satay omelette noodles

Here’s my favourite lunch, fortunately it’s extremely easy, but does not make a good work lunch because you need a stove.

Take 2 eggs, some milk and whatever veges you like and make a small omelette, cut into small squares. Then make 1 packet of 2 minute noodles (Indonesian satay variety with chilli) and chuck it all into a bowl. Add some chopped mushrooms if you have time.

Yum yum. A kiddie or husband friendly version can be made with the less chilli variety of noodles.

Cabramatta

I was lucky enough to have lunch in Cabramatta today, this is the great thing about working in Liverpool, Sydney. It’s like having a mini overseas trip to Asia, complete with extremely hot weather and food of dubious hygiene. I don’t know why we spend so much time, money and carbon gases to go overseas when a trip here is just the same.

It’s a colourful, noisy, dirty place and what I like is just the complete unexpectedness of what one might find in the shops. The public toilets are well signposted and well barred complete with sharp disposal boxes and signs that say “injecting drugs is illegal”, pointing to a darker side of Cabramatta. There are many fruits I have not seen before or can’t recognise. White Anglo people are a minority and as a half-ethnic generic looking dark haired person I even feel strange starting conversations in English.

By the time I arrive I am starving and can’t decide where to eat. I choose a “combination” white fluffy bun thingy but soon wish I had opted for the BBQ pork variety. After discovering a boiled egg and an unidentified piece of entrail I feel less enthusiastic about the eating side of the adventure. There are the customary red BBQ duck carcasses hanging in windows, and ridiculously cheap butcher shops with huge slabs of meat.

Banks and real estate agents have signs written in Asian letters. There are many jewellery, clothing, shoe and fabric shops but I don’t have time to fossick around for long enough to choose clothes or shoes. I suspect there is gold to be found here. I could find a tailor and buy fabrics, I could stock up on baby clothes and fancy little girls dresses for presents.

I buy mango stin and lychee for husband who loves this stuff, chillis for me. Couples are everywhere, I see one Vietnamese couple carrying a crates of mangos and arguing, another giggling together infectiously. I see an elderly white gay couple and several white men with Asian wives.

I will have lunch here more often.

cars and other symbols

To continue on my current holier-than-thou theme I am now going to slag off the entire medical profession, so apologise in advance to anyone medical who owns a luxury car who might be reading this (especially if you know me personally)

My weekly act of smugness is to drive my 12 year old Honda Civic into the private medical centre carpark, and park it between a couple of brand new BMW’s. I usually rejoice quietly to myself about my lack of enslavement to the silly materialist trappings of everyone around me – and I have been known to take photos.

Mostly I run into friends with high-paying professions who have accumulated all the right status symbols and I smile indulgently at their stressful existence. I think “thank God I don’t have to work my b**t off to aquire an expensive piece of metal and then pay ridiculous amounts of insurance to watch the thing depreciate at an alarming rate”. The same goes for mortgages or ridiculously overpriced renovations in expensive suburbs, or highly inflated school fees.

I also feel that it is somehow my mission in life to have a positive influence on people and remind them that the world doesn’t fall apart if we don’t live in the “top” suburb of the most expensive city or have the right designer clothes. I cheerily discuss my latest ebay purchases or the delights of Vinnies shopping to perplexed and slightly alarmed colleagues.

This all gives me a bit of fun, really. But every once in a while I will have to admit a moment of uncertainty. I might run into someone I haven’t seen for a few years who is just purchasing a huge home in the expensive suburb. I realise that we probably couldn’t do that if we tried, having been out of the high earning stakes for a few years. They have a new degree or are enrolling their kids in something I have not thought was necessary. And I wonder – what have I been doing all this time?

These moments don’t last long. Being on a spiritual path and rejecting the material has glorious abundant rewards which are truly unspeakable, and every day I am joyful and thankful. But these rewards are intangible and cannot easily be trotted out for inspection. Materialistic success produces recognisable outcomes, solid physical objects of possession that can be pulled out and flaunted at a dinner party to boost self-esteem and compare favourably.

