I’m 52, when I look in the mirror I wonder who the old person is! I don’t actually have a problem with aging but my middle aged skin doesn’t bounce back like twenty or thirty something skin did.
I’m dealing with a lot at the minute and it’s all showing in my face, what I’ve been using wasn’t quite hitting the mark but I wasn’t sure what would help.
I had seen the ads for this and thought about it. Then a similarly afflicted friend said that she was using it and that she loved it. I bought a bottle, then I bought a bottle for when I’m at Mum’s. About four weeks into using it and my skin feels great and the look… not younger but a bit fresher.
Pre allotment selfie, I’m wearing lip balm but not much else
If it was up to Mum, she wouldn’t eat much at all. This is what happened in August, she wasn’t eating enough, fell over and wasn’t strong enough to get up.
While we both know what’s coming with the PSP, Mum would like to stay at home for as long as she can. I’m more than happy to support that, but I need to be confident that if she falls (and she will fall) she’ll be able to get up.
Chicken and pancetta with homegrown chard
So I make sure she has food and Mum eats the food. I try and make things that Mum likes to eat and Mum loves a pie.
So I bought some mini pie pans and pies it is!
I can make good shortcrust pastry but I buy puff pastry, so all I really need to do is make the filling. This one is chicken and bacon, I used the fat from the cooked bacon to make the white sauce. I’m going to try mushrooms next!
I thought that this week was the week I was doing to finish the paths. Reader, I did not finish the paths!
I got side tracked by the state of the front bed and the amount of plants that needed to go in the ground. So I weeded the front bed, I dug up one of the day lilies and moved the cola plant. In weeding I found a bunch of bulbs which I relocated to around the tree. I also mulched the area around the tree with woodchip and while I was thinking about it weeded the blackberries and mulched with woodchip.
It doesn’t look like much now but fingers crossed it’ll look lovely in the spring, summer
Planted in the bed were the cotton lavender plants, a lavatera clementii ‘Barnsley Baby’, four tarragon plants to add to the two already there (one French, one Mexican and two tolergon which are supposed to be hardy), two leucanthemum ’banana cream’, and three lily of the valley. I have no idea what I’m doing so let’s hope it looks nice next year!
Then I decided to sort out the spare bed of tomatoes which I’d set up in the summer. It had been semi successful, but it was time for an autumn tidy.
July
As I was doing this and weeding around it, I found a bunch of rooted strawberry runners and I had five asparagus plants left over from buying too many in the spring. So I put them in there.
Then it was time for more woodchip. I’ve done up to the table but I still haven’t tackled the two side paths and the area in front of the table, I am close but it was raining by this point and I still had plants to situate
It was quick growing salad collection, some chard and lettuces, I had given Sue a collection for her small garden but there was quite a lot left. The salad mostly went into the polytunnel but the peppers aren’t ready to leave yet so it was a bit more crowded than I anticipated.
look at that pretty pepper
So they went into a couple of other beds around the plot
That done it was time to tidy up and take the weed bin home and get out of the rain!
I’ve always had plants in this flat. The rule is that they have to be okay with some slight neglect because I’m terrible at remembering to water them.
When Tina and Charles left St Leonards Road I was ‘gifted’ some plants, a lemon scented pelargonium, a couple of begonias and they survived, In fact the pelargonium has spawned many offspring, and I currently have another one in the living room.
I still have the plant but the kitchen looks completely different!
I acquired a spider plant, I now have two (they have also spawned many babies)
Spider plant
Then came the orchids. I currently have three.
Current living room plants, this photo was taken before I got the second lemon tree!
There is a small collection of succulents too!
Finally, the new addition is the lemon tree. Which takes a lot more care than the others.
The only real problem is light, I live in a flat with no windowsills (the bathroom does and the kitchen has a counter but plants need light and while I do have a grow light set up for the allotment having that up all year round would drive me crazy.
So I need to stop adding plants, before it gets out of control!
My autumn/winter project is coming along, that’s 25% sewn.
Intellectually, I know I live in a city with decent, comprehensive public transportation. This Friday, I needed to get a train from Mum’s house to Fulham for 8:45am. Signal failure says no. I rebooked the appointment and decided to get the bus home, knowing I wouldn’t be at my desk at 9am but ok. A bus driver decided he didn’t want to stop (his bus was not full) and so my two hour journey took longer. What I’m saying that while I know I live in city with ‘good’ public transport, public transport in London doesn’t feel comprehensive, cheap or convenient. I dream about learning to drive. (Everyone from other parts of the country must see this as me complaining about my diamond shoes being too tight!)
Mum heard my hint and I have another lemon tree as an extremely early Christmas present.
I’m really tired at the moment, it’s autumn. The darkness screws with my happiness and my ability to fall asleep and stay asleep! I know people with SAD are supposed to sleep more and probably if I could do anything I liked. I’d sleep until about 9am and take an afternoon nap. I’d sleep more over 24 hours. However having to put all my sleep into 8 hours a night doesn’t at all work for me in autumn/winter and I’m so tired
This does not in any way convey the actual joy and comfort of my bed!
