Mrs Helicopter Writes

  Blossoms! Sunshine! Warmth! Swifts and Martins! Bursts of pink, green and white, buzzy busy bees, blue sky with the aroma of freshly cut grass. The promise of more luxurious days dozing in the garden on sunny days. The start of summer! I LOVE this time of year. All my senses are heightened in May. Even the laziest trees (Ash, I am looking at you) finally have green leaves. And flowers, flowers everywhere! It’s a veritable feast for the eyes. The birds are singing, the grass is being mown (unless you’re doing no mow may but ssssssh). I owe you all a positive, happy post because I’m really good at writing when I am miserable and usually too busy having fun when I am not. So, I thought I’d describe my favourite time of year. Spring in general is exciting for me because the end of Winter in the UK drags so much and even more so this year with the record rainfall. It’s been very cold and wet and pretty bleak, really. But the sun has finally poked through right in time for Birthday mon...

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 ...

This is going to be a bit of an unusual post for me. Normally I launch straight into my opinions about parenting or some outrage about human rights. Today I’m going down a more personal route. I am going to write to about health. What advice would I give a friend who was looking to get healthier? I am being careful with my words here for a number of reasons. Obviously I am talking about losing weight. My real life friends know weight is something I struggle with constantly. I have done since I was in my late teens. I’m actually even cautious to use the words “struggle” when it comes to weight because I don’t want to convey a message of negativity to those who are large and happy. I’m a massive champion of body positivity. There are lots of reasons people are overweight / obese and none of them are laziness or greed, the common misconceptions. So I applaud anyone who out and out rejects societal pressure to adhere to a specific “acceptable” BMI and embraces their size/shape wi...

Got small kids? It gets easier. When I had my first baby, I noticed that whenever he appeared to be peaceful, certain people couldn’t WAIT to tell me what awful things I had to come. Not sleeping through? WAIT til the terrible TWOS! Terrible twos? Wait til he’s a threeanger! You think you have problems now, wait til they’re an ACTUAL TEENAGER! BE GRATEFUL. Actually, this is not very helpful thing to a new mum. Or in fact, ANY mum. You may be greeted with a wan smile if you say this to someone but inside that person will be swearing at you. Because NO one wants to hear that things get worse. Stop it! I often think about whether or not I actually would have wanted to know how hard I found EVERYTHING from pregnancy onwards. I’ve had many a conversation since with fellow parents starting “no one ever tells you …. *insert awful realisation about parenthood here*…” But would I have REALLY wanted to know?     Would I have wanted to know that: a) Pregnancy is s...

For International Women’s Day I want to celebrate all the glorious women in my life. I’m so lucky to have some amazing ladies around me. I thought about trying to write something worthy. Something about trying to celebrate unheard women’s voices from around the world, but as David Lammy pointed out about Comic Relief, it’s time we let their own voices be heard. We don’t need another white, middle class woman clumsily trying to write about inclusivity, without awareness of privilege or agency on the subject. So. I’m just gonna write about my mates and my family. My female loves. To tell them how much I appreciate them, need them and adore them. The Girls Who Are My Rocks I don’t have a “girl gang” or “tribe”. But I have a fantastic selection of super close friends who I’ve made since leaving school. They’re an eclectic bunch. I met them all over the place: Uni, work, friends of friends, family friends I’ve known since we were teens, Zumba, baby classes (which wei...

Keeping up with the Kardashians…. A programme that divides and unites. I’m assuming that you’ve seen at least one episode but even if you haven’t, you’ll have most definitely seen and heard about the various members of the family. In my experience it tends to unite people in their shared negative opinions about their vacuous, vain, uber-privileged life style and perceived lack of discernible talent. I am here today to put forward an argument that most of the vitriol aimed at this family, in particular the daughters and specifically KIM, is based on  internalised misogyny and double standards and that there is more to selfie culture than just vanity. Lets get started with the first thing that people think about when the name “Kardashian” pops up: Kim’s 2003 sex tape. I haven’t linked to it, not because I don’t approve of it, but because it was sold without her consent. What, a woman didn’t give consent and the guy didn’t face any consequences? Welcome to the rape culture of...