This is not to say that I don’t have a lot of materialistic resources. I have been blessed excessively in that area, and don’t know how lucky I am. But within the culture of the medical profession the standards are impossibly high and frankly silly. People blindly accept the need for these kinds of acquisitions, I virtually know no specialist who drives an ordinary car or lives in an average suburb. I wonder why they can’t see through the capitalist system. Haven’t they read “Affluenza” or Status Anxiety? And as for psychiatrists, don’t they know the happiness research? Hasn’t it been fairly much proved (see Seligman) that money past a certain level really has no connection with happiness.

It’s an automatic rite of passage as a consultant that you buy a luxury (European) car, start dressing to appropriate standard and the status home and the status schools are unquestioned. People who don’t do these things are regarded with suspicion, almost as irresponsible or perhaps they just have not grown up yet. It’s about being recognised as superior to others and having achieved well.

This is simply the all-pervasive consumer capitalism of this age infiltrating the ethical values of medicos, but to me this is sad. People do work hard, but not for the benefit of anyone else, and make their own existence miserable in the process. They are people who otherwise might be comfortable financially but relaxed, and free to make decisions on the basis of some other values besides money. A doctor who chose to have a less expensive life might be free to spend time with their families and pursue creative hobbies or research, and offer inexpensive services to patients who really need it.

There is much more to be said about this topic. I seem to remember in the history of medicine it hasn’t always been this way.

today’s sermon: giving

This blog is getting very preachy, so why stop now?

This is my very own sermon about “giving”. You know, like those encouraging speeches that are given prior to passing around the collection plate (or credit card form) in the mega-churches. Here is my version of the giving speech.

First Bible verse:

“Give to anyone who asks, and if they take what belongs to you, do not demand it back” – Luke 6:30. This leads into the universal golden rule “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” This suggests that giving should follow a request rather than just occur in a willy nilly fashion, making it somehow easier to decide who or when to give something.

Things we can give to others:

- time

- money

- praise

- care

- energy

- possessions

- hospitality

The list is probably endless, think of anything you have ever been given or given to someone else.

Next Bible verse:

“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” – Luke 12: 48

Then put the two things together. Think of something you have been blessed with or given abundantly in your life. Maybe you are someone who has been loved extravagantly, or received a lot of praise for something, or you are just filthy rich. You might have been cared for through a long illness, or someone has just given you all their baby clothes. Anything.

The point is, maybe the thing you have been given, you are also expected to give to others. Hand it on down the chain, that sort of thing.

Whatever you are rich in, maybe it’s praise and accolades, maybe it’s love, money, caring or even time. Find someone who has less than you have – and give them that.

benefits of earlier parenting

As someone who had kids fairly late in life, I have had the advantage of more stability in many ways (social, mental and financial!) which hopefully has given my kids some benefit as I’m more mature as a mother than I would have been 10 years earlier. I observe this trend of later motherhood and for many people like me it turns out fine in the end, but not for all. However, there is a part of me that believes this is not the natural or most ideal state of affairs, that maybe humans as a species are actually designed in many different ways to reproduce earlier. Here’s why.

The biological side is obvious, there is the obvious problem with declining fertility in males and females. All the infertility experts urge us to start earlier. There is a greater risk of pregnancy complications, birth defects, miscarriage, just about any problem. Older mothers have less energy to stay up all night and run around after the little ones.

What about the psychological or emotional side? I’m really only referring to Western society here, and I am still considering this theory so it’s a work in progress, bear with me. Younger adults or adolescents have different brains, which become “adult” in structure only at around 25. Young people are highly social and connected, concerned with forming their identity. Sometimes they  are more impulsive, flexible, risk-takers with a lack of empathy and a sense of invincibility. They are also highly social. All this is now confirmed with brain research that shows our brain connections are not fully established until the mid-20s.

