self care – Page 3 – Mimi's Thoughts

Am I abusing my strength?

Sometimes my strength annoys me. Especially today. Today, I’m very upset with my strength. I have had a very very busy week… so, today being a Saturday, I slept in till 8:30am and I woke up with the words; “today I’m not lifting a finger”. To that declaration, my husband said; “You need it babe, you rarely rest at all”.

So there I was, propped up in the living room because both my son and his dad were out of the house for a morning game of soccer. If you are a woman in my situation, you would know how valuable this is…having the men in your home out of the house 😁😁😁😁😁. I selected the right movie for the occasion, a cheesy romcom… nothing too serious to stress me. They hadn’t been gone 30 minutes when I got a call from someone I had been expecting to call with a job opportunity. His call said it was urgent and I had to meet up with him immediately. I did. Next thing I know, I am prepping for a job that will last atleast one week. I got home at 6:45pm. I was tired. The reasonable thing would have been to kick my feet up and sleep. Well, I didn’t.

I am writing this at 11:01pm. I’ve done a load of laundry, I’ve straightened the house and I have made dinner. I selected the movie ‘savannah’ and I was about to watch it when I realised I was being insane. I should be asleep, resting. Why and how I could still be up and about after the day I had was totally wrong. It’s wrong that I don’t let myself rest. My strength should not be abused. I’m here hoping I take my advice.

Grief

When I was growing up, my family took many trips to my mother’s village home. We took these trips to go and lay some very close people to rest. My maternal family has lost so many people. If I were to make a list, we would have over 20 people on it, each death hitting harder than the last. We would cry, lay to rest and try to get on.

I never gave grief much thought till I lost a friend and then a cousin in the span of 1 month. Grief is hard. Grief is depressing. Grief is many things. One thing I know for sure is; grief is felt and expressed differently.

While I was trying to recover from the numbness of losing my friend, death hit my maternal family again. We lost our spice (story for another day). I watched everyone closely and realised everyone was grieving differently. Some of us spoke about her often with tears in our eyes, some of us remained mute and held back tears, some cried non stop, some refused to say her name or listen to anyone say her name… Everyone was hurting differently. One year after her death, everyone is still grieving… Most of us still don’t want to say her name, some of us think of her with a smile, some of us still cry… Grief never ends. It was on that day of her remembrance I wrote about the sad truth/fact I have come to accept, life goes on.

Things I have learnt in my grieving period:

Grief is normal.
We can’t dictate how a person should grieve.
There is no way around grief. You have to go through it to get out of it.
Grief will last as long as it wants to, you can’t force it to stop.
It is not predictable. It comes and it goes. Hits you at unexpected moments.
There is No shame in grieving.

I used to cry while listening to Drowning by Chris Young but now I even smile sometimes… Grief gets easier, it just rarely ends.

Rest

Rest can be productive

I belong to a closed motivational group of eight members; today, being the first day of the year, I asked if we had any goals I could key into. One of us said she planned to get pregnant, one said she planned to make more money and lose weight and another said she wanted to rest this year. Her exact words were; “I have stressed myself so much in the last 3 years, I just want to rest now”. I know a number of people who may say that isn’t productive. They could come up with reasons why rest can slow you down. I can take a wild guess and say that even she who plans to rest this year may have thought it a bad idea a couple of years ago. At that time, she may have need the stress to get her going, today she needs to rest to get her going. Life changes and we need to take decisions as it does.

Rest is when you cease to work or move in order to relax or sleep or recover your strength. So I believe the period of time needed for rest depends on how long it takes for you to recover your strength. Physical strength takes a shorter time to muster but when it comes to mental health, I believe one can and should take as long as they need.

Only this evening I was telling my husband how yesterday I was too tired to continue a daily online fitness class I had enrolled in online. After I had spent almost one hour talking myself into logging in, I finally did. I clicked on ‘Day 5’ and the words “REST DAY, Your body and muscles need to get some rest” popped on the screen. My jaw dropped in shock. Apparently, they have studied the program and they know that the average human would need to rest by day 5. I rested. Today, day 6, I faced it without any tiredness or reluctance.

It’s the first day of January in the year 2022. If you worked (physical or mental) hard in the previous year(s) and feel tired and you feel the need to take a rest, please do. The rest may be productive.

I plan to do a follow up on this about the importance of rest but in the meantime I will conclude with the words of Alan Cohen “there is virtue in work and there is virtue in rest. Use both and over look neither”.

What cheers you up?

I may be having the worst day but when I eat a well cooked plate of beans, I feel better. For some people it’s ice cream, for others it’s alcohol, for some, chocolate etc. Everyone has that thing that does it for them.

In October 2017 I found myself in a very frustrating situation. I had just started a low carb diet and I realised beans had lots of carbohydrates. Growing up we were told to eat beans for protein. Yes. Beans has more protein than rice does and then it goes ahead to load up on carbohydrates too. No, I kid you not. For every 100g of beans you consume, you would be consuming 63g of carbohydrates and 21g protein.

