Kedgeree; rhubarb pie and ice cream

I don’t usually bother with trigger warnings, but I’m going to talk about self-harm and I know that can be a sensitive subject, so please consider yourself warned.

Mum has once again been having a bad day today: her urinary symptoms were playing up, making her anxious and miserable, which made the symptoms worse, which made her more miserable, and so on in a spiral of unhappiness. Mum couldn’t settle, wandering from room to room, occasionally stopping to ask me what I could do to make her feel better (nothing much, sadly), then getting up to wander some more.

While she did so, I finished the health questionnaire sent to me by the DWP, ordered a load of bedding plants from an online garden centre¹ as mum won’t go to the one in the village, and avoided doing anything about sorting out my bedroom (yes, it’s a mess, but until I work out where to fit some storage my clothes will just have to live on the sofa bed).

One of mum’s friends invited us both out for lunch on Friday, and I made the mistake of mentioning it to mum, which kicked off the usual escalation of panic. After several rounds of “I want to go, but what if I have problems with my insides, that would be too embarrassing, no I can’t possibly go, but I do want to go…”, I went to make dinner, but it wasn’t a good session of cooking.

I sat on my perching stool, then realised I needed the rice from the cupboard. I got the rice, sat on my perching stool, and realised I didn’t have a spatula for cooking. I got the spatula, sat on my perching stool, then realised I needed the spices that were in the other room.

By the time the rice had thrown itself across the work surface and hob, and mum had come to indulge her obsession with cleaning by trying to clean it up while I was still cooking, and the fish had revealed itself to still be frozen in one solid lump, my frustration with life in general, and cooking in particular, boiled over. Unable to direct it outwards, I instead self-harmed.

Mum didn’t know about that, and her near vision is luckily poor enough that she won’t see the marks on my arm, but she could see my frustration and unhappiness, and came to my aid, doling out the same advice I so often give her (most notably “take a breath”). For a brief while, she was distracted from her own worries and became something like her pre-anxiety self – and her urinary issues went away almost completely.

After all that, the resulting kedgeree was just OK, and definitely nowhere near good enough to merit the hassle it had caused me. I know kedgeree should usually have eggs, for example, but the one I tried to use turned out so soft boiled it collapsed when I tried to peel it. Once I’d cleared up all the egg oozing across the work surface, I didn’t feel like trying again with another one. Although the rice was undercooked enough that I would have had time to cook more after all, as it turned out.

Mum actually ate her portion and said it was “not too bad”, although I don’t know if she really thought that or just felt sorry for me.

We followed it with rhubarb pie (from Tesco, and not bad at all) and ice cream / cream (for mum and me respectively), then I went to try to redeem myself by doing the washing up. It almost worked, until I dropped a nearly full mug of coffee on the living room carpet. From the clean up process, I can tell you that kneeling on nearly feeling-less knees is a truly weird sensation.

So that’s that, once again. Mum has, quite bravely, entrusted me with another mug of coffee, so there I will leave things so I can devote all my attention to keeping the mug upright and with its contents on the inside. Wish me luck – I think I’ll need it.

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1. Gardening Express, which has lots of plants for £1 each, and I may have got just a little carried away. There’s going to be a lot of planting in my near future. ↩︎