A few ways with broccoli; or a bit about living with depression

It's been a tense few weeks at Dodsley Towers, tbh. It's enough moving house - or rather waiting to move because the damn thing doesn't seem any nearer being built than in March, but to add in a few dollops of stress from other quarters and suddenly life borders on the near-despairing.

It's very hard when you hit despair. It's even worse when someone you love hits despair and there is nothing you can do. You watch them sink into themselves, a sort of right-way-round version of The Twits, disappearing from view; conversation becomes monosyllabic or downright emotional, an endless repeat of "why me?" and "what can I do?". You aim for staunch and supportive, bluff and stiff upper lip, but get accused of being actually unsupportive. You hug and cuddle and make myriad stupid, meaningless gestures they don't see anyway, like always doing all the housework, looking after the children, and end up feeling resentful and unsupported yourself. You veer away from making conversation - any kind - other than to relate something funny a child did today to lift their spirits, because conversation always ends in the same way: "I hate my job/my life," or "another shit day" or another rant about the new house not being built because that's something tangible to focus on. You can't actually face those phrases again so you choose to say nothing. You dread waking up because the day ALWAYS begins with them saying "Another shit day..." (It ends with it too). You find yourself tensing, waiting for the familiar soul-deep sigh that seems to emanate from them at almost minute intervals. You find your eczema, sensitive to mood at the best of times, appearing in places hitherto unexplored and want to yell "Why is your mood ruining my body?" (Remember: staunch and supportive at all times). You want to - and in fact do - repeat platitudes IN THEIR FACE like the one about the light at the end of the tunnel, but then see that they can't see that light; they're just stuck in the howling darkness with the freight train rushing down on them AND THEY CAN'T SEE THE DAMN TRACKS. You cry. A lot. Over nothing. And hide it. Or sometimes you don't in order to get a response, some notion you exist in their heads too.

We've been waiting for some news that will potentially change all this and finally, yesterday we got it. And it was good. So now, in theory, all this goes away. MCD Sr is bouncing away like Tigger on ketamines - suddenly all the despair has vanished, he found the tracks and is running, helter-skelter, towards the light. And I'm wondering why I still feel low, as if nothing's changed. And I think it's because it's become a habit. Because for months now, I haven't felt another way other than that of feeling my way blindly round a timebomb, constantly tiptoeing so that all that feeling, all that sadness, doesn't come surging out again like a tsunami taking us under again and again, leaving us blindsided and gasping and fighting to get to shore and security. Husbands, we are told, are not supposed to cry, are not supposed to be the ones making us feel unsafe and insecure just by being "a bit sad". They go manfully off and strive through their jobs, just as we do and crucially, get on with it. When, suddenly, they can't, when that MANLINESS becomes just a frightened child waiting on the hills for the wolves to come, you have to rush in on your charger, holding up the light so they can see it. And sometimes it takes a fucking long time before they can. Meanwhile, on you muster, a very pillar of wifely support, trembling, frightened, resentful, sympathetic, loving, hating, exhausted and wired. Because that's what you do. Because that's what marriage means. But no-one talks about that.

So every little helps and eating your greens at such times at least keeps your iron levels up when all you want to do is eat nothing but macaroni cheese. MCD Jr maintains he only likes broccoli "in stuff" so I've been exploring a few ways to get it in. Moronic, I know, but over-achievement has always been my byline.

3-veg Pesto:
This is dead easy: Take a big handful of spinach. frozen peas and broccoli and a peeled clove of garlic and cook in boiling water till just tender. Drain and bung in a food processor. Add a small handful of toasted pine nuts, a squeeze of lemon, olive oil and a good handful of grated Parmesan and whizz together to make a pesto consistency. Cooking the garlic with the veg softens the flavour if you've got, like me, a child with sensitive tastebuds that hates the heat of raw garlic.

Ham, Cheese and Veg Quesadillas
Blitz a good handful chestnut mushrooms and a few stalks broccoli with a clove of garlic in the food processor then add to a pan with a good lump of butter and a splash of water and cook until softened. Lay a tortilla wrap on a baking sheet and top with a slice or two of nice ham. Spread a thin layer of the veg over the top then sprinkle on grated cheese of your choice. Top with another wrap and bake in the oven until the cheese has melted. Cut into small wedges and serve.

Broccoli Cheese Sauce.
Blitz some broccoli again in the food processor then add to a basic cheese sauce, either the béchamel variety or cream with cheese stirred in. Use to coat pasta, cauliflower, leeks, chicory, anything really.

This blitzing is a great way with greens: I'm trying it with kale and leeks but would also work with cauliflower or even Brussels sprouts, which love cream and cheese.

An exercise in catharsis

I'm a great believer - if not excellent practitioner - in mood control, ie, bucking yourself up, finding something to smile about, giving yourself a good talking to when all you actually want to do is throw yourself on the floor in a stormy tantrum. Or worse, hide away under the duvet until the clouds have passed - worse because this is sometimes worth giving in to and extremely hard to resists - duvet days were a great invention, but for most of us, unfortunately, a weekend luxury. Life's not that convenient.

