Mother's Medicine

When I was young there was no room for being sick, no time in my busy life for a cold, for a day in front of the TV watching movies and eating ice-cream under my duvet. Whenever I approached the breakfast table looking like a used crash test dummy, and complaining of an ailment, my mother would suggest that I take a tablet, “Take a Solpadeine, it will make you feel a lot better.” So I would sit drinking my hot Ribena and swallow two Solpadeine before going to school, and for all my resentment that my mother would never let me just have a day off school, she was right… I did feel better.

The past week or so has not been easy. Work has been a total upheaval of reorganising duties and responsibilities, getting used to new bosses, and making sure that nothing got missed in the process. Then there is my own personal upheaval, the one where I am resurrecting the Little Miss Boo to full working order, dusting off the skinny jeans and making myself the image of the woman I feel. It is not easy when everything in life is not running smoothly to battle it out on all fronts. I feel that just as I am getting my workout routine in check, I am invited to a hundred work events, that I have to go to, but which totally disrupt my routine.

Then there is being a woman. In general I try not to be one. Not that I don’t love being a woman, and not that I am not feminine… I am. I try not to be too much of a woman in terms of being overemotional, over analytical and reading way too much into every situation. Clearly no-one is perfect, so it is somewhat unrealistic of me to expect that I can be the perfect juxtaposition of male and female in one body, but nevertheless I like to think that I am not the average girl…

…And then once every two months (because as I said I am not the average girl) all the emotions I put away in the ‘women only’ closet in my brain come gushing out in a wave of hormones, tirades of self pity, awash with salty tears and the inability to stop myself from drowning in my own self-despair. It is exhausting, especially as I know that non of it is me, the rational me. None of the words that are coming out of my mouth are coming from my heart, my heart which is part male and part female, but are coming direct from this strictly pheromonal place that I cannot control! I try to control myself, I should really just put the phone down, switch it off, close myself away in my apartment with a giant X on the door stating “Stay Away for at least 4 days!”, but I don’t because the stupid man in me thinks he can control the beast, and all men should know that they can never control the woman… not since we threw away the chastity belts and burnt our bras anyway…

My mother calls me and the tears will not stop flowing. I think sometimes my mother reacts to me crying the same way that I react to her being sick… with utter shock. In the case of my mother, it is because while the entire household would be suffering a stomach bug or a flu virus, my mother would always be fit as a fiddle and running around taking care of the sick. In the case of my tears, there is only one thing that makes me cry to my mother, and that has always been my father (well we have always had a nasty way of winding each other up!). So here I am on the phone crying for no reason other than, “I have no idea why I cannot stop crying,” when my mother in despair reverts back in time to when she would send me snivelling to school with a dose of ‘mother’s medicine’ inside of me:

Mum: Darling I think you need to take some Magnesium tablets… that will make you feel better

At this I laugh for the first time in 2 days

Me: Oh no Mum, no pill can make me feel better… Only I can do that!
Mum: I am worried about you darling, you are not yourself.
Me: No you are right… I am just getting so much better!


It is a teething period that makes my emotions rock solid stable one moment and the next teetering on the edge of the tight rope, but one thing I know is that I will never fall off, because I have the male and the female to balance me out…. Until I get to the other side.


Meanwhile apologies to all those of you who were on the sore end of my sour mood… I swear you are all safe for at least the next two months… And thanks to those who saw through it all enough to still want to hang out with me… I love you all!