I am a teacher 👩🏾🏫 — it’s one of my most incredible features
Me?
I see expanded possibilities for mental health by learning
I think I can teach almost any person a thing that I know and sometimes we can learn together
Anyways so morning fruits
Not just any fruit — a sensory fruit bowl
You see, mummy healing. Not just from pills or prayer or walking in the Mountains with me She healing from the inside out — from the hand that picks, the tongue that tastes, the eye that sees.
Her sensory fruit bowl is not just food.
It’s therapy with skin on.
🍌 Banana — soft, easy to peel. Good for the mornings when she feel a little too fragile for hard textures.
🍊 Orange — I slice it into four like quarters of the sun. She peels the skin with her fingers, smell rising up like Sunday memories.
“Feel this,” I say.
“Smooth,” she say.
Language unlocked- it’s also linguistic development- a lot of her expressions are phonetically incomplete. And when she is talking to someone and you can’t understand because her words are hard to understand she hush in the world.
An I know for sure voice is powerful
🍉 Watermelon — cold and wet and sweet. She ask every time,
“Is this the one with the seeds?”
Curiosity bubbling up where silence used to sit.
“What this one name again?”
“Watermelon.”
It not sweet
“Water where?”
We laugh.
We learn.
🍈 Island plum — manciport — soft and fleshy like old feelings. And the texture is the bite side seeds are brilliant for her oral fixation.
I notice she likes to put things in her mouth – so she would bite up the foot and spit it out.
So why not give her food she can play with
Complain is self-expression too.
I welcome it.🤣 and laugh
🥭 Mango we pick from outside as well
I pick it at different stages so she experience it at at different flavours
This bowl working ( occupational therapy ) OT.
Taste, touch, sight, even sound.
When last you heard your mouth doing aerobics to drink the water water melon after you picked all the seeds out?
That’s touching to taste
That’s music.
That’s therapy.
That’s her nerves rewiring themselves back to joy, absence and presence
And when she pick out the seeds and pick up the fruits one by one, that’s fine motor work.
That’s independence returning in fruit-shaped miracles.
It’s softness, it’s experiencing deserved-ness, food as therapy
Some days I am too tired to make it
I got to busy to collect the Fruits
sometimes God use a mango before He use a medicine- cause we don’t need constipation tablets again
So I keep filling the bowl.
She keep tasting her way back to herself.
Food as occupational therapy: How Mangoes, Motor-skills, and Motherhood Shape Mental Health
