Monsoon and Poison in the Garden

Geranium

Yet another day with the damn headache and nausea.  Today I tried to act as if the migraine didn't exist, since there was nothing I could do about it and there were things I wanted to do.  Everything is super bright and any noise seems magnified.  I'm irritable, and I haven't been speaking or interacting much because it takes a whole lot of effort to be civil.   My brain is also fuzzy and it's hard to speak coherently without stumbling over my words.  I feel like I am taxing my coping skills to the max. 

This morning we went to Espanola for groceries and because Mike was scheduled to get an MRI of his neck and back.  He has arthritis and his doctor wants to know what exactly is going on and if nerves are involved somehow.  It turns out that he would have to pay for the full cost of the exam, $1200, because his health insurance deductible is $1500.  What the hell is that, when you pay for health insurance, but you still can't afford to get the healthcare you need because it's too expensive?  That's wrong.  So we got food, but no MRI.  He's going to fill out an application to see if the hospital will reduce the fee, given his annual income.  In the meantime, pain and no MRI, and continuing to pay for health insurance. 

We had a bit of rain last night and again this afternoon.  It seems that the monsoon season is here. 

 

 My mom picked her first peppers yesterday from her garden.  She had originally started plants from seeds but they only grew to about an inch tall and then stopped, so she gave up and got almost fully-grown plants from the hardware store.  She's been talking for weeks about how excited she was to eat vegetables from her garden for lunch.  She picked the peppers in the morning and was going to fry them up with some eggs.  But the next day, I noticed she hadn't eaten them.  She announced at dinner that she was depressed because she'd decided that it wasn't safe to eat any of the vegetables growing in her garden due to the Bittersweet Nightshade plants that she had originally cleared out of the space and which had begun to re-sprout. 

Bittersweet Nightshade plant

We tried to tell her that the plants wouldn't poison her vegetables, that the poison would be limited to the Nightshade plants themselves and that even then, they weren't a threat unless she ate a significant amount of the plant or rubbed it all over her skin.  But she's already made up her mind that the vegetables will be tainted. 

My sense is that she doesn't want the garden to be successful.  This is by no means the first time she's told me about how depressed she is because her garden is doomed to fail for one reason or another.  And now, just as the garden has taken off and she has peppers and baby tomatoes, she's found a fool-proof way to make it so that it can't be successful, no matter how well it flourishes.   In other areas of her life, she's similarly found ways to sabotage creating happiness here and now---for some reason or motivation I don't understand, she wants to hold on to positive memories of things in the past that no longer exist, rather than create a positive, albeit different, present. 

Other people's messed up cognitive frameworks are often easy for us to think we see and understand.  We often think, fallaciously, that they can be simply summarized and understood, but we ourselves are more complicated and less easily understood.