Shame shame.

About a week ago I fell over.

I was walking with my family down the sloped driveway of our apartment complex wearing sandals that have exactly no grip on the soles of them. In an unrelated and fairly uninteresting tangent - I bought them while living overseas and my good sandals broke. I just haven't gotten around to buying good ones again.

Our driveway is made of flesh tearing concrete with tiny pebbles pressed into it... the kind that is uncomfortable to walk on. Do you know the kind I mean?

So my sandals were unsurprisingly crap and betrayed me, one foot slid out ahead of me down the hill and the other collapsed and I smashed my knee and the top of my ankle into the driveway which took some skin and Ellie-meat as a souvenir.

The husband let go of the pram to help me up, which went drifting down the hill along with the four month old Samurai. It was dramatic. (You had to be there I'm sure)

I hobbled back to the house and cleaned up and we went out again without any more issues, but the whole thing was actually fairly embarrassing.

Which got me thinking.
Some things are just WAY more embarrassing when you're an adult. (Most of them are bodily function type things.) Here are some of the things that are more embarrassing (for me) as an adult:

1. Falling over. I'm a touch over 6 foot tall and it's like felling a smallish tree when I fall over. Highly ungraceful.

2. Not knowing how to drive. Not driving as a child - legal and acceptable. Not driving as an adult? Lame. I don't, and the older I get the more awkward it is when people ask me about it. Working on it!

3. Getting words wrong. I remember for a long  time I thought that my Opa was fighting gorillas when he was in the army. Stories of him punching cows (he was a farmer and this only happened to the most ornery bovine) made this seem even more logical to me. Turns out they were guerrillas. Another time I was reading a book and asked my mum what brassieres were. Bra's she said, and what kind of book was I reading?? I read the sentence and they were actually braziers - which made a lot more sense. I now look up any words that I don't recognise in text, my spelling is still atrocious, but my vocabulary is much better.

4. Not knowing my times tables. Along with telling the time on analogue clocks, I just never really clicked with times tables as a kid. I have since mastered telling the time (phew) but I still sometimes have to sing the times tables songs to remember them. Thankfully phones have calculators.

5. Calling people the wrong name. Most people have called their teacher 'Mum' at some point - admit it. I called Ronin by his brother's name for a full month after he was born. I only have two children - there really isn't much chance that I'm actually confusing them, my brain is just turning into mush.

6. Sanitary Pad failures. Been dealing with the whole 'being a lady' since I was 12 - getting it wrong is still mortifying.

What things embarrass you as a 'grown up' ?

Cake for brekkie

This week has been about building a base of illustrations that I can turn into prints and postcards for the etsy store.

So keep your eye out of these folks - coming soon to the etsy shop.

You love gifs, don't deny it.

A while ago, on a previous blog, I mentioned that I have bipolar disorder.

After a long time of thinking it was totes normal to hate on myself (for any reason possible) and draw emo things, it was a revelation to know that actually it's totally uncool and I shouldn't do it.

While it still sometimes sucks ( a little or a lot) most of the time my attitude about being bipolar is kind of like...

... you know. Whatevs - It's how I roll. 

This post isn't actually about being bipolar, it's about when I had kids, and about art, and about fears, and whatever else.

When I had the Angel I was terrified that I would get post natal depression, and when I instead got a placid baby who I liked pretty much straight away I was pretty pleased. Two years later when the Samurai showed up, I wasn't worried. I was going to have a baby, take a few days off and get back to art and looking after the Angel and studying medical terms and all sorts of 'not related to baby' type things.

I left the hospital the same day that he was born feeling all tough and womanly about my staunch reaction to child birth.

And then I got home and went to bed and fell into what I would deem to be a self inflicted depression.
I wasn't connected to this squishy little guy, I never managed to get everything done in the day that I wanted to do, he was always (always) hungry and feeding him was a painful trial...
I felt guilty for saying anything about it, and just stared at his little face hoping for some kind of revelation - before going to make dinner, or clean something, or sit on the computer, or do something else that would take me away from him.

Dummy.

I was distraught that he wasn't like the Angel, that I didn't love him the same, that I couldn't 'figure him out.'

Then I realised that I didn't know him. He was just new and hadn't been around for the two years I'd had his brother.
I slowed down, spent more time with him. Realised that he whinges because he LOVES being around people and chatting and laughing and staring into peoples faces. After the first few weeks he even started sleeping through the night (um way to become the favourite - jks!!)
He's awesome, and super cute and totally different to his brother which is fantastic. I love his guts.

The moral of the whole story, or perhaps a moral of this story is that while I may be able to shrug about how I deal with my mood swings and bipolarity, and while I know that I don't need to hate myself, I can still draw emo drawings.

Shunning sadness and irrational desires to cry has meant that I put away a lot of the things that I did at that time to cope for things that actually worked.

For example.

Listening to sad music while sad - not helpful
Complaining to equally depressed friends while depressed - not helpful
Cutting off all my hair and/or dying it yet another colour - not helpful
More earings? - NOT HELPFUL
Watching world movies - not helpful

See?

So while I still love Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I'm hardly going to rely on it to help me manage my emotions. Rather I'll go for a run or better yet, call my husband for a whinge and then go have a sleep.

I stopped drawing my emotions around the same time that I was diagnosed, and I shouldn't have. Drawing allowed me to constructively express myself without wearing down my loved ones with constant complaining.

So this is what I did today.

Because sometimes I need reminders of things. I will always know that I love my son, but the story of how I figured that out contained important lessons for me, and those I might forget.