If child-rearing was to occur in the teens or early 20’s , psychologically parents would be more flexible, able to cope with chaotic baby behaviour without too much need to impose an artificial routine. The highly social nature of teenagers is also adaptive because a social environment is necessary or extremely preferable for children. The effect of having a baby is (for most people) to increase empathy or the ability to put another’s needs before your own. So I think the benefit of early parenting (for the parent) would be actually to help emotional development, at a critical time of development, onto a more productive and cooperative path. We know from psychology that cooperativeness is a great character strength which leads to positive health outcomes (There are other parts of this theory that don’t work like impulsivity & invincibility, so I am working on those)

Socially, having children earlier would have benefits for the extended family. Grandparents would be younger, and could therefore support parents more, rather than having children when one’s own parents are very old and may require care themselves. Having children earlier would mean that they were able to help the parents to care for their own grandparents in old age.

I would see all this as having a benefit for babies in terms of attachment. A more highly supported social network for the mother may lead to a secure baby. Of course a theory like this can’t be universal and I guess there are down sides to this as well.

Why is parenting delayed? These days, largely because of financial expectations we expect to establish careers and do a lot of intellectual work (at least in the West) in our teens and 20s – to get into a reasonable financial position before we have the children. However this kind of career focus requires the maturity of a more adult brain, and in some ways it would be better to wait until over 25 when we may have more capacity for self-knowledge to choose an appropriate career path, wisdom to make responsible decisions for society and the persistence or discipline required for a complex workplace.

The other reason is relationships. People in their 20s now have the cultural expectation of transient relationships, often based on pleasure and self gratification, multiple relationships in order to find the best fit “try before you buy” without expectation of commitment or care of the other. We also expect to have “fun” and leisure before settling down to the “hard slog” of parenting, but I’ll get to that later. I think there is some evidence that this approach to relationships might be damaging. We know that broken relationships can be a grief event, and some of the most traumatic experiences from a psychological, mental health point of view – leading to depression, suicide and insecurity. By practicing serial monogomy or low-commitment and low-care relationships we are actually un-learning the art of real relationship by practising uncaring behaviours. This is actually bad for us in the long run, and sometimes it takes a long time to catch up and heal from the wounds of multiple relationship losses.

Anyway, that’s about all for this theory for today – as I said it’s a work in progress and so it could probably use some references, but this blog is just about ideas, not necessarily references!

Adios for today.

ten interesting websites

It’s pretty hard to keep up the blogging post month whatever thing. Running out of inspiration fast, so today’s post will be dedicated to other people’s ideas! Here are ten interesting blogs & websites, in no particular order.

1. Vintage November. Amanda’s gorgeous site with a lovely dress each day for the month. I feel privileged to actually know Amanda in person.

2. Doctor woman. Another mother / woman / doctor / Christian blog. Thoughtful writing and someone I can relate to a lot.

3. Charlotte’s web. My old favourite from the old blogging days (2006-7) good to see Charlotte is still going strong.

4. Creative nonfiction. This is a journal website and also a facebook group, accepts submissions for essays. Here is the definition of creative nonfiction:

“The word “creative” refers simply to the use of literary craft in presenting nonfiction—that is, factually accurate prose about real people and events—in a compelling, vivid manner. To put it another way, creative nonfiction writers do not make things up; they make ideas and information that already exist more interesting and, often, more accessible.”

5. CiteULike. A useful site for storing journal references or creating a library of bookmarks for just about anything.

6. Karaoke Sydney. I like this site because it has a lot of detail about where you can go in Sydney to sing Karaoke. It contains a map for several different days of the week, as well as reviews on some of the venues.

7. Po Bronson. This man wrote possibly the most interesting book of biographical case histories I have ever read, called “What Should I Do With My Life” and has subsequently written other very interesting books including one on parenting.

8. Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. A link to book review of this famous book by the man with a very long name. I really wish I had found, bought and read this book by now (along with the other 137 books which are sitting on my bedside table bookshelves or in fact still in the shop waiting to be read by me) but reading this review I almost don’t have to read the book.

9. Journey Mama. Someone else who is trying to do a BloPoMo (why do we do this again?) and has an interesting life.

10. Last but not least, godless monkey. Who knows what this blog is about, I found it at the “alpha inventions” blog randomiser and I just like the name.

That’s it for today – what a struggle!