I really love beans. I remember a long time ago, maybe 20 years ago or so. My cousin came back home from school. He had travelled over 500 kilometres. He arrived very late at night. There were no mobile phones then so he couldn’t tell us he would be arriving and so we didn’t make any meal ready for him. He was someone I could do anything for, I loved him very much and we were very close… I still do even though we aren’t so close anymore. When I realised by morning time that he had helped himself to my pot of beans, I cried, literally. I always had beans cooked and stored. He didn’t understand why I was reacting that way. He didn’t even believe i was upset. He only laughed. Yes, Imoter will laugh at you in your most serious moments and he’d get away with it, he’s adorable.

Back to the present, I’m 38 years old, I’m watching my weight and I need to be careful how many carbs I take in because my body has a love hate relationship with carbohydrates. Suddenly I find my self on a mission to find something besides beans that gives me joy. Something that isn’t bad for my body so that I can alternate with my beloved beans. I wonder what that is. Although I must confess, beans is the only high carb meal I cheat with and I don’t feel guilty.

I wish myself luck on my mission to find a replacement joy giver. For now, it’s still beans.

Sunday vibes

My son and I have a routine. Every Sunday, after church we go to Katsina-Ala Street to buy stuff we may need for the week from Ifeanyi. We started this a few years ago and it became a normal thing. Even on some Sundays when we skip service for one reason or the other, we would always drive out later to Ifeanyi’s shop on Katsina-Ala Street to do the usual.

Most people usually stock up on snacks for their kids for months but my son isn’t a one brand guy. He may want caprisone this week and next week it will be Fanta, the next week it could be sprite. That’s where the weekly stocking up came from. I’ve grown to enjoy the Sunday trips, SonTer has too. However, today I went alone and I went very early. SonTer decided to stay home with his daddy because it’s Father’s day and also because I wasn’t going back home after the restocking trip. My mother in-law needed to prepare some food for some guests so I was going to stop over for a few hours and give her a helping hand.

Like I said, I went to Katsina-Ala Street too early. Ifeanyi’s shop was locked but his neighbour across the road was open. His neighbour is someone I used to shop with, a long time ago… I stopped shopping there because Ifeanyi attends to me from my vehicle but with the guy across, I would have to go into the shop. This was not convenient for me from the moment I had a baby. The stress of removing the baby from the car seat and putting him back was one I wasn’t ready to deal with all the time. Today, that baby is a big boy, he turned 8 yesterday, but I’m used to Ifeanyi’s services, but Ifeanyi wasn’t here yet. So I got out of the car and walked across the road to his neighbour’s shop.

Ifeanyi’s neighbour is a fat short dude in his 50’s. He’s friendly and likes to chat a lot. Today he asked about my son, he asked how old he was and I told him he had just turned 8 years old the previous day. He marveled at how time flies and asked why I hadn’t had another child. I told him it was because I had not been given one by God. He told me to believe and that God would give. I smiled and thanked him. I bought all I had gone there to buy and just as I was leaving he said “make you try reduce your size too, maybe pikin go come”. On that note I said goodbye. I don’t think I will be shopping with Ifeanyi’s neighbour anymore. I don’t take comments on my weight lightly. Especially when I have just made remarkable progress in weight loss.

As I walked to my car. I saw Ifeanyi opening his shop. I noted the time. Now I know when he opens on Sundays.

Drink some air

My mum is one of the people who know how to actually care for themselves. Most of the people in the world, myself included, often neglect the fact that we have to care for ourselves. We often see the lack of things like money, time, space and a few other things as obstacles and hindrances. If I must be honest, I would say it is a lot easier to care for yourself with a little more money in your pocket and enough time on your hands, but my mum never let the lack of these things stop her. I never gave it much thought until yesterday. I gave it a lot of thought.

Some of her self care didn’t even require much. She had very simple activities that didn’t make any sense to me, but now, oh now I see. One particular activity she called ‘Ma ahumbe’, meaning ‘take some fresh air’ but translates directly as ‘drink air’. I liked this activity. I don’t know if it was always pre-planned or if it was usually spur of the moment but she would usually just say “se za ma nen ahumbe” which means “let us go and get some fresh air”. My memory is not so clear on the ‘us’ but one person I know was always there with me is my immediate elder sister, we would get into the back seat of my mum’s Honda prelude and we would drive all around our town, for no reason at all. The fun part for us was how my mum would open the small rectangle on the roof of the car and let us put our hands through and feel the air. I didn’t know why she did it then but it was fun for me.

Yesterday I couldn’t leave my bed, I was resting because my body was not happy about the stress I had put it through at work for two straight days. My husband was out of town so it was just me and my son, SonTer. I stayed in bed from morning when I woke until about 4pm. I finished a novel I was reading and watched 2 cheesy romance movies. I was tired of resting, sadly but honestly, I don’t know how to rest… I am still coaching myself. I wanted to take a walk, but my body wasn’t up to it. I just lay there and let my mind wander around and tried to figure out what to do and then i decided to go for a drive, so I said to Son “se za ma ahumbe”. He had no idea what I said but he loves to go out and before I could get ready, he was at the door. We drove round the town, for one hour, for no reason.

I am 38 years old I was doing this for the first time and all I can say is, it was totally refreshing. I made sure the music wasn’t as loud as we usually play it so that we could talk. I pointed out things and explained things just like my mum used to. It was totally therapeutic. I felt like I hit a reset button. What made it much more beautiful was when SonTer said “mummy, thank you for doing this”.

I’m going over today to tell my mum “Thank you mummy for doing it for me”.