Welcome to another blog post by Matthew McKenzie carer activist and one of the carer network ambassdors for Cygnet.

As of this month for October 2023 it is Black History month. This month is a special theme for me since the theme is ‘Saluting our Sisters’. The theme highlights the crucial role Black women have played throughout history.

There are so many famous black women throughout history

Rosa Parks – for her courageous participation in the Montgomery Bus Boycott to push forward the civil rights movement against racial segregation on public transport.

Maya Angelou – who was famous for poetry and also a civil rights activist.

Mary Seacole – Contributing to medicine and nursing where she even helped British soldiers being injured in the Crimean war while fighting discrimination.

There are of course many more famous black sisters who are far too numerous to mention, but the above have shows the importance history plays in shaping our lives.

Still, I want to focus on someone very special and dear to me as she has not only shaped my life, but in a strange way inspired many others. Around 2019 during the pandemic the country was fighting an unknown and dangerous virus. That virus turned out to be COVID-19 and the outcome changed my life. My mother struggled with her mental illness in her later years, which in turn led her to also struggle with her physical health. With resources running low in the health service my mother was the unfortunate casualty of dwindling health resources during the pandemic.

Like so many other vulnerable groups. My mother did not actually die of virus, but just could not access emergency healthcare as resources were focused on covid victims.

The impact left me wondering what could I learn from my many years of caring for my mother. I had a choice either to share my story to other carers or completely move in another direction of my life. I made the former choice, because it helped me heal and also pay rememberance not only to my mother, but to myself.

So around 2020 I wrote my first book about my experiences as a mental health carer. The book was called “A caring Mind”, which was named after my blogsite which was born raising carer awareness after writing blogs for South London & Maudsley NHS trust.

Even when caring for my mother, I was also helping to care for an old friend who also inspired me to write. However it was my mother Rosemarie McKenzie who spent so much time writing poetry. My mother also wrote stories and even managed to get a story published in a magazine while she was struggling with mental illness.

My mother enjoyed singing and used to sing at our local African/Carribean community centre (family Health ISIS) that catered for those struggling with mental illnes.

My mother inspired many other clients at the community centre to be creative with poetry, singing and writing. It did not matter the mental struggle other clients was going through at the centre. They saw my mothers, as long as they could be creative, it helped them express traumatic feelings in a positive way. This was one of my mother’s strengths. No matter how many times she was would suffer with her health, she always found strength to be more than her illness. She made me find cause in highlighting awareness for vulnerable groups. This in turn led me to continue writing and using creative ways to express my lived experience.

Of course I could never fully understand my mother’s illness and could only express my mothers creativity as a dutiful son and a mental health carer. In the end I feel we cannot always look to the famous and fortunate of our black sisters. We all contribute to history in our own way. My mother used her own creativity to tell her story and I will continue that story hoping to contribute to black history.

Thank you for reading.