 

insomnia

4.53 am. Have been awake since 3am.

Today launching a new form of post: the “insomnia” post. This is a censored stream of consciousness post, with origins relating to the “morning pages” concept from the famous Artist’s Way course. Anyone also struggling with insomnia is free to comment here.

The insomnia post can only be written under conditions of extreme sleep deprivation. Generally just write any thought that comes into consciousness, but in contrast to morning pages, editing is allowed.

Why blog? That’s a good question for today, lack of sleep produces thought disorder which means it’s incredibly hard to stay on one topic, hopefully adding some of spice to the post. My blog is a kind of net to catch the random thoughts for the day, rather than drive myself crazy with an endless stream of ideas for writing topics, which has been happening for years. I blog to get myself writing, as a kind of kick-start for something. What?

My daughter sings in the room next door, she’s been doing that for about an hour now. Strange things happen on insomnia nights, children move around and beds break. My hoodie has lost it’s zipper.

I guess we also blog because we want someone else to read our thoughts, otherwise we could just write a journal. I do like visitors (watching the stats) – but then again I don’t – why would anyone want to read this tripe? I like the blogging community of writers who have never met but leave nice comments on each other’s musings. Now that I have a link from my facebook page, someone I actually know may read this – which is much scarier than complete strangers. I’m still unsure about the facebook linkup.

The other question about blogging is does it benefit anyone else? obviously in my case the main beneficiaries are people who dream about tsunamis and people who are afraid of death. There are a lot of those in the world, I have disocovered. The reason those posts have been beneficial is that people have commented about their own experience. So maybe in future I will write more discussion posts.

Does a blog need a theme? Mine is eclectic because my brain is very random. Blog statistics are interesting because you can find out exactly how many people have visited your blog, which posts they viewed and which pages referred them here. When I post every day, traffic to the blog increases, but not necessarily to the recent posts – which I can’t quite figure out.

Sympathetic insomnia is interesting, or tandem insomnia. Sometimes I wake at odd hours, unable to get back to sleep and often I am visited by the small presence of my 3 year old son, who lies next to me for hours wide awake. Now, who is keeping who awake? This doesn’t seem any good for anyone. We may be pretty quiet there, but sometimes my daughter (18 months) also wakes up and she doesn’t have the option of joining us because she is stuck in her cot. So she lies there and sings in solidarity. Recently I have been surprised that it is possible to get on with life with so little sleep. Of course I can’t remember any of it any more…

Maybe one day I will end up like the guy in “Memento” (movie) constantly leaving notes for myself, or the people in the town in 100 Years of Solitude (Marquez) who suffered from an insomnia plague. Gradually everyone’s memories deteriorated to the point where they had to label the furniture to remember its name and use. I have sympathy for that.

Now it’s 5.35 and my son, who insists I rest my feet on his bed while I sit in a chair to work at night, is asleep. My daughter isn’t singing any more, and I haven’t had any coffee. Maybe that’s my chance…

 

global food crisis

And what use is a blog if you cannot promote something important?

I was listening to ABC radio national – my favourite program Life Matters, the other day and an expert was talking about the Global Food Crisis. Here we are, the rich fat cats of the West, moaning about some losses on our share investments! Sure, perhaps the financial crisis is really affecting people in the West but to me it just looks like we are having to survive on a few less pairs of shoes. After all as someone said on the radio, our grandparents used to recycle string – we haven’t reached that level.

Anyway, the point of it is the REAL crisis in the world today is this – and it seems to me this is a greater problem right now than even climate change. The greatest impact of climate change is yet to come and will mainly affect less developed, vulnerable, already poor and starving nations.

So I am trying to inform myself about the global food crisis and thereby get the word out to others also. Herewith a few informative websites.

Compassion says 800 million people are now struggling to find their daily bread. 300 million children are now starving and the global food crisis threatens another 100 million people. Four children die from hunger every 30 seconds. In many developing countries the cost of rice and beans has doubled in the past year. So if you are already starving what does that mean if rice and beans double in price?

Mothers in many nations are facing impossible choices such as between feeding their children and buying medicine for a sick child.

