Chicken en croute with green beans and rainbow chard in garlic butter

A few people have commented that I’m a saint for coping with my mum. To reassure you (and me) that I’m not a saint, but a perfectly normal human, this morning I lost my patience with mum.

I won’t repeat the entire conversation, but suffice to say that mum had already woken me up three times when she went into her “my stomach hurts, my back hurts, I don’t know what I did to deserve this, I don’t know what to do, my stomach hurts” routine, in the ‘little old lady’ voice that she uses when she wants sympathy. (I don’t think she does it deliberately, but she only does it when she’s in self-pity mode, and I hate it.)

We went round and round what felt like a hundred times but was probably only half a dozen, with mum refusing to do any of the things we had agreed yesterday evening that she would do to help manage her anxiety. (“I’ve tried that but my stomach hurts and my back hurts, and I don’t know what to do.”)

By this time I’d had enough, and just stopped responding. Mum said something about me throwing her away, I said something (with perhaps just a touch of sarcasm) about putting her out with the bins.

There was silence for a few moments before mum stormed out to get the bird food and take it out to refill the feeders, her progress trackable by the sound of slamming doors.

After a while she came back inside. She apologised, I apologised, and we were having a serious conversation when I glanced out of the window and said “ooh, is that a buzzard? No, it’s an eagle, look at the shape of the wings, there’s no way that’s a buzzard…” and so on, because in that moment my birder instincts overrode my sympathetic carer instincts.

Sadly it flew off while I grabbed my phone to take a photo, but here’s a blue tit that came on one of the feeders while mum and I were sitting in the garden a while later:

I spent most of the rest of the day sitting on my bed playing games on my phone while mum sat in the living room playing games on her kindle, and all was peaceful. And if you think I’ve had half an eye on the sky in hopes the eagle will return and let me take a photo, you’d be entirely right.

For dinner I cooked some chicken en croutes from Tesco, and to accompany it I stirfried some rainbow chard, a vegetable my dad used to grow in such abundance we would have it for nearly every meal in late summer. For me it has nostalgia value to amplify the fun of eating candy-coloured veg.

I had somehow forgotten that leafy veg shrinks to nearly nothing when cooked, and had to bulk it out with some frozen green beans. Then I added garlic and butter, which both make nearly anything better¹. I thought it was all delicious. Mum said the veg needed to be cooked more, but ate it all so it can’t have been that bad.

So that’s another day done. Tomorrow we’re going out for lunch with mum’s best friend: mum has said repeatedly that she may be too ill to go, and I’ve told her I’m going whether or not she comes with me, so we will have to see if that works to persuade her to come. Because only a saint would be above a little manipulation🤭

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1. Except ice cream. I have tried garlic ice cream at the annual Isle of Wight Garlic Festival, and there’s a reason it’s not in every supermarket’s freezer section. ↩︎