Motherload

I am seeing a herbalist occasionally at the moment, who is not remotely sympathetic about my 'issues' with food, which I find HUGELY challenging. When she asked, on my latest visit, what I had been eating and serving the kids, I found myself going blank and feeling rebellious, sulky, and cross. Even though I actually plan menus. On paper. She has a direct and unemotional manner. She doesn't do sympathy, she does diagnosis and treatment. It seems that I wish to be treated with kid gloves, as though I might shatter if she uses the H-word (that's H for healthy). Part of me doesn't want to go back to see her EVER AGAIN. Mean, horrible lady, who won't pander to my whims, won't be nice to me for being such a hero as to Address My Problems. Another part of me thinks (knows) she's doing me a favour. She's assuming I am fully functional – an adult, forsooth! – and that I'm ready to hear good advice. In fact, her assumption, oddly, is that, since I...

I had a wonderful coffee this morning with a friend. She told me a great Motherload story, and I wanted to share it. Before Easter she wound up a teaching job, and then went straight into the Easter holidays. On the first day after the holidays, her three children went back to school, and she was free for the first time. She decided to go for a run. She thought, "I'll just take the dry cleaning with me, and I can do my warmup walk, then go on and do my run". It didn't work out that way. She did drop off the cleaning, then set off to run. But she didn't finish it. All the time, her mind was skittering from task to unfinished task. She didn't enjoy her run, and she felt dissatisfied at the end of it. She hadn't achieved it — completed it, finished it, won it, done it. She was laughing at herself over coffee, but at the same time, she was angry with herself. "I should have laid down firmer boundaries," she scolded herself. "When I was ...