People in the West are dying of excess, while the world starves. We face impossible choices, like what style of take away to buy for dinner. Obesity & cardiac disease, diabetes – the major killers today – are all related to lifestyle and dietary choices. I include myself here as someone who consumes far too much and is overweight.

And this is what the United Nations has to say:

“We consider that the recent dramatic escalation in food prices worldwide has evolved into an unprecedented challenge of global proportions that has become a crisis for the world’s most vulnerable, including the urban poor.”

UN World Food Program

And now I have copied in the explanation from Compassion’s website:

WHAT IS THE GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS

Like a ‘silent tsunami’ the global food crisis has caught the world off-guard and left millions of people struggling to survive.

Throughout almost every region of the developing world people are experiencing localised food insecurity, lack of access to food, or shortfalls in production or supplies. According to the World Bank, in the last three years global food prices have increased overall by 83 per cent. In many developing countries the cost of food staples like rice, wheat and corn has more than doubled in the last 12 months.

One sixth of the world’s population, nearly one billion people, already live on less than $1 day—the common measure of absolute poverty. Of those, 162 million struggle to survive on less than 50 cents a day. Rising food prices have the greatest effect on those people already struggling with food insecurity who spend 60 per cent or more of their income on food. According to the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organisation Jacques Diouf, there are now over 862 million people in the world without adequate access to food.

UPDATE ON THE GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS

Partly due to the global economic downturn, food prices have started to drop slightly after record spikes during 2008. However, it is expected that prices will remain substantially higher than pre-2005 levels and will continue to cause families living in poverty to decrease both the quantity and quality of nutrition. As global economies begin to recover again, pricing pressures—particularly in developing nations—could even accelerate. Any decrease in food prices will most likely take longer to flow through and make a difference to the poor and will be less substantial than those seen in the markets of developed nations. The current macro-economic environment may be therefore be providing some broad temporary relief, but not a permanent reprieve from food price inflation, particularly for the poor.

WHAT CAN WE DO

If you are concerned about this I would recommend

a) Doing some research – become informed

b) Start by donating money to a recognised charity – the major ones would be World Vision, Compassion (Christian) or Oxfam (secular)

c) Talk to your friends, post on facebook, blogs etc – raise awareness

d) Get larger organisations such as churches, workplaces & business involved

e) Lobby the government for greater contribution from Australia

More links:

Here is a photo essay from Time magazine

Just search Google – there are many links available!

gardening theory of parenthood

As a regular and quite recent facebook user I soon discovered “Farmville”. You may know it, the game application where you get a little patch of virtual land. You can then plow the earth, buy seeds, plant them and wait for them to grow. Plants grow, you harvest them and get money, which can be used for exciting things like buildings, lemon trees, cows, pigs or chickens – great fun.

Well, this application had me interested for a few weeks. It was quite nice to plant the seeds then come back in 1-2 days and find fully grown plants. It gave me something to look forward to in the day. After I expanded the farm a bit, got a few animals and nearly towards generating some kind of balanced diet, well it did get a bit boring. I’m quite glad to say.

What happened next though, was quite amazing. I actually went out and bought some real seeds and a seed tray, shoved them in and did the same thing – waited. Surely enough after a few days, things did begin to grow out of the earth. It was incredible. I have to admit to never doing this before in my life. My previous experience of plants was to buy and kill them. Unlike children or animals, plants were just never loud enough or made enough demands for me to pay attention.

So I took the next step and dug out a bit of the garden, mixed in a bit of compost from the neighbours and inserted seedlings in. Watered, even fertilised. Waited… and amazingly enough those little plants continued to grow.

My husband kindly cut logs to delineate a space and now we have it – a real vege garden. With live things, that actually grow. I’m pleased to say I’ve even been remembering to water it. Checking it for new leaves. Could it be that I’ve become a gardener after all.

We’ll see how long it lasts – after all I have had new projects before (joining the gym, mosaics, guitar, saxophone, novel writing) none of which are still happening.

