Mrs Helicopter Writes

Christmas is without a shadow of a doubt my favourite time of year. I am super lucky because growing up my family really invested in creating traditions and making it a magical time of year for us. Not with money, we didn’t have much of that growing up, but just with making such a big fuss of the season. So for me it’s still a magical time of celebration, happiness and fun with the added bonus of living that magic vicariously through my children. But this year, something changed. The stress outweighed the excitement of the season and I almost had a breakdown. I started to have panic attacks and I had to go and see my *counsellor to get me through the holidays. I can’t say I actually decompressed until several days after Christmas day, despite having lovely times in between. But I just wanted it to be over. I couldn’t cope with the weight of expectation laid so heavily at my door. Laid at the door of the wife, the daughter, the mother, the granddaughter, the daughter-in-law. And ...

I often wonder how clean other people’s houses REALLY are. You see, I am an awful mix of complete neat freak and terminally lazy. I think people who often have WAY too much going on in their heads often have neat-freak tendencies. If I can “just sort this room out” then my brain will be all calm and my thoughts will be in order. Perhaps it’s a sign of an anxious person. “I got all these things to think through AND a stinky, messy pit to clean up…GAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” Actually. That does sound like me. And I like my house to be clean. REALLY clean and tidy at ALL times. But it isn’t. And it never has been. Even before I had kids. Even when I only had one cat or even when I lived abroad and had NO cats. It was never, ever shiny spick and span. Because as with everything in life, my expectations do not meet reality. So then I wonder how clean other people’s houses are. Because I am secretly weirdly competitive about stupid things like this. Now, I am not talking about the super...

A Year On from “Drugs Saved My Marriage”. It’s been a year since I wrote and published one of my most definitive blog posts to date. It was an emotional rollercoaster to write and after reading and re-reading and editing and making Emlyn read and re-read it, I pressed publish . I had some amazing feedback. It really seemed to resonate with people, especially mothers and I had some amazing comments from all corners: friends, family, strangers, even people I hadn’t heard from in years. I can’t believe how much difference a year makes. I could never have predicted that 2015 would have been so full of so many brilliant times with my little Helicopter family and so many great opportunites. In fact, 2015 was a fantastic year for me both emotionally and physically. And I put a large part of it down to that post. I think it marked the start of a really exciting chapter in my life.   I’ll pick up where I left the post in Feb 2015 to explain why I think it had such positive rep...

I am so tired of being told how grateful I should be for my husband. I hear it all the time. Even my own Grandmother has said it to me. So what is allegedly so special about my husband? 1. My husband cooks. He will cook every night unless I want to cook something. 2. He cooked every night of both my pregnancies because I couldn’t stand the smell of ANYTHING. He also did all the washing up because it grossed me out and the washing cos I was knackered. He did virtually everything around the house. 3. He does most of the clothes washing. 4. He does the bins and the litter tray with little or no reminder. 5. He vacuums when it needs doing and not because I’ve asked. 6. He gets up with the kids every school day and gives them breakfast and gets one or both of them dressed. 7. He loves spending time with the kids and spends hours playing with them both. 8. He drives us everywhere. 9. He’s more than happy to stay in pretty much every night of the week and let me, if I ...

The internet is a wonderful way to present a heavily edited version of yourself to the world. Online I try to be funny and ranty and entertaining but if you know the real me, you’ll know that recently the ranty has been more prevalent than the funny. I have also had periods of depression and anxiety. Not just anxiousness about something tangible, like a driving test or 10 (ahem, sore point!). The anxiousness i have experience is known as free-floating anxiety. It permeates everything and leaves me paralysed with fear for NO reason, rendering me incapable of concentrating or functioning other than on a very basic level. Thankfully I haven’t experienced too much that since Gus was about 15 months bar a few wobbly days.  I am always aware, however, that it has the capacity to come back at any given moment if things start to overwhelm me emotionally.So, say for example, if I was in a permanent state of anger for NO reason at NOTHING and then as a result I was constantly explodin...