The work volunteer day is this week. While I will have to do a lot of running around. It’s a day in a garden (@ropewalkcommunitygarden) so while it’s not my garden, it’s still a day in the garden, which can’t be bad
I hate all housework that has to do with cleaning floors. I loathe it, I can explain how poorly my mum is at the moment by explaining to friends that I’m hoovering and mopping the floors in her flat.
In action
I just hate it. So why did I buy a new hoover this year?
Because it makes it easier and quicker to hoover the floors and so I do it more. I can now hoover all the floors and the stairs and then mop the floors with the mop attachment in about 30 minutes and I don’t have to deal with plugs and leads. In fact, I think it’s using the cord free shark at Mum’s that lead to my need for a cordless hoover!
I’m not an expert on hoovers but this one does the job without costing a fortune.
So if you hate hoovering with a burning passion, then I would recommend this hoover!
How elder care can rupture sibling relationships: ‘I didn’t have much choice’ It’s tricky and Ben and I have had our moments, at base though, Ben and I are quite similar and we have talked more in the last couple of months about how we’re going to handle it and we do agree on the important things. We are also helped by Mum being very clear about what will happen and how she wants me to handle it, she’s made it really clear to Ben so we are all on the same page about how we will handle most things. I think it’s really important to remember that we are both struggling and doing the best we can.
‘I carved until my fingers bled’: inside the baffling world of pumpkin obsessives I love winter squash and this time of year (and especially this year with my complete winter squash growing failure!) I tend to buy some and turn them into puree which I use for pancakes, cake, and savoury things. But never pumpkin pie which I’m not keen on at all!
Tuesdays and Fridays are difficult days in my week as they are my swap over days, on Tuesdays I go to the office from my flat and go ‘home’ to my mum’s flat. On Friday’s, I go home because while I love hanging out with my mum, I draw the line at sleeping on an inflatable mattress /floor more days of the week than I sleep in my bed! However, one of the themes of this blog has been how much I struggle with transition, on Tuesdays, I don’t want to leave my flat and on Fridays I don’t want to leave my mum, even though I go back to see her for the day on Saturday and Ben comes to see her on Sunday, while I know I’m not abandoning her, I feel like I am!
Friends have expressed concern about me, about my self-care and resilience and other people have said it’s too much to do. I don’t believe it’s too much for me to do for my mum, other people have other circumstances, responsibilities, and priorities. What I’m doing is not a criticism of what they are able to do for their parents. However, I’ve been saying that the routine needed to bed in, and I needed to get into ‘harness and it would be fine, also I have a friend whose husband had a stroke last year and a boss who has a child who has significant needs. I feel they have a more difficult road to walk than the one I’m on, all I’m really doing right now is hanging out with my mum.
However over the last couple of weeks, I’ve started to feel that I’m settling in. Not gonna lie, for most of September, I was fried. I managed to do everything that I needed to do for Mum but my flat and my life was feeling a bit more chaotic that I was comfortable with, I guess I was also coming to terms with her diagnosis. PSP is a nasty and rare disease (I’d never heard of it before Mum got it and the neurologist at the NHS hospital has only seen one other person with it). Knowing that your beloved parent has a disease that won’t only kill her but rob her and us of herself, honestly, it sucks. In a way, that it’s a fast disease is it’s only blessing, Alzheimer’s and dementia can take decades.
I’ve also been dealing with a sense of failure, that I should have seen that it was more than her balance, looking back I can see that this has been going on longer than a year, the decline has been quicker since her concussion last year but I can see now that there were other changes but I just didn’t know to look for.
All that to say I’ve been doing a lot of emotional processing, which combined with a lot of change to routine, was causing me to be frozen at home. I was doing the bare minimum to get by, and it was showing in the state of the flat (I’m pretty sure that at the beginning of the month, I did the same load of washing about 5 times because I kept forgetting about it). I know it was bad because I read one book from the end of August to last week! I don’t love not being in control and honestly, it was hard for me to cope with all the change, autumn and all the things that Mum needed. After the first week, I realised that what we needed were blocks of time with minimal back and forth. Originally, I was going to go home on Wednesday night and visit on Thursday and then Saturday. That really doesn’t work, now I go Tuesdays and stay until Friday morning (if I’m going for a walk with Sue) or Friday afternoon/evening if not. I come back on Saturday to do shower, housework, shopping, food prep and hang out.
And I still have my moments, especially when I’m tired. Last week was not good. The thing about resilience and self-care is that they are interconnected. They are both like muscles you have to strengthen and stretch them and they work with each other. I believe that in order not to burn out it’s important to notice what helps and doesn’t and to give yourself some grace. These are all things, I’ve done over the last three decades or so (sometimes not as well as I’d like!) and I’ve realised that I’ve been putting them into practice this month without really thinking about it but I have noticed it showing up.
