Mind Bending

Sometimes I feel quite articulate and that's when I try to write my blog, you know, so that it makes sense. Then other times I don't feel very articulate and I want to write a post anyway. Today is one of those days so please forgive me, but today a packet of Rainbow Drops made me cry. Then I watched Call The Midwife followed by Last Tango in Halifax, all of which made me cry even though I have never even seen the latter before in my life and had to google what was going on. So the chances are I was pretty pre-disposed to crying today anyway. Maybe on another day the Rainbow Drops wouldn't have made me cry. I would hope not anyway since you really can't nip around Tesco in view of all the neighbours you inevitably bump into there with mascara running down your face. Imagine the scene: "Oh hi how are you...oh are you crying? Oh dear is everything ok...?" "Ermm... yes thanks (sniff) I just saw some Rainbow Drops that's all then I bumped into some Strawberry Laces and they finished me off" *AWKWARD SILENCE*  "Ahhhh. Ok, sorry to hear that. Chin up. See you soon byeeee" 

Yeah, it wouldn't really work would it. They'd be carting me off under the mental health act before I got to the checkout. Anyway like I say I certainly don't make a habit of it and it took me utterly by surprise today. Luckily there were no neighbours around to see me and the staff were too busy piling up the Easter Eggs to notice, presumably should there be a late-January rush for  something nobody actually needs until April. But back to the Rainbow Drops.

Sometimes, when you are the parent of a child like Elin, for odd, strange split-second moments in time, you utterly forget that they are disabled. I can't explain it really. It's like because you think about them so often that they are just your baby in your head, like any other Mother or Father you think of them as them and not as a disabled child. This allows very very rarely for small fragments of your imagination to burst through the actuality of what you know in every fibre of your being. It's like a mind trick that Derren Brown would do and you would beg him to tell you how he managed it. It happened to Paul only the other day. He was downstairs very early in the morning and he had left Elin and I sleeping upstairs. I woke up and came downstairs a short while after and he said, that in the morning fog of the brain just slowly waking up, he had a flash of a thought that Elin was coming down the stairs. Just like that, heard the footsteps and thought 'Oh- Elin's up, she's coming down' . The thought must pass through the brain at one million miles per hour. It must be there for less than a hair's breadth of a second, before you realise, of course, that it could never be. You can hardly believe the thought was there..where did it come from? Why did you think that? A milli second of forgetfulness, of thinking of Elin simply as your child and not as your disabled child. It bends your head, let me tell you. It's happened to me a few times too in different ways. Cue Rainbow Drops.

We used to love them as kids so they took my eye today because they are kind of an 80's treat and I haven't clapped eyes on them for years. Then I had my Derren Brown moment. I literally thought, as quick as a flash "Oh my god- Rainbow Drops! I'm gonna get some for Elin!!" which is presumably what my alter-ego would have done, the Mum I never was with the child Elin could never be. As the reality train drew into the slow motion whirring of the station that was my brain, I realised as soon as the thought was formed that of course I wasn't going to buy them for Elin, because she can't eat anything. I mean, she would probably enjoy the crunching of them in the bag, but that's not what my brain was thinking in that lightning flash of a thought. I was absolutely thinking I should just buy them and take them home and give them to her to eat.

Head. Officially. Bent.

So the tears came (and went as quick as the thought itself) with the shock and the sledgehammer of realisation. Like waking up from a dream where she talks, or walks. I don't even know why Im telling you all this blog fans and if you've got this far well done- I think my Nursery class last year have written more coherent passages on the tablecloths at Frankie and Benney's with crayons. But, if you are going about your daily business one day and you spy someone silently weeping whilst staring at an inanimate objects, don't be alarmed. They may just be having a Derren Brown moment of their own and wondering about the power of the mind and how it can, in the space of a split second and without warning, make you stand and cry to yourself in the supermarket.
Damn you Rainbow Drops. I always preferred a Sherbet Fountain anyway.