Sweet chilli veg stirfry and noodles

Trigger warning: mental health, suicide, suicidal ideation. Plus some more fun stuff, I promise!

Today has been a bit of a trying day. As anyone in the south of England will know, it’s been pretty warm today. Usually I cope well with the heat, but with chronic pain now thrown into the mix I have been, I confess, more irritable than usual.

Mum has also been struggling: she keeps saying “it’s just so hot“, as if it’s being so to spite her particularly. She has been suffering particularly with her back, complaining repeatedly about how painful it is, but refusing to even consider allowing me to take up the MSK practitioner’s offer to refer her for physiotherapy.

The fourth or fifth time we had this conversation (not because she’d forgotten, but because I think she hoped I would have a different solution), she made one of her favourite ‘jokes’: “maybe just shoot me”, with accompanying gun-to-head hand gesture.

We have an unfortunate history of serious mental health issues in our family: my sister attempted suicide several times, I have come close on occasion, mum’s favourite uncle suffered serious depression, one of her great uncles killed himself… You get the idea.

So for mum to joke about it, and in a tone that indicates that it isn’t really a joke at all, is both in poor taste and personally upsetting. I have been making non-committal “hmm” noises in response, but today I opted for what is, by my family’s standards of people-pleasing and passive-aggression, the nuclear option: I said “I find it very upsetting when you say that, so could you not, please?”

Mum was very apologetic, said she didn’t realise it might be upsetting, promised that she wouldn’t say it again, and gave me a hug.

I’m glad my bold play worked, but I will from now on be sticking to my familiar, tried-and-often-failed pattern of people-pleasing, because I’ve been too well trained from childhood to seriously consider anything else.

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And so to dinner, the preparation of which was accompanied by a large dose of maternal pass-agg in noting that it was such a shame that one of the plants I had bought was going to die because I wasn’t able to plant it today, poor thing.

[After dinner I forced myself to go out and plant it, despite being critically low on spoons, and mum felt so guilty that she insisted on carrying the new bag of compost outside for me. Which of course made her back hurt more, so there were no winners in that scenario. Except for the plant, which hopefully will be better off in its new, much bigger pot.]

Mum thoroughly enjoyed the very simple dinner I cooked, which was just supermarket own-brand noodles cooked and mixed with a splash of sesame oil to stop them sticking together, plus some chilled ready-prepared veg stirfried in vegetable oil with some bottled sweet chilli and garlic sauce added at the end.

Now it’s tennis and trying to resist the urge to eat some ice cream as I know it will only upset my stomach, until mum decides she’s had enough and it’s time to retreat to our respective bedrooms where mum has to shout to talk to me rather than just having a normal conversation sitting side by side in the living room. 🙄

Sorry, told you I’m irritable today!