This is all supposed to be leading to the main point, which is my gardening theory of parenthood. Like plants, children naturally grow and flourish and learn and develop when they are given the right conditions. We don’t always know in what direction they will grow, or even what kind of plant they are sometimes. But our job is to wait, watch – provide the earth and the water and the sunshine. Love, food, shelter, protection, nourishment. Allow them to grow. Don’t get in their way and they will bloom in amazing ways.

The gardening approach to parenting is in contrast to the baking / cookie cutter approach. Baker knows what kind of cookie she wants, prepares dough according to recipe, cuts dough to shape and puts in the oven. Gets exactly the cookie she prepared from the recipe.

But a cookie is not alive.

I want to be a gardener parent.

survival instinct and the new mother

Evolutionary psychology is a field of science that looks at human behaviour in terms of evolution. Some of our habitual or instinctive behaviours have developed that way and are encoded in our brains because these behaviours lead to the survival of the species.

These types of behaviours include attraction to the opposite sex  (for reproduction) protection of offspring, seeking food or shelter (nesting) and general response-to-threat behaviours.

I remember a particularly interesting trip with my 3 children to the “Crocodile Farm” in Cairns. On arrival I became nervy and irritable, I wanted to make our trip as short as possible and I got very prepared to fight irrationally and seriously with my husband when he tried to take the children somewhere. Basically I was quite prepared to do whatever it took to remove the threat. But it took a while for me to realise that what i was actually afraid of was the Crocodiles! Because a lot of the time, evolutionary behaviours occur on an unconscious level – they are instant reactions that occur in the “anxiety centre” or brainstem, and bypass the logical thought centres (cortex) of the brain.

So in mental health anxiety is often seen as an evolutionary behaviour. Our nervous systems have evolved a “fight or flight” response to any kind of perceived threat. This involves certain body sensations (increased heart rate, muscle tension etc) which prepare us to literally fight or run – and other responses here might include a “freeze” response which happens in some kinds of anxiety.

Looking at mothers with new babies, all our evolutionary responses are maxed out because we are programmed to protect this new little life. This leads to the “mother bear” syndrome when some of us will go for anyone’s jugular if they seem to be threatening our baby. This includes fathers, when they seem to be putting the baby in danger.

So how does this work for postnatal disorders. We all know about postnatal depression and how common it is. Anxiety symptoms are very common and is intimately connected to depression, so much that some even say they are the same thing.

We have all seen worrying mothers and anxious mothers and fiercely protective mothers. When does this cross the line and become a disorder? Maybe some of our behaviours and body responses were adaptive when we used to live in the savannah surrounded by possible predators. We had to find shelter and food, avoid threats and stay with the group to survive. These responses can work against us in the society in which we now live.

Some common anxiety disorders are:

- panic disorder and agoraphobia (fear of open spaces) people become anxious when out in the open – a primal fear of exposure to predators, and this is associated with panic attacks.

- social anxiety – people are afraid when around their friends or community and fear rejection by the group, sometimes worrying about their own appearance – this dates back to a time when rejection by the group could mean death, and perhaps those who looked different were rejected because it might mean disability and threaten the survival of the group. But the result of this kind of anxiety can be that people actually avoid the group and inadvertently create what they fear – isolation.

- obsessive-compulsive disorder – a classic feature is fear of germs and compulsive hand washing – related to fears of disease and death. Again this becomes worse with a small baby as a protective mechanism gone wrong and can sometimes cause harm to the baby through excessive cleaning or lack of affection. I have met women who fought bitterly with their husbands about hygiene, not realising they were literally fighting for their lives.

So that’s how anxiety disorders in pregnancy and postnatally are related to evolution. It kind of makes sense when viewed in the context.

The solution is to encourage people to see their thoughts more rationally and logically, and evaluate the reality of the situation. Is there any threat and what is the outcome of their conditioned behaviour. Is the anxiety harming or helping, and how to come up with more logical thinking or helpful behaviour. We need to activate our higher thought centres (cortex) and integrate it with the anxiety centre (brainstem) to calm it down. The good news is those pathways do exist and can be developed, as neuroscience research shows.