In my post last week I talked briefly on feeling blue and shaded in and how I'd 'had a word with myself' as a friend puts it and came back to some sort of equilibrium - a truce with myself that I could feel down for X amount of time, but thereafter, back on with life, hi-ho. And I managed it and the last few days have been fine, but I still feel a little wound up inside, not quite back to sunny normality.

Now, I'm not apologising for this - I believe that in actuality, humans have a licence to feel how they wish as long as they don't inflict their mood on others (and goodness, isn't that a demanding and incredible position to maintain, but we can all aspire), but I do find that during a consistent bout of feeling a bit down (no more no less), my dream-subconscious decides that it might as well get in on the act and give me a good psychological battering just when I really really don't need it - and it's this I want to explore.

One of my most frequent dreams that occurs when I'm feeling low is undoubtedly a Freudian classic (and I'd love to see how Jung or Adler might approach it), and it never fails to leave me feeling the next morning as if I might just give it all up now and go take my black and stormy person off to some wasteland somewhere where I might not poison anyone else.

So what is it? Well, the dream is always along the lines of a scenario being played out (last night it was Christmas Day) and my parents are extremely disappointed, then subsequently angry and dismissive about what they view as my childish point of view/behaviour/feelings in that scenario, and then dismissive of me as a person - it's like I'm wiped from the family unit. I, meanwhile, feel extremely frustrated and angry that I can't get my point across, that I'm being shown up as childish and behaving badly. Always in the dream, my parents end up taking my sister's side and pretty much constantly you can bet that my dream-sister has done something to antagonise the situation, making me furious and look like the bad party. So far, so very consistent...

Last night's was a humdinger though. This time my dream-sister and I didn't actually end up in yet another physical fist-fight, where I want to hit her so hard - and yet somehow can't quite land with the power I want - but she in fact called upon a gang of kids (good grief!) to threaten me with violence, push me around and make sure I was terrified.

The therapy-view is reasonably easy to guess at in these circumstances - it's never my husband in these dreams ever (for which I am endlessly grateful, one less stick for my subconscious to beat me with), but my family, whose opinion I respect and need (I surprise myself in writing that, but it's true) and my sister whose existence I'm sure I did at one point in my toddlerhood deeply resent, but it's all worked out now - but these things run very deep - the people whose love and sympathy I need most are those who are natural objects for the subconscious to use to turn that around. And - hard to believe - I'm not a depressive, although it was touch-and-go for a while there a couple of years back - God bless the old therapy couch.

By writing this down, I wanted to see if it's easy to gain some sort of perspective on the whole. Naturally I don't feel at my most loveable after these dreams and it takes a good couple of hours to bring myself around, talk myself back into a less harsh and judgmental stance on myself and feel a bit sunnier. However, I'm interested in how I'm responding to it writ large in black and white.

I still feel at the bottom of it all an underlying sadness and sense of worthlessness that stems deeply from the dream, that I'm better off on my own (a feeling I have to fight with all my being sometimes, because it's both untrue and ridiculous - no-one is). I find it hard to address these feelings or to talk to my amazing husband about them, because it would feel as if I was admitting an intrinsic failure in myself and an innate unloveable-ness - if I have these dreams, I'm both evil and unworthy and definitely insane, goes the thought process.

I suppose by writing it down, I'm trying to take away, or at least subdue, the power this recurrent dream has over me. It attacks me when I'm already at my lowest, reinforcing all my self-doubts, which I've worked hard to get over anyway, and it takes a while to pick myself up again, emotionally at least.

I now want to write - flippantly - what a nice, self-indulgent post that was and what you're quite supposed to do with it, I'm not sure. What I'm quite supposed to do with it, I'm not sure either. It's an exercise in reducing the power of dreams and taking back a little control - look, no hands - and I'm not sure yet if it's done the trick, but I'll keep you posted.

And tomorrow - just for added light relief - pickling green beans and whole-roasted Tandoori chicken - who says I don't do rounded.

A shade of blue

Today I feel sad and a little blue - quite a dark shade - and I'm not really sure why. I feel a little lost and out of sorts, not on-par with the rest of society. I don't know if it's the rain, which is likely as I'm very weather-dependent for my mood, or something out of kilter elsewhere that I can't identify.

I get these moods - as does everyone I suspect (written about eloquently by Tania Kindersley here and here) - but when you're in the mean reds, or even the furious fuchsia-pinks, it's hard to recognise that. So I've been snappy and a bit mean and perhaps not as nice as I would want to be towards the people I love. And hopefully they'll forgive me because that's what they do (quite often as it turns out).

I gave myself a good talking-to this morning - 'You'll turn out like your grandmother; no-one likes a meanie; it's your mood - take control of it' - but it hasn't quite done the trick. So I'm a bit lost still.

So last night comfort food of the most peculiar order. I always turn to cheese - so chicken, sauteed with anchovies, garlic, chilli and lots and lots of greens and samphire for health and then covered the lot with a particularly stinking Camembert slightly past its best. Rather like a carb-free raclette. And I'm not saying it was comfort food of the highest order (that might be macaroni cheese) but it was hot and melty and while the rain was pouring down, it made me feel a little better. But not much...