To show you how that works in my like I want to take you through last week when I noticed the pattern. I had to be in the office Monday and Tuesday. We had a new starter on Monday, I woke up feeling dreadful, I’d was migraine-y, which is defined as an upset stomach and a banging head, which could get better or worse, following a dreadful night’s sleep. I got up, took some paracetamol, my vitamins and ACV (self-care) and got myself to work, I got into the office early (resilience) but I did not have lunch or breakfast with me, I decided that if I felt bad at lunchtime I could go home (grace). I didn’t feel fantastic at lunch but after a short walk, I decided I wasn’t sick enough to go home and as I was in the middle of a piece of work, and I made a call to just get it done (resilience). However, I left the office at 5.05pm and was home by 6:30pm (self-care). I came home, and I decided that laundry left from the weekend, wasn’t going to get done (grace) but that I would take everything on the airer down and put it away (resilience). I did not feel well enough to eat but I tidied the kitchen and sorted out what I was taking to Mum’s the next day. (resilience). There was even some light hoovering, I had a bath and went to bed (self-care).
The next morning (after 7hr47m sleep – yay for self-care!), I got up and made my bed, packed for mum’s, got ready for work and managed to take the recycling and food waste out (resilience) because Tuesdays are also bin days, I also managed to clean the bathroom sink and toilet and the house isn’t perfectly clean but it is clean enough and tidy, so that I won’t feel terrible when I get back on Friday (resilience and self-care). I was in the office about 15 minutes later than usual and again without breakfast or lunch but with coffee. So I skipped breakfast and bought lunch again. (grace). On Tuesdays, I get the train to Waterloo, I could walk it but it’s a 25-minute walk, with a rucksack and a suitcase along the South Bank with the tourists. I give myself the gift of not having to deal with that and get take the drain!
So gradually my grinding out the tasks is giving me some space for self-care which in turn is helping me get more resilient and being more resilient, I can see the change and give myself grace for what I’m not doing but instead of seeing it and berating myself for not doing those things, the noticing of them is helping me solve the issues.
I’m not sure that all makes sense but I’m more aware of how it all works together. Resilience doesn’t mean things are easy, self-care doesn’t mean doing what you want to do, grace isn’t about things being ok when they aren’t done. I’m trying to find a balance and it’s mostly working. In all of this, it seems ridiculous I can see how lucky I am. Mum is approaching this with such grace, (even knowing how I difficult this is going to be, I would still pick her, she’s the best parent anyone could hope for!), she raised me, I know I can do this. I’ve also been lucky to have the care and support of my friends and while it felt difficult at the beginning my brother is being fantastic, work are also being great. Truly, I’m very lucky, even as this is horrible.
And for anyone wondering, I’ve chosen to mostly illustrate this post with pictures of Mum, mostly of her from about 10-15 years ago, when she was absolutely herself. This is the Jillian, I wish everyone could know because she was a force of nature and I’m so lucky to have had that time with her!
I said that this week I would work on the paths. I did work on the paths.
I started with cutting back the lavender and then cleared the bed by the gooseberries and as I was there, weeded the path that runs the by the asparagus patch to the beds and back to the central path on the plot. Last year a stray strawberry runner planted itself and this year that plant had runners so there’s a little mini bed of strawberries!
Then I started on the sides of the beds that hadn’t been cleared. This is the before last week
And this is the after on Monday, the green you can see in the path is supposed to be there. It’s chamomile lawn, thyme and a couple of forget me nots I decided I would let live!
I also cut back and weeded the mint bath.
I weeded some of main path and wood chipped , so this is where we are with the path
I basically have to do two more side paths, between the strawberry bed and the bed with the nasturtium going wild and between that bed and the cabbage bed and the central path from the blackcurrants to the raspberries. Aka the worst bit. Both beds could also do with a tidy and then get planted up. It’s going to suck because it’s bad.
This isn’t even the worst path!
I did do some other stuff too. I planted half the onions in modules. They will live in the polytunnel until spring when I’ll have a think about where to plant them. (I’m going to put the others in the cabbage and kale bed either next week or the week after and I think the shallots and spring cabbage are going in the bed that the nasturtium is currently in! Finally the garlic, will go into the bed that had the sweetcorn in and currently has the squash in. But paths first!
I cut some flowers, harvested tomatoes, chard, lettuce and the world’s smallest cabbage.
The bucket of chard is back!
There is a lot to do. I need to weed and top up the blueberries and fruit trees and then to strulch them. The fruit cage area needs weeding and mulching and more plants in between the pavers.
Work required
The raspberry and blackcurrant beds need some attention and weeding and mulching. Plants need putting in the ground. There is all of the work I talked about last week. I need to sort out my much neglected compost pile and the shed and poly need tidying too. The front bed and the path by the rhubarb needs weeding again! And just look at the state of the leek bed!
Haven’t said that, things are doing great. The kale is in and growing, the chard is looking amazing!
I need to keep at it but I’m hopeful that I can break the back of the worse of the work before Christmas and be ready for spring.
Nic Dempsey 