media. So, my chicken and egg situation with “how ...