Mother, it is great to be up North
Can we take a trip to see High Force?
I don’t think we can manage that,I said
Why ever not,I need to leave my bed
Well,I can’t drive for I can’t see so well
He looked at me with pity, it was hell
Shall we take a cab, he questioned me
I don’t think they can get there before tea
We can take a flask and your fruit cake
I knew his mother well, and could she bake!
I did not like to say it is too far
Two hundred miles or more from where we were
He asked again about my honeymoon
Did you find it over all too soon?
I felt a blush spread over my fair skin
He was my husband, I spent it with him
But yet I could not take away his joy
He loved his mother much when a small boy.
Judging by the smile on his dear face
Freud was right, he wished to me embrace.
Is it wrong to let a man mistake
His wife for his late mother, that is fake.
But since he was so sick and suffered long
I had to keep him going with her songs
She sung in her church choir the hymns of praise
To overcome that strange weekend malaise
So valiant as ever in my work
I sang O Praise the Lord as in the Kirk
I sang Oh, little town of Bethlehem
Of course there was no wall there way back when
He still read the paper every day
And in the night when sleepless he would pray.
I would have lifted rocks and cut through steel
If I could have made his heart valves heal
Yet still our masquerade was to him real
He held my hand and smiled with great appeal.
Then he said he’d like to go to bed
With his own mother, what could I have said?
I made some tea and he smiled even more
I guess that’s why he lived to 94.
Day: Oct 10, 2023
My life was ruled by panic attacks. Here’s my seven-point guide to tackling anxiety
Writing can have unexpected benefits
Clearly, if writing were therapeutic, authors would be the happiest, calmest people on earth. It turns out that the type of writing matters. Gratitude journals are often pushed by the Positive Psychology movement as one of its most robustly evidenced interventions, but multiple meta-analyses have found their supposed benefits to be weak to non-existent. At best, they may have a small placebo effect on mood.
On the other hand, research into writing about traumatic experiences suggests it can boost subjective wellbeing, health, immune response and even the healing rate of a 3mm punch biopsy wound. Crucially, psychologist James W Pennebaker told me, you have to connect details about the event with your feelings then and now. Ironically, in the process of writing down my experiences for the book, I may have blundered into a powerful, free means of engaging with our challenging memories and emotions.
